1. Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Communities in cyberspace. Routledge, 2002. 37-68.
2. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” ICWSM. 2011.
The two papers examine how identity is used (and abused) in the online world, but at opposite ends of the spectrum.
“Identity and Deception” talks about the dynamics of the users in the Usenet newsgroups, where every post has an associated account name that ties that post to a particular identity. This has benefits in that users can grow reputation and gain trust in their particular groups overtime, but also has the disadvantages that it makes it easier to impersonate someone and also that anonymous posts tend to be looked down upon.
On the flip side, “4chan and /b/” examines how the imageboard 4chan thrives despite the fact that over 90% of its posts are anonymous (which is encouraged by the userbase) and that posts tend to be deleted very quickly as new posts come in (unlike most other places where data is stored permanently). Even if it is anonymous, other ways of identifying yourself as being ‘in with the crowd’ have sprung up, through particular language use and tricks (like the so called ‘triforcing’) to identify yourself as a true member.
One thing that stood out to me in “Identity and Deception” was the parallels between the identity dynamics in Usenet and today’s websites. The act of sticking to a single identity to build reputation mirrors what we see today with Reddit and Stack Overflow, but with the explicit addition of a real point system that other users can vote with. This turns the act of gaining reputation from this invisible social practice to a visible, tangible thing provided by the website itself. Category deception when a point system is involved could include not just pretending to be something more than the user actually is, but also vote manipulation (by hacking or vote bots) to inflate the user’s virtual reputation in order to give them an air of legitimacy. The widespread use of Linkedin today seems to be today’s analogue of having a personal webpage which you would link to from your signature, especially for someone who identifies as a professional, with both serving the function of providing a curated view of said professional. Perhaps all this is evidence that humans behave in the same ways even when technologies change and shift over time. Also I guess this means that trolls will never die off. Oh well!
“4chan and /b/” provides an interesting study of posting behavior in the face of ephemerality and anonymity. But one shouldn’t read this and assume that /b/ alone is representative of 4chan as a whole. /b/ is the most popular, sure, but it is only one board among many. I believe that it is likely that different conclusions could be drawn if the authors had performed similar analyses on the other boards. Maybe posts on other boards last comparatively longer or shorter (after normalizing for relative posting activity compared to /b/, so we are not looking at a skewed comparison). For example, the /r9k/ board does not allow reposts (while reposts form a not insignificant chunk of /b/’s activity). “How will things differ on other boards?” is always an important question to ask.
Having read both the given papers, what could potentially be done in the future is to do a study of the identity dynamics and interactions in 4chan, similar to how “Identity and Deception” did for Usenet. I think that it could be a fascinating case to see how things change (or don’t change) in 4chan compared to Usenet. “4chan and /b/” touches upon this a little bit in the later part of the paper but their main focus seems to be on the data analysis of ephemerality and identity and didn’t really go deeply examine the dynamics of the interaction of the users.
