The main topic of discussion for todays’ reflection was Identity, deception and anonymity. The papers assigned for this assignment are

1. Donath, Judith S. (1999)- “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Book chapter from “Communities in Cyberspace” (29-59).
2. Bernstein, Michael S. et al. (2011) – “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”. Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (50-57).

Summary.

The first paper by Judith S. Donath talk about the identity and the deception that is prevalent in the online community. For example, a person can claim to be an expert of a matter or can falsely embody someone else so on and so forth. The paper mainly focuses on the Usenet newsgroup which is predominantly a non-fiction based virtual community. It mainly discusses how reliability of a post is closely based on the writers’ credibility. It talks about how the information from a post e.g., the writers’ email address, the language and tone of the post itself, the signature, can be used to detect various attributes about the author of the post. Attributes like the location, organization, gender etc. are some which may be detected. Judith also describes how trolls are common in those chat forums and that often it has even led to contacting the system administrators of these offenders to act against them.

The second paper focuses mainly on the anonymity and the ephemerality of posts in the large online community of 4chan, and its most popular board named /b/. The authors conduct two kinds of study to test the ephemerality of the posts itself and the identity and anonymity of user to understand its effects. It gives an idea about what kind of content the community wants, which results in the post to have a relatively longer life and even been re-posted later on. The concept of “bumping” and “sage” is described which gives the user control over the ephemerality of the posts. It was found that over 90 percent of the posts on /b/ was completely anonymous. Email signatures were also uncommon with 98.3% of posts not containing an email. It was also found that only 0.05% of posts had tripcodes and pseudo names.

Reflection.

The first paper gives an idea about how identity plays an important role in the virtual community. It also points out ways by which one can somewhat get an essence of the post is trustworthy or just a “troll”. One thing that I could relate to right away is how I tend to rely on articles and posts in social forums like Quora, Twitter, mac-forums or Stack Overflow is quite similar. I have noticed that I tend to look at the persons’ name, the email and his description. The blue tick of twitter, or the name and description of Quora, the tag attached to the author in mac-forums (Administrator, Moderator, Member, Premium-Member etc.) and the number of up votes (or the green tick) in a stack overflow post makes me decide if I want to believe or follow the particular article. It is true that sometimes it turns out to be dubious and I am completely directed in the wrong route which leads me to believe that trusting such users, based on only the signatures and other attributes is erroneous.

The second paper mainly highlights how common anonymous posting is in the realm of the virtual world. There is a need for anonymous posting where people seeking help or advice without giving up the identity can benefit from this. This helps in keeping certain sensitive matters private. Nonetheless, on the other hand, in absence of any form of authentication, a suspicious individual can exploit the system due to the lack of accountability.  It was pointed out by the author that /b/ is “crude” with contents often being “intentionally offensive”. because of its anonymous nature. The main point that stands out to me here is, when it comes to valuable information, then user identification is of greater importance and the worth of the information is related to the credibility of the one posting it.

The question of ephemerality is the one which concerns me the most. Although /b/ is ephemeral by design (where a post is automatically deleted once it reaches the fifteenth page) but, our today’s social media platforms are not ephemeral in general. Facebook keeps on remaining me what I did 4 years ago or my n^th friendship anniversary with someone. This suggests that all our details and data are stored, analyzed and later utilized to give us a personalized feed. The “My Activity” of google which records everything, even things being asked to a google home speaker. The concept of “digital footprint” thus arises.

Read More

1)- Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Communities in cyberspace, 2002

2)- Bernstein, Michael S., et al. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” ICWSM, 2011

 

Summary:

After almost a decade of the rapid evolution of online social communities, the two papers discussed a continually important component when designing an online social platform which is Identity and Anonymity of users.

The first paper – although dated – discussed a phenomenon still arises in modern online social platforms which is user Identity and how it could be used to deceive others. The author used an analytical framework to approach her study, which is a communication system developed by biologists and game theorists that consists of signals (cues used to present identities), senders (person having/claiming an identity) and receivers (other members of the community).

