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

By Michael S. Bernstein, A. Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, Greg Vargas. 2011

332 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we explore how /b/ succeeds despite being almost entirely anonymous and extremely ephemeral. We begin by describing /b/ and performing a content analysis that suggests the community is dominated by playful exchanges of images and links. Our first study uses a large dataset of more than five million posts to quantify ephemerality in /b/. We find that most threads spend just five seconds on the first page and less than five minutes on the site before expiring. Our second study is an analysis of identity signals on 4chan, finding that over 90% of posts are made by fully anonymous users, with other identity signals adopted and discarded at will. We describe alternative mechanisms that /b/ participants use to establish status and frame their interactions.

Subfields: Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “13 For instance, users are more likely to share unpopular opinions or to make sensitive or personal disclosures in private or anonymous spaces, than they are to do so in public ones (Bernstein et al., 2011; Schoenebeck, 2013b; Shelton et al., 2015).”
Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity (2014, result): “In essence, our findings align with prior literature (Bernstein et al. 2011; Schoenebeck et al. 2013), where anonymity has been found to be a positive feature of some online communities, because when it comes to mental illness, disinhibition in the form of journaling and discourse can be an effectiv”
Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate (2018, background): “M. S. Bernstein et al. (2011) discuss this feature more specifically and point out how it facilitates a particular kind of communication, turning the conversations on the board ephemeral.”
Crossmod: A Cross-Community Learning-based System to Assist Reddit Moderators (2019, background): “But norms vary widely across communities; even behavior considered undesirable in one community may be valuable in another [5, 50].”
"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog": a twitter case study of anonymity in social networks (2014, unknown): “Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3198-2/14/10 ...$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2660460.2660467.”
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities (2018, methodology): “[7] study the ephemerality and anonymity features of the 4chan community using data from the Random board (/b/).”
Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat (2016, background): “ymous sites like 4chan or YouBeMom (Bernstein et al., 2011; Schoenebeck, 2013), “throwaway accounts” on Reddit (Leavitt, 2015), real-time sharing during disasters (Vieweg, Hughes, Starbird, & Palen, 2010), and the perceived ephemerality of the Facebook news-”
Predicting Fluctuations in Cryptocurrency Transactions Based on User Comments and Replies (2016, background): “Online communities serve as forums where people share opinions regarding topics of common interest [13 – 17].”
You Can't Stay Here (2017, background): “A wide range of hateful behavior can be destructive to online communities; however, such behavior is also celebrated in some communities including 4chan [3] and Something Awful Forums [31].”
The Secret Life of Online Moms: Anonymity and Disinhibition on YouBeMom.com (2013, background): “Unlike ephemeral sites like 4chan (Bernstein et al. 2011), content on YBM is permanent and archived and it is possible to crawl content from the site since its inception.”