Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Identity is not important for some communities?!

I've just watched very interesting talk by Michael S. Bernstein about 4chan and /b/ discussion boards where more than 90% of users are anonymous. The threads in the boards are not archived but deleted after sometime (~3,9 minutes). Although the anonymity of users and very short life of threads, communities have their culture and policies.For example, if somebody posted without using a settled slang, he gets a "Lurk further" reply.

Such kind of communities haven't been researched a lot. It is interesting that in communities like 4chan nobody looks for a reputation of a user. Even so some posts have "long" life (~ 39 minutes) when other users reply. In the boards it is going only about posted content and not about who has posted.


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


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