The author classified the signals into: (1) Conventional (obvious, easy and cheaper) signals, which might deceive the community members, and (2) Assessment signals, which are harder and more costly to send, and usually used to measure the veracity of an identity

The author studied the Usenet newsgroups, and identified three major types of identities: (1) Account name (email address), (2) Identity in voice and Language and (3) Signature. She also identified different types of deception inside the Usenet newsgroup: (1) Trolls, (2) Category deception, (3) Impersonation and (4) Identity concealment. And through each type of identity and deception the author explained different examples and showed which type of signals is used and how the other community members had recognized the deception.

In the second paper the authors studied the 4chan online community with respect to the Anonymity nature of the participants and the design aspect of ephemerality of the network.

Reflections:

Lots of observations and events related to the Egyptian revolution in 2011 came into my mind when I read the first paper. During those events online social platform were used to discuss the ongoing political situation between different parties, organize protests, and even rescue protesters during that period. The following examples illustrate real situations about identity and deception during the revolution:

• Protests leaders used to conceal their real identities through creating false identities in order to protect themselves from the authorities, which used to chase and detain protesters (Identity concealment)
• Fake accounts were used to create conflicts and fights between different political parties and even between the members of a single group/party (Trolls)
• Fake identities that worn the hat of certain groups were used to hack into those groups in order to create conflicts between the same group members (Category deception)
• Fake accounts of popular participants of the revolution were used to spread false news to their followers (Impersonation)

Those cases of different types of deception create an ongoing argument whether the identity of users on online social platforms should be kept verified and reflects the real identity of the user or users could be anonymous or use fake identities.

Designing an online social platform that allows its users to freely self-express, participate in events organized through those platforms and protects their privacy while in the same time prevents trolling, identity impersonation and different types of deceptions is a challenging task.

The following question came into my mind when I read about the in-voice and language identity. Could we identify/classify users’ views/values/backgrounds from their languages and writing styles? I believe this a very challenging and interesting research question and there are some ongoing work to answer it.

Another question about identity, suppose a user who has a real identity on one of the online social platforms created several fake identities on the same platform. How distant those fake identities far from the real identity? And are there any patterns/commons between those fake identities? Could it be used to psychoanalyze the person behind them?

The second paper signifies the role of Anonymity in the growth of the 4chan community, while the first paper lists many cases to prove the importance of identity veracity in Usenet and how identity could be used to deceive others. I think the decision of Anonymity vs Identity depends on the nature of the social platform. For example, Usenet is used as question answering platform where users search for credible answers to their questions, that is why Anonymity is not suitable and may be dangerous in designing such network. On the other hand, the nature of 4chan does not require the identity of the contributors to be visible or checked. That is also why Anonymity contributed to the energy growth of 4chan.

Another question arises, does the ephemeral nature of the platform helps in creating new trends and discussions or do people keep interacting/discussing in the same topics/trends even if those trends and topics are no longer exit on the platform?

 

Read More

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 value associated with human speech stems not only from its contents but various other factors namely the identity of the speaker, the speaker’s place in the social hierarchy, speaker’s speech characteristics and so forth. But speech in the virtual world is devoid of these physical entities due to which other markers tend to occupy its place as substitutes. What are the challenges in such environments? This is what the authors of the two papers are trying to probe and understand but from different angles.

[1] tries to map an evolving virtual environment, its use of identity and virtual equivalent of significance. It also describes various cues evolved in these settings to bolster the validity and importance of these identities created. The author goes on to then describe the various harms in giving importance to identity cues and eventually these virtual identities as they are susceptible to deception and impersonation. The author also quickly goes on to describing the effects of persistence of content on the behavior of the virtual crowd.

Although the virtual space described, usenet, is a thing of the past, few of the problems that plagued it are still prevalent in today’s virtual spaces. An interesting point the paper dealt upon, that I find interesting is the idea of harm due to taking advice from virtual and potentially unreliable sources. This brings up a rather interesting question, who is responsible for the physical harm due to signal or information from these virtual spaces? How can such incidents be managed? This cyber-physical interaction is relevant especially now, given that social media is a platform for much of the political and social debate.

