4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Editor's Notes

• #2: collaboative grad student research, no profs
• #3: Let’s start this journey with some trends.When you’re designing an online community or social media service, you need to make some choices.On identity, pseudonyms were the norm on the Internet for a long time.Then Facebook came along. We see more and more sites moving toward strong identity.
• #4: Likewise, the advent of search engines has shifted us toward stronger notions of archiving…the web means the end of forgetting.
• #5: Academic literature has followed suit. We argue that real names and pseudonyms are important to the health of online communities, and that centrally-maintained archives persist the group memory.
• #6: Sometimes we argue both at once. But recently we are seeing a trend in the other direction. Fully anonymous = not even a pseudonym, nobody knows who posted it
• #7: Sometimes we argue both at once.But recently we are seeing a trend in the other direction.
• #10: the memes, the catchphrases, the attitude
• #11: This is what 4chan looks like. Visually, it’s a throwback to 90’s web design.I’m going to try and mimic that aesthetic and attitude through the entire talk with these slides.Content-wise: intentionally offensive. “newfag”, “oldfag”, … misogyny…PornCliff LampeChristopher Poole, or “moot”, created 4chan in 2003 as an anime discussion boardCopied the format of Japanese forum 2chan.The format is: several threads per page, here you can see two compressed views of threads.Posts start with an image, often replies have images.
• #13: About sixty boards today, spanning fashion, science, and “sexy beautiful women”
• #16: anonymous is 18% of slashdot comments, controlled via user moderation. slashdot norm is pseudonyms
• #17: [[[4-5 minutes into talk?]]]
• #18: Why do this?Important to give a sense of how the community succeedsIn a space where participation looks nothing like traditional participation, we need to give you a sense of what you’re getting.Warn that this is offensive
• #20: In keeping with /b/’s identity as an image board and the requirement that each thread-starter post an image, a common purpose of the board is to share images and web content. The two most prevalent thread types (Themed, 28%, and Shar- ing Content, 19%) both revolve around images and make up nearly half of all threads in our sample.
• #21: In keeping with /b/’s identity as an image board and the requirement that each thread-starter post an image, a common purpose of the board is to share images and web content. The two most prevalent thread types (Themed, 28%, and Shar- ing Content, 19%) both revolve around images and make up nearly half of all threads in our sample.
• #22: the kind of thing you’d rarely see teen- and college-age boys admitting online
• #24: it's idiosyncratic, but it's not a hate machine. see traditional kinds of things, even in what seems to be tremendously hostile environment, we see lots of prosocial behaviorshold nothing sacred. leads to many reactions like, that is simultaneously the funniest thing I’ve ever seen and I wish I could unsee it.
• #25: /b/ trolls itself.
• #26: What does an ephemeral community really look like?How do people manage it?
• #42: Darwinian struggle for attention
• #43: 4chan /b/ is known collectively as Anonymous: so how anonymous is it, really?And how does that play out?
• #51: but this turns a blind eye…FORTRANfrankly, by the time they’re on twitter or reddit, their fate has already been decidedinterest in this: slate, gawker, reddit, hacker newsColemanischool
• #55: but this turns a blind eye…FORTRANfrankly, by the time they’re on twitter or reddit, their fate has already been decidedinterest in this: slate, gawker, reddit, hacker newsColemanischool