Internet epiphany

It's taken many years (although most of them don't count since I had no knowledge of the subject matter) but I've finally worked out why 4chan is so popular on the internet. As an estimate I'd be willing to say it's far less popular then believed, but it's notoriety is such that if you're a regular internet user and you don't know what 4chan is, you've at least felt the effects of it. Been rickroll'd or seen any of a dozen different memes (including the horrific shock sites) and yes, you've been 4chan'd.

Since learning about it I was heavily against 4chan. But having not visited it I was operating on hear-say, and as such believed them to be a bunch of creepy cultists operating from a mountain-side retreat attempting to cause suffering throughout the world for their own amusement and in the name of their unisex diety 'lulz', utilising a solely male membership in their domination plans with attempts to regress the world to a society from the 1950's, but much more open to porn. While very little of this has been disproven, I have had a startling insight.

4chan operates with a very, very simple premise in place. In some ways it is the ultimate meritocracy, but that I believe is overstating it since you require the 'merits' they believe to be an inherent good. How do they enforce such a meritocracy? Simple. The pure fact that probably 99% of all posts are done by "Anonymous".

One one hand this anonymity means that there is a great deal of stupidity present. People can post whatever they want and be as stupid as they want, and there's nothing but the uncaring nature of the people they're trolling to dissuade them. But dissuade them it does. Trolls are rated (usually quite poorly, working on the concept that the best trolling is the one where they don't realise they're being trolled), and people have more fun with them then the Troll did. But the stupidity is still there.

So what good factor does Anonymity bring in? Simple, there is no social 'clique' to get 'in' with. There are no leaders, since there's no way to identify who's leading and who's not. There is no way to grab attention since no one even KNOWS who is grabbing the attention. There is attention to grab, but it's like the person trying to step into the spotlight is invisible. This removes so much of the social drama that can exist in an internet based community.

And while it must be said this attitude does result in alot of poor taste humour and offensiveness, the fact that the entire group is founded on mutual amusement means that every now and then you just find... comedy gold.