[2] looks at 4chan, a imageboard website to understand the effect of anonymity and ephemerality in a virtual space where both those qualities are “deemed to be undesirable.” The author, conducts two experiments, one to identify the ephemerality of the content which in the virtual space is controlled through various mechanisms, and the other to identify the different identity cues which have gained prominence due to absence of traditional ones.

Given, the above feature of anonymity and ephemerality, 4chan is an interesting space to explore. Various other products like Instagram or Snapchat stories have the feature of ephemerality but not the anonymity like 4chan. But these ephemeral entities, I believe, have a common trait which makes it pool in more engagement from the users due to its inherent design, giving it an edge over non-ephemeral medias in certain cases. But this begs a question, is the user’s mental health due to it playing a part in increasing active user login time is something these product makers care about and if so what are the different steps that can be taken to manage it? I also find the natural conception and evolution of alternate forms of identity using to enforce group membership and status barrier interesting intriguing. One can also see that users having to use a product can create mechanisms rather naturally which the designer himself didn’t think about and allowing for such use helps in creating a more successful product.

Looking at various virtual spaces which have different design principles including those of how they manage identity, how one manages conflicts, if one’s virtual spaces have moderators and area specific rules, one can observe that the users and their behaviour tend to different. This is an interesting phenomenon. These identities in usenet as seen in [1] are more individualistic along with few group identity signifiers compared to 4chan as seen in [2]. This shows how the design of the virtual spaces creates very different user experience. How we manage these will definitely shape the conversations in the coming years.

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Papers:

1. Identity and deception in the virtual community – Judith S. Donath.
2. 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.

Short Summary:

It goes without saying that both the papers deal with issues related to identity of the users on an online social platform. Both spend some time describing both how the design of these systems affects trade-offs between the credibility, status, reputation building, and accountability that identity affords the user on the one hand, and the freedom from consequence, judgement, and equality of consideration that anonymity provides on the other hand. Both papers also discuss the ways in which users deal with or adapt to the design of these systems, creating their own methods to tip the balance of these trade-offs, as befitting the situation.

[1] focuses on the users of Usenet, an online topic-based chat/advice forum. It broadly discusses identity, attempts at deception of identity, and mechanisms for identity verification and the prevention of deception that users create on Usenet.

[2] discusses not just identity, but particularly how anonymity and the transitory nature of data on the website affects content, and user interaction and behavior. It focuses on the random (/b/) thread of the website, 4chan.

Reflections:

[1] describes the concept of signalling as a way to establish possession of a desirable trait, e.g. experience in a community, or domain knowledge of the topic of the community discussion. In particular, [1] mentions examples of signatures which contain programming jokes, “Geek Code“, or riddles used in programming Usenet communities. [2] also mentions similar “signatures” in 4chan /b/, like the “triforce“. It might be interesting to explore the usage of such explicit “signatures” on modern anonymous or pseudonym based platforms, like Reddit, StackOverflow, etc.

More ubiquitous are implicit signalling mechanisms, like the language, grammar, references, usernames/email-ids, etc. While investigating this in a data-driven way might be harder, it would also be interesting to collect data about the trends in usage of in-group language and references of a single new user over time, as the user goes from being a new member to a seasoned member of the group , and starts using the same language and references as the group. It would also be interesting to track how these rates would vary among groups, and how easily a single user simultaneously part of multiple disconnected online social groups can switch between the different mores of implicit signalling of the groups.

[2] mentions that “sites like Twitter … feel ephemeral” because of continuous streams of content, despite not being ephemeral. Would this have an impact akin to ephemerality on the user? Would there be any 4chan like “bumping” (or subtler forms of such behavior) on Twitter, because the end user subconsciously feels the site to be ephemeral?

