4chan - article - 2011 - 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community
Michael S. Bernstein, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Drew Harry, Paul Andre, Katrina Panovich and Greg Vargas
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

    Bernstein et. al, have produced a brief report on the issue of anonymity and ephemerality with regards to the /b/ forum on the lulzy website, 4chan.org.  This research team has investigated such aspects of the well known (for its offensive content and as the source of a number of highly regarded internet memes and hilarious media pranks) online community.  Their report is interesting because it stresses that /b/ appears to thrive despite an absence of the things many other online communities consider requirements for responsible membership - that is, markers of user-identity and an archive of past community activity.  The authorship of almost %100 of messages posted on /b/ is noted as 'anonymous', and the average forum thread dies within seven minutes.  /B/ is a hugely popular message forum, despite the fact that most other forums require its contributors to build a reputation associated with a particular online identity, and expect users to observe modes of communication by researching the forum's previously archived activity.

    The article includes a brief history of the forum which details the reasons for its notoriety.  Their history includes describing /b/'s perpetually offensive content (including racist rants, misogynist and homophobic imagery, etc) and the forum's base for the mysteriously amorphous group, Anonymous.  The focus of the article were two studies based on data accumulated over a two week period.  These studies determined that /b/ did, indeed, foster anonymity among its users, and that a typical thread would exist for a very short amount of time before disappearing forever. 

    The author's of these studies note how /b/ works with these aspects, claiming that anonymity deinhibits users and may drive innovation in meme-making.  Furthermore, anonymity and ephemerality may help users evade histories of poor posting, and develop alternative forms of status signaling.  My own experience with /b/ is limited, however from conducting a few unstructured surveys of the content of /b/ it strikes me that a repetition of the content of posts from thread to thread is a fairly prominent aspect of the communication that appears on the forum.  I'd be curious to know if this repetition is considered necessary, and therefore ephemerality of /b/ creates a need for communication that has anything in common with oral traditions systems for preserving cultural memories. 

Anyways, the article may be read at: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf