Paper:
Bernstein, M. S., Monroy-Hernandez, A., Harry, D., André, P., & Panovich, K. (2011). 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Discussion leader: Tianyi Li
Summary:
This article explores the concepts of ephemerality and anonymity the-the, using the first and most popular board “/b/” on the imageboard website “4chan” as a lens. To better understand how the design choices we make impact the kinds of social spaces that develop, the authors perform a content analysis and two data-driven studies of /b/. Perhaps best known for its role in driving Internet culture and its involvement with the “Anonymous” group, the authors believe 4chan’s design plays a large role in its success, despite its counter-intuitiveness. In this paper, the authors quantify 4chan’s ephemerality (there are no archives; most posts are deleted in a matter of minutes) and anonymity (there are no traditional user accounts, and most posts are fully anonymous) and discuss how the community adapts to these unusual design strategies.
The authors review the prior literature on anonymity and ephemerality. First, they review communities that choose different points on the spectrum of anonymity — from completely unattributed to real names (eg. Facebook). There is previous research on online communities that use pseudonymity to build user reputation, and anonymity in small groups. The authors reconsider their results in larger online communities in their work. The authors acknowledged the mixed impact of anonymity on online-community. On the one hand, identity-based reputation systems are important in promoting pro-social behavior, and removing traditional social cues can make communication impersonal and cold, as well as undermining credibility. On the other hand, anonymity may foster stronger communal identity as opposed to bond-based attachment with inpiduals, impact participation in classrooms and email lists, and produce more ideas and overall cohesion within the groups. Second, they recognize the rarity of ephemerality on large-scale online communities and claims to be the first to study it directly in situ. Although data permanence has been the norm of online communities, it has downsides in some situations, as the example given by the authors, archiving history in chat rooms has elicited strong negative reactions. They also relate the previous related academic work to practical implications for online social environments.
4chan is composed of themed boards, each having threads of posts. The author justified the choice of /b/, the “random” board that is 4chan’s first and most active board, where “rowdiness and lawlessness” happen, and the “life force of the website”. After explaining the background about this forum and board, the authors described and discussed their methods and results of their two studies.
The first study focuses on ephemerality. The ephemerality on 4chan is enforced by thread expiration and real-time ranking and removal of threads by their replies. The authors characterized /b/’s content by the communal language used, and conducted a grounded analysis on a series of informal samples of thread-starting posts through an eight-month participant observation on the site. The authors focus collected a dataset of activity on /b/ for two weeks and conducted a content analysis of 5,576,096 posts in482,559 threads. The authors believed that the sample size is representative enough of most daily and weekly cycles. They did not capture images due to nature of the materials. They capture the daily activity in the two-week dataset by calculating the number of threads per hour, the threads lifetime in seconds, and the amount of time (in seconds) the thread stay on the first page. The amount of posting activity in one forum board is roughly the same as arenas like Usenet and Youtube. They identified the high traffic time on the website when both the lifetime and first-page exposure of threads is the lowest due to high competition. The contents deletion plays role in pushing the community quickly iterate and generate popular memes. Users can control ephemerality by bumping up threads through replies and burying it through “sage”. Such efforts raise community participation unintuitively. They also found that the users have developed mechanisms to keep valuable contents: they preserve images on their local machine, and they donate images in return for their requests.
The second study focuses on anonymity. The anonymity on 4chan plays out by not requiring an account to post and not enforcing unique pseudonym. Despite the existence of “tripcodes” for password holders, they found that this feature, as well as the pseudonyms, are largely eschewed. The authors use the two-week data sample to analyze the identity metadata of each post. They found that only 10% use pseudonyms and less than 2% posts with email, 40% of which are not even actual emails and mainly for the “sage” feature. Tripcodes are used only for users to privately keep their authorship of the the previous post. The authors found that anonymity can be feature on the dynamics of 4chan, despite usual disbelief. It provides a cover for more intimate and open conversations for advice and discussion threads; encourages experimentation with new ideas or memes by masking the sense of failure and softening the blow of being ignored of explicitly chastised. In addition, the community is able to recognize authenticity via timestamp. Furthermore, instead of building an inpidual reputation, anonymity in /b/ gives rise to community boundaries with textual, linguistic and visual cues.
Reflections:
This article had some nice strengths. It is the first to study ephemerality the in a large-scale online community directly and in situ. It provides a nice overview of an extreme of the opposite of commonly accepted on-line community norm. As the authors note, the opposite positions on user identity and data permanence have its own merits and advantages. The authors provided an in-depth literature review of the dominating belief as well as a comprehensive analysis of a representative sample of the opposite extreme.
Not aware of the existence of such communities, I was intrigued to read the paper but also got my mind blown when I try to see what 4chan looks like. The first impression I got of the /b/ board is that “this is the dark and dirty side of the cyber world”. However, after finish reading the paper and some related discussion mentioned in related literature, I appreciated the author’s professionalism and sharp insights into the online ecosystem. Also, checking other boards reshaped my impression and made me realize 4chan is a powerful platform where people care more about the truth itself than judging if things are true by who is telling them. I also learned the real-world impact of 4chan, both in US election, and the CNN blackmail scandal.
The results from the two study are interesting. The most impressive one is that the effect of ephemerality on content quality echoes my personal experience. As quoted by the authors from previous research, “social forgetfulness” has been playing an important role in human civilization. This reminds me of the saying “there’s nothing new under the sun”. The richness of information is never as valuable as the limited attention and human memory. Although I applaud the concept of ephemerality but stay suspicious with anonymity. To be honest, it is challenging for me to stay unbiased with such online community with a high degree of autonomy through anonymity. I see the value of a certain level of anonymity given the authors’ study results and discussion, but I still doubt if the good outweighs the bad. Unlike ephemerality, which leads to a competition for attention by producing high-quality and eye-catching contents, anonymity removes the burden of responsibility from the posters of the impact their posts have in the community.
I admired the methods the authors used to conduct their analysis. The statistical analysis and the daily activity graph is very straightforward and self-explanatory. I never used content analysis myself before. After researching more details, I feel like that part where the authors conducted grounded analysis using a series of informal samples of thread-starting posts on /b/ is closer to the descriptions I read about content analysis. For the two-week long data set, they mainly did a quantitive analysis of the post metadata, including the post timestamps, reply timestamps, usernames and user emails.
Last but not least, despite that I was uncomfortable with some posts on the website, I wonder if the decision of not capturing images in the posts changes the analysis fundamentally. Since intuitively, those are highly possible to be the real “life force” of the website and keep reoccurring in my limited times of visiting the website. I would appreciate it if the authors have captured that at least the metadata of part of posts, and analyzed the weight and impact of inappropriate contents on the overall website.
Questions:
* What do you think of the advantages and disadvantages of anonymity and ephemerality discussed in the paper? Do you have additional perspectives?
* How do you think such online communities as 4chan impact the overall cyber ecosystem, and real world?
* Do you trust the anonymity in online community?
* Did you know about 4chan before? What did you think of it? Does this paper influence your point of view and how?
* Where in the user identity spectrum do you think works best? What are the situations or contexts?