Side note: [2] mentions in passing that to combat the effect of ephemerality of data on 4chan, users comment “bump” or sometimes “bamp” (as a linguistic variant of “bump“). This highlighted for me the importance of spending a lot of time on the particular website or online community being explored, before conducting data analysis, as a casual user of 4chan would be aware of “bumping“, but not of the keyword “bamp“, which is something of an intermediate reference. Thus, posts which were “bamped” would be ignored while gathering data for analysis in this case.

[1] also states that Usenet went from being ephemeral to being a permanent website, as far as data storage was concerned. This raises an interesting opportunity to explore the effects of this transition on the usage patterns, and the behavior of users of the website.

[1] talks about how a users web home page is a useful, believable way of declaring identity, since it is time-consuming to make, harder to fake, and can’t be discarded or replicated easily. Thus, it increases the cost of deception. Most online users nowadays do not have personal web-pages, but many users connect certain website accounts (e.g. Goodreads, Instagram, etc.) to their Facebook or Google accounts. If these accounts are sufficiently old or regularly used, this greatly increases the cost of deception on a website where the users Facebook or Google account is linked, as they contain large amounts of important social information, and may also be linked to other websites. It would be interesting to explore user speech or behavior patterns on websites linked with their Facebook account, like the rudeness/politeness of speech, lies told, etc., versus websites where there is no need to link another social media account. 

 

Read More

Although I started by reading Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith S. Donath, its date of publication made me drift towards reading and reviewing the other paper, 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community first.  The crux of discussion in both papers was identity, or the lack thereof, can do to the content of a social community. Both papers also talked about Deception and Ephemerality of content, but I would first like discuss my thoughts about identity in the virtual world.

Although having an identity (whether in the form of real credentials or pseudonyms) plays a role in content formation, the driving force behind content creation by people is different in different domains. A blogger or content writer on LinkedIn will most likely prefer having his/her credentials against the publications since the motive behind posting them is to get more followers who know who they are, subsequently helping them in scoring better career opportunities.  People posting pictures of family vacation or graduation ceremony  on Facebook also choose to post with their real world identity so as to direct respect and awe gained by such postings to their real world persona. Whereas someone who is seeking advice on their personal problems, looking for a way to fix their broken or non functional appliances, or attempting to find someone who can help them with their code isn’t too keen to reveal their identity, or to go through the hassle of entering bona fides since they can get away with getting what they want without it.

This brings gamification into the picture, which uses elements of game playing such as point scoring to promote gratification in helping others while elevating one’s own online status. A good example of it is Stackoverflow, where users don’t necessarily have to use their real world identity, yet they have a status associated with their pseudonym that they thrive to maintain. The first paper defines this phenomenon as reputation building. After comparing the instances of choice between remaining anonymous or choosing identity in both papers, the question that I felt like discussing with someone is : “Can gamification become the middle ground between identity and anonymity by being an ulterior motive for content creation?”

Moving on, the other thing that particularly interested me was the mention of “signals” in both papers. While the first paper talks about the use of assessment and conventional  signals to authenticate the identity and prevent deception, there is also the use of signals in a seemingly anonymous platform (assuming the fact that majority of people persistently avoid the adoption of identity in 4chan) for maintaining status, status being the only level of identification for them. The use of signals (a.k.a triforcing) is more of a trolling or dejecting gesture. If one was to advocate for pseudonyms, it brings another question in mind: what other signals can be developed in order to promote healthy unification among users of an online community? 

Although the product of anonymity in 4chan seems to be more of a vicious nature, the question that needs to be answered is “does developing and sticking to identity prove to be a bugbear for real life introverts who find virtual world to be a better mode of communication, thereby limiting their interactions which constitute a large amount of content on the web?”

Lastly, the use of Ephemerality in 4chan seemed not only to promote active user engagement and the quest to produce posts with longer lifetimes, it also obstructed the deep rooted fear of ones digital footprints being on the web forever, which triggered the thought whether the surety of our posts being off the scene after a while help us get over the anxiety of them coming back into our face later in life. “Is this the thought behind the launch of Facebook, Snapchat and Whatapp stories, which are there for only a short while?”.  Or does that fact that they are short lived make them more in-demand?

