Can someone explain what /b/ and 4Chan and Anonymous are?

[KittyWampus]

I am someone who has never been to Myspace and has no Facebook.

The incident with Dusty the Cat yesterday has people talking about stuff on the internet I've no idea about.

It's like when people start discussing celebrities on Entertainment Tonight. I have NO CONCEPT who most of the people are and what they're known for.

Am posting this in GD cause there may be others like me who are clueless.

[grannie4peace]

1. i don't know what you are talking about

[JDPriestly]

2. I'm as ignorant as you are, Kittywampus. Could someone explain?

[Occam Bandage]

3. Here:

4chan: http://www.4chan.org/
/b/: http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html

Warning: do not visit unless you have no soul. Not safe for work.

4chan is an imageboard site, where people post pictures. It is the dark underbelly of the internet. /b/, or "random," is a subboard, and is the absolute worst place ever, in which nothing is sacred, the offensive is reveled in purely for its offensive properties, and people out-do one another for attention. It is a very large, and very idiosyncratic community.

Anonymous is an informal organization in which anonymous people across the internet (mostly from 4chan, as all things exist there) band together to cruelly destroy the lives of people who deserve it. They especially hate scientologists and, apparently, cat-abusers.

[superduperfarleft]

5. Rules 1 and 2?

[XemaSab]

23. I am going to bed less innocent than I was when I woke up this morning

And considering that I spent WAY too much time last night at

http://lovingdd.blogspot.com/

That's really saying something. :o

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

4. Staples of Internet lore.

The quick and dirty version is that 4Chan is a discussion/message board that mostly pedals in sophomoric images, and questionable content (although there are exceptions to my broad strokes).

Anonymous is the title given to any anonymous user on a board, so when it is used in a context like you are it generally refers to a body of nameless agents who are engaging in illegal activities or general shenanigans.

[angrycarpenter]

6. You are better off not knowing.

They are talking about the most vile places on the net. The mere sight of 4chan will make you lose all faith in humanity. It is an anonymous message board full of sick porn, racism, gore, and jerks urging other jerks to kill themselves. Stay away, it is the web equivalent of radioactive waste.

[blogslut]

7. They are the cancer that is killing teh Interwebs

Seriously, 4chan is an anonymous messageboard. They break their forums down by letters of the alphabet. /b/ is one of those forums. /b/ is primarily devoted to internet fuckery. Members that participate in such fuckery like to refer to themselves as Anonymous.

[B o d i]

26. Thank you, I understood that. Too much of this discussion is way over my head. nt

[NeedleCast]

8. the simple way to think of them

are no-holds-barred message boards.

Be warned that they are often very graphic and often contain lots of porn (not that I have a problem with porn...just warning).

[AB_Positive]

9. From a 'channer herself, to you:

4chan is an imageboard. Think like here in DU's lobby only you have an easy access "Upload a pic" function built into posting. Everyone who posts on 4chan posts so anonymously. Thus how the "Anonymous" and "Anon" memes were formed.

"Anonymous" is basically someone that sticks around the /b/ section of 4chan a lot. 4chan is sectioned up into parts where you can post/upload pics in certain categories. Some are worksafe (cute, anime, technology, video games) some certainly aren't (ask a 4channer what /d/ stands for and you'll get a universal answer, even though you rarely see it on /d/ anymore).

/b/ is the designation for "Random" meaning you can post anything. Literally. I've seen a pic of Michael Jordan photoshopped to have a swastika on it. Literally anything goes on random save for furry and child porn I think. This is where the angriest of what are known as "/b/-tards" generally stick around griefing anyone they can.

Somehow /b/ got sort of political... starting with the "raid" (read: attempt to mess with) on Hal Turner. Hal was running an internet radio show being super racist and telling his listeners to open fire on a Hispanic state judge in NJ. Now in the true spirit of /b/, racism is only funny if it's irrelevant and thus Hal was targeted. I personally watched as on Christmas Day in 2006 many /b/tards ran an automated script downloading and deleting the two largest images from his site. Repeatedly. A $75,000 broadband bill later and Hal Turner and his racist show was off the air permanently.

Next came the Scientology raid. Someone decided to "declare war" on Scientology via YouTube espousing the usual Anonymous talking points. Whether or not an actual member of Anon did this (since, you know, they're anonymous) seems irrelevant because suddenly the angry geeks had a cause. One generally everyone could get behind and damn did they. Lots of protest and TV stories and whatnot later and suddenly Anonymous ended up in MAXIM (but not enough publicity however since people are still in the dark as to how evil Scientology is...).

The Palin yahoo hack was apparently from an Anon as well - or at least they were taking credit. I chuckled hard on that.




Generally, Anonymous are griefers with standards. They'll attack whoever they want like a flashmob via the internet if they feel the target justifiably deserves it. Targets likely to get hit: Racists, homophobes, emo kids, pedophiles, Scientologists... or really just about anyone.

Some terms you may hear dealing with this subgroup...


"4Chan Party Van" - slang for a disguised FBI van waiting to arrest some idiot who posts illegal stuff on 4chan.

"/b/-tard" - an idiot on /b/

"It's a trap!" - the picture of the pretty lady which prompts this is usually "a man" or a pre-op Transsexual.



Some of the spinoffs of 4chan:

7chan - because /d/ doesn't have enough pictures of trans-hentai so this was made.