Read More

• Judith S. Donath. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.”
• Michael S. Bernstein, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.”

The two papers approach identity in online communities with some diverging focus: Bernstein’s on ephemerality and Donath on reputation. The value in their contribution in our estimation, is in how much in common they have, and the implications their observations have (had) in present and future online communities. Thus, the summary and the reflection will cover both papers in an intertwining fashion.

Brief:
What currency is considered important in a given community? (Does this importance scale across other communities?)
Two major online communities are covered by these papers: Donath’s being an earlier paper considers Usenet, and Bernstein et al., 4Chan. Both these communities involve users starting threads for a given reason, and other members in the community are given leave to chime in with their views/support/comments – these comments subjectively given different weight as far as how useful they are. Community members (speaking of both the platform as a whole and considering specific groups), have different means of establishing and weighing identity and credibility to then make decisions on whether to trust the posts.

The papers diverge from this point: Donath proceeds to argue on the importance of a poster proving their identity overtly, and/or users determining the authority based on previous posts, while Bernstein et al. proceeds to consider how the /b/ forum continue to flourish with some sort of order while at the same time over 90% of the users preferring to remain anonymous.

Reflection
We presently have the advantage of back-sight that the authors of the pair of papers did not have at the time, and thus can judge the papers based on both prescience and longevity. While Usenet has been usurped by other — more efficient groups, the cultural behaviors remain prescient. 4chan and /b/ are alive and ever active, and we can also use recent events as a lens by which to reflect on Bernstein’s work.

Q1: Anonymity == Deception?
According to both papers, no.
But it’s not quite that straightforward: Oh to be a fly on the wall when both /b/ and Usenet was born! Both papers presented the cultures expected of users in both communities as a given. A new user is expected to first observe, learn and then participate in adherence to the communities’ culture. Watching the birth and evolution would’ve been invaluable. Thus giving rise to interesting questions:

• But how did the consensus on how to behave come to be?
• Does this convergence to a consensus scale to other social media?
• What does this tell us about how we self-organize on the web?

The early days of Twitter for example, was filled with exquisitely minute descriptions of users’ daily lives, which evolved as the platform gained popularity, and the users adjusted their behaviors to match. The blue check-mark for example a more recent addition to the service Twitter offers, serves as an identity verification. In contrast to Donath’s work, this Twitter’s mark of authenticity serves to decouple authority from identity. Just because you say you are who you are, does not mean that you are then to be trusted. Yet, there is still space for anonymity with reputation established as Donath described: by users concluding based on previous posts, that the given user is to be trusted: Case in point: @NYCSouthPaw, whose reputation with providing a legal view on politics can be considered trusted (the user revealed his identity very recently). 4Chan, according to Bernstein’s view, necessitates a much faster means of establishing “credibility” (given how fast posts expire). This serves to narrow the focus towards using in-culture lingo – not as a measure of reputation, but rather as a measure of belonging — this being of a higher importance over identity and outright reputation measures .

The question on credibility on 4chan has also been prescient – given the rise of QAnon, and how tripcodes are used to prove that the poster is indeed 4chan and not an usurper, which while granting an irrefutable identity to the poster, also allows (an illusion of) credibility, and expansion to other online communities.

Q2: Ephemerality vs Archiving: Which is best?
This is touched upon by Donath, who importantly notes the fact that ephemerality matches the real-world right of forgiving and forgetting, and where the move towards “internet is forever” is an anti-thesis to this. The larger question, beyond remembering data is attribution, the fact that a verified (identified) user is attributed to a certain content that would live perpetually online raises the question on both the usefulness of enforcing identification and the rise of the “Right to be Forgotten” movement.

Both 4chan and Usenet members have/had an archival tool available to store information they consider important in some ways. Beyond how they store and re-incarnate favorite/popular posts:

• What considerations goes (beyond popularity) into making the decisions to archive a post?
• How often did the archived content got requested/re-upped?
• Does this have a larger implication on how users curate information?

Q3: What are the implication of online behavior on the real world?
The use of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms is widely known, and so is the overflow of ideas from one online community to the world at large. Considering more recent phenomnea: QAnon (a 4Chan creation) was a rallying point and a major point of discussion at a real-world venue.

The more things change…
Considering more recent online communities: Facebook, Twitter and StackOverflow, reputation is important for all of these platforms, and an explicit measure and action is provided: by likes, by follows, or by vote. These measures  have a factor on trust, and leads users by default to act towards establishing reputation — without necessarily establishing identity.

Apart from Facebook and Twitter – when considering blue check marks, identity is not as important: privacy and anonymity is more understood and appreciated.

Ephemerality has been adopted – at least in the social context as a means of offering a choice: Snapchat as a platform allows posts to expire and deleted forever (there are apps that offer a mitigation from this feature) and in Instagram and Facebook on stories. But also archiving is provided by default, accommodating both the need to be forgotten and the need to remember on demand.

How about the use of multiple online aliases, the motivation behind their creation, and the effect they have, as presented by Donath? this is still an open and very interesting question.

Read More

Judith S. Donath, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”

Michael S. Bernstein et al., “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”

Both the aforementioned papers both look closely into identity in social media platforms. The second paper also deals with ephemerality, a discussion the first paper doesn’t go into. While both these papers are dealing with similar topics they are both presenting wildly different views. As I read Donath’s work, I was convinced that in a virtual community, trust is a huge issue. Despite being given some information about the identity of someone on social media, we still cannot be sure. Donath goes on to classify signals that we receive from users on platforms into conventional and assessment signals. I was able to tie this beautifully with several instances in an online community called ‘Adopt a Pet’ on Facebook. In India, there are very few pedigree dogs (abandoned/require rehoming) up for adoption. They are also very much in demand. Whenever a pedigree dog is up for adoption, we have to go through a very stringent vetting process. This is because many members of our group are backyard breeders impersonating animal rescuers or pet parents. Their conventional signals are on point as they’ve watched us discuss and argue on our page. We are finding it difficult to find any assessment signals to verify their identity online. For now, we have resorted to doing physical house-checks. However, logistics become an issue if an offer of adoption comes from a different town. Is there an assessment signal that could help our group rehome dogs safely with no hassles?

Donath’s paper is quite dated but the issues that she has outlined is very much our reality as well. We may have come leaps and bounds in improving the quality of our social media systems, but does impersonation now have more adverse effects than it ever has in the past? People we don’t know, pages we cannot verify are prescribing cures to stubborn diseases, superfoods, and whole lifestyle changes that other users in a social media platform are willing to subscribe to. Many times for a cost.

The second paper tackles the culture of 4chan’s /b/ discussion board and the effect of anonymity and ephemerality on it. When I paid this discussion board a visit, I was taken aback at the nature of the posts. Granted, I did enjoy some of the dark jokes that I came across but I wasn’t comfortable thinking a child could come across this website. Ofcourse, the vile and insensitive nature of the discussion board can be attributed to the complete anonymity of posts. As I progressed through the paper, it is pretty clear that 4chan has been the origin of some of the internet’s most viral content. However, I am inclined to argue that Reddit (more identity based, less anonymous platform) has also been the origin of some pretty popular memes. This is backed up by this research paper ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’ by Zannettou, S et al. This further raises two questions –

1. If Reddit and 4chan can both produce this kind of creative content, what more does the complete anonymity of 4chan bring to the table? Is it only the degree of darkness of the content created here?
2. Is the trade-off between safe and accurate exchange of useful information versus the ‘creative’ (read dark) content worth it? Is this ‘creativity’ essential?