I can haz cheezeburger - those funny cat pics with the captions? Yep, started on 4chan as "Caturday"

The Holders Series - some crazy horror story meme that kicks around and gains entries every now and again. It would make a HELL of a tabletop RPG story, in my opinion.


there's a basic 4chan primer. Have fun and don't take the site too seriously. None of us do. :P

[KittyWampus]

10. Thanks for the details! Actually sounds like an interesting culture. There's a form of poetry

called "Flarf" that this reminds me to.

See Youtube video of "Annoying Diabetic Bitch". Over the top insulting and offensive which only works when it's irrelevant.

[Posteritatis]

18. They really are sort of fascinating

I prefer not to be in their crosshairs, of course. The nastier ones are better than ED members, but that's still often like saying it's better to have a femoral fracture than a severed head.

I'd say the large majority of folks who'd consider themselves a component of Anonymous (the concept's broader than 4chan nowadays) are more or less harmless, but there's a core of them who cross the line well into evilmotherfuckerdom; a bunch of them spent a couple of months trying to harass my sister, but she knew enough not to be an entertaining target so they gave up after awhile. A lot of the rest though are either just kids goofing off in a few specific places with their own lingo/history/etc, or people who are acting like kids just goofing off etc.

One big thing to keep in mind with the "Anonymous" thing that most people discussing it and all people doing news coverage of it don't get is that it is not an organized group of any sort. About the only thing binding them together is the fact that they post on one or more image boards anonymously. The reason the term's been anthropomorphized is sort of a running joke in those communities; when you see enough posts from Anonymous on one thing or another, especially if there's some sort of common attitude in them, it's pretty easy to make the jump to deciding that there actually is this one guy out there named Anonymous who's omnipresent, omniscient and omnimalevolent. I do admit I love the image they have of the concept (a Man in Black without the head), though.

The V mask thing showed up as a way for Anonymoi to show up in public while still remaining anonymous (to a point), and gradually turned into a running gag of its own if just because, well, V lines up with the vengeful anarchism a lot of them espouse. A lot of other Anons, however, despise the new activist bent by a lot of them, and there's a lot of no-true-Scotsmanning going on as a result.

It's also a slang term in some circles for The People in general, e.g., "the big thing about Wikipedia is that Anonymous can edit it."

Also, one way of describing 4chan (and /b/ in particular) that I kind of liked is one I used to explain to my father (who's netsavvy enough that he admins several online games recreationally and helped build a couple back in the nineties): in terms of the general "omg nooooo!" reaction from the content, /b/ is to the Internet as the Internet is to normal offline society.

[ColbertWatcher]

24. It is my understanding that ED is 4chan's unofficial wiki. n/t

[Posteritatis]

28. That's more or less the case, yeah

I know plenty of drama junkies who at least pretend to loathe 4chan and anything related who are alllll over ED though. It attracts the worthless from all over the place that way.

[ColbertWatcher]

25. Bravo! That has to be the best explanation/history I've read about 4chan.

Well done!

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

11. sage

[RandiFan1290]

12. But can u tri-force?

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[Occam Bandage]

13. lol NEWfags cant triforce

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[Leftist Agitator]

14. 4chan is any image board, /b/ is one of its subsidiary divisions...

Otherwise known as "The Asshole of the Internet."

Anonymous is a loose confederation of /b/ users, or "/b/tards" as they're commonly known, who engage in such activities as trolling Hal Turner's racist call-in show, protesting Scientology, mocking dead children, and generally causing havoc, chaos, etc. for the "lulz", a corruption of LOL, which basically means that they do the things that they do to get laughs at others' expense.

That pretty much sums it up.

[AB_Positive]

15. Thank the god I don't believe in I'm not alone here.

Although I'm glad Triforce became the new annoyance meme over the way over the top DESU chant.

Damn desu. Get out of my head. I keep my noodles in there.

[Occam Bandage]

16. ...

[AB_Positive]

17. No Rule #34?

...

Actually, a friend of mine has a shirt that depicts Rumsfeld french kissing W. If that's not the worst Rule 34 ever I don't know what is. :/

[Posteritatis]

19. That's benign

I was made aware of someone who Rule 34'd the Ozy and Millie webcomic a couple of years back, which pretty much makes my current goal in life to find a nice pool of lava or something in which I can swiftly eliminate my head to get that concept out of it.

(Of course, both of those are probably benign in the larger context. Considering there's Tetris slashfic online, I'm not sure I want to approach the limits to the net's, ah, imagination with these things.)

[Leftist Agitator]

22. I haven't been to /b/ for a while...

It makes me lose faith in humanity if I spend too long there. But I've gotta say, there's something intoxicating about that completely uninhibited mass of anonymous hatred.

[ColbertWatcher]

27. I'm starting to think that the entire internets has become one big rickroll.

There is little one can believe on the internets that is real, and links cannot be trusted.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I think it's all devolved into some huge electronic gag meant to trick old people into believing something important is happening online, but when they finally get the nerve to check it out, someone posts photoshopped pics of them getting out of their own tub ... covered in tentacles.

Oh and the elephant population has tripled in the last 6 months.

[-..__...]

20. 4Chan...

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy".

[Occam Bandage]

21. You know that's 4chan because that isn't her leg. nt

[hootinholler]

29. TriForce? Desu? Rule 34?

:shrug:

Sounds like the alt groups of yore.

-Hoot