I also noticed that in 4chan, the user is given the illusion of an identity. I could be posting under a certain pseudonym that could very easily be poached from me and misused by another person. It seems like one would rather move to a different platform than go through these elaborate measures that users have to take in order to establish identity (like pictures of themselves with timestamps) on 4chan. Using Reddit when you wish for your post to be attributed to you and 4chan when you are posting things you don’t really care for seems to be an option.

When it comes to a choice between purely anonymous posts versus posts with some form of identity, the purpose of the social media platform would play a major role.  For instance, on a platform like StackOverflow, it is useful to keep yourself identifiable so that your contributions can stand testimony to your qualifications in maybe a job interview. In the case of a discussion board where most of the discussions are inconsequential and ephemeral, does it really matter who is posting?

While I am inclined to be against the anonymity of 4chan, its ephemerality is wonderfully refreshing. Only posts that the community deems truly engaging stays on top and other posts simply die away. In a world where Facebook reminds me of that incredibly embarrassing post from 5 years ago, the ephemerality is welcome. However, the lack of persistence of their data renders anything that you post onto their platform inconsequential in the long run. I find it difficult to comprehend why someone would go through the trouble of posting things on a platform that it will almost immediately disappear from. Is any useful discussion going to ever transpire on such a platform?

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The two papers by Donath et. al. and Bernstein et. al. study the implications of anonymity in online communities.The first paper studies how user anonymity and deception can lead to antisocial behavior and loss of credibility. In contrast, the later displays how some communities thrive despite extreme anonymity and ephemerality.

Dolan et. al. describe with examples, how identity deception and anonymity cause biases and anti-social behavior on Usenet newsgroups. They argue that identity plays a valuable role when people are looking for credible information and advice. The paper goes on the discuss the effect of various assessment and conventional signals such as email domain, language, signature which will be discussed in the last paragraph of this review as comparison points with the second paper. The second half of the first paper addresses anti-social behavior on Usenet. Although the examples provide a detailed explanation of different behaviors such as trolling, concealment, impersonation the examples seem highly case/user specific. For example, there is no quantifiable way to determine whether the question asked by the college junior in “Rec.motorcycles” is actually a troll or not. How would you measure impersonation, trolling or category deception? Further, what is perceived as anti-social by one group of users, might not be considered as that by a different group. One important research direction would be to just analyze the sensitivity of different communities towards anti-social behavior based on user profile distribution such as gender, location, age group, lifespan, and expertise.

Bernstein’s work studies how the design elements of rapid content deletion and complete anonymity drive the user behavior on 4chan. Regarding ephemerality, the authors argue that the fast-moving board /b encourages users to rapidly generate creative content and increase community participation. It retains “fresh” content on the front board /b. This prompts the question: whether such temporality works only because of the anti-social, meme-oriented nature of /b board and whether it might be discouraging in forums with higher community standards. This question persists when analyzing the anonymity implications. Authors claim to observe increased dis-inhibition, more intimate and open communication and masking of failure. Again, in this case, the success of the anonymity feature appears highly content driven. Taking examples from other communities like Quora, responders rarely stay anonymous while answering intellectual, philosophical or non-personal content while they prefer to answer anonymously while recounting a personal, embarrassing, or alarming content. As a further research contribution, it would be interesting to observe how anonymity and ephemerality influence different types of virtual communities serving various purposes.

Coming back to what I found as the most interesting concept in the first paper (assessment and conventional signals) there are some parallels between Usenet and 4chan even with the extreme perception of anonymity. For this, it is important to understand the difference between  “anonymity” and “identity”. While anonymity is discouraged on Usenet and highly valued on 4chan (due to the content), they both use same assessment signals for establishing identity, either group or individual. Usenet users are observed to use specific language and signature cues similar to the use of slang and “triforcing” on 4chan. Both sets of users practice posting identifying photos (time stamped on 4chan) to establish credibility. Does that indicate that users value identity more than anonymity? How would the community react to an anonymous and a non-anonymous user with different community status or identity? 

In summary, I believe that to observe the complete effect of anonymity and deception,  across social network study needs to be performed considering the context(content) of communication and signaling behavior.

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