On Anonymous socialising.

2025-06-20

I run an anonymous BBS over at denpa-chan.org, and recently I've been thinking about the anonymous board as a concept. Most internet users aren't aware that the idea of an anonymous board pre-dates 4chan, and that 4chan and it's shitty culture is not the only available anonymous board on the internet. Even within 4chan, people aren't aware of the smaller boards and their cultures, since they're overshadowed by shitholes like /v/ and /b/. Therefore, it seems that when people decide they want to host a social space on the internet, anonymity is never even considered as a viable option, since it's assumed that it can only create 4chan-like culture. In reality, the anonymous board format has some great benefits, although there are problems too.

Have you ever been in a community, say a discord server or forum or something like that, and it's been torn apart by some inane drama. Two members start e-dating, then break up and you suddenly have to pick a side in their messy relationship, someone makes a new server and invites like half the people from the old one without telling the rest, the server splinters. I'm sure you know the sort of thing I'm talking about. A nice thing about anonymity is it prevents situations like this. Two users could be at each other's throats in one thread, while wholeheartedly agreeing with each other in another thread, and they would have no idea it was the same person. You can't carry grudges against specific users because you don't know who the other users are. I mean sure, people will butt heads and get in arguments, but they can't carry on that emotion beyond it's context. Anonymity is a vaccine against drama.

The ideal behind anonymous socialising is that people will be judged for what they say rather than who they are. It's a bit utopian enlightenment shit for me, but I do think there is a nugget of truth behind it. The idea that you could be talking to a celebrity, or the owner of the website, or just any rando in the world, and none of that matters, well I do think there's something positive to that. It's the antithesis of "social" media. In this "small web" space or whatever you want to call it, people seem to be in agreement that the sorts of gamified clout metrics like follower counts and likes and "friends" are alienating. They contribute to a commodification of sociality, and coordinate social processes into a set of ulterior motives where you must "play the game" of social media. But is it not the case that the fundamental structure of having an account which all of your interactions are documented as belonging to still remains an abstracted form of this gamification. It may more closely resemble meatspace sociality, where the account is your physical features, but is that the only form of socialisation that is desirable? What about other forms of socialisation in meatspace, graffiti writing, a message in a bottle, signing a guestbook. There are instances of anonymity in meatspace, and the internet gives this form new possibilities. Consistent identity tied to posts still retains the social game, but in an abstract and opaque form. Just because likes and friends aren't buttons you click on the website, that doesn't mean the system isn't still there in people's minds. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, it's just not necessarily the only good thing either. There is some value in liberation from that social game, it opens possibilities for a different kind of sociality.

On a more concrete note, it's annoying to have to make an account on every fucking website you ever visit. Is it not nice to just go somewhere and be able to hang out? Oh I want to ask a question on this forum, ok time to navigate to the account creation page, hand over my email address to whatever party owns the site, think of a username, create a password, add it to my password manager, solve a google captcha to train palantir drone AI vision, wait for them to send a string of numbers to my email, verify my email. It's just a pain!

Unfortunately, there's a reason this fell out of favour

Sadly, there are many bad actors on the internet, especially the modern internet. Spam and abuse is a bigger and more technologically complex operation than ever, and the anonymous board is highly susceptible to attack. Basically, it's hard to moderate. There are mitigations one can put in place, as I have tried my best to do on denpa-chan, but it's an uphill battle. Ultimately, the anonymous board format scales extremely poorly. When the community is small and generally invested in the health of the site, everything is fine. But if that security through obscurity fails, the moderation workload can rapidly grow, in a way that just having a basic system of accounts would completely mitigate. We have the example of 4chan to demonstrate exactly how not to do it, and even 4chan has been revealed to use surprisingly complex surveillance techniques to track users and enforce moderation behind the scenes. At that scale, even the bare minimum moderation most large boards on 4chan use becomes impossible without de-anonymisation techniques which kind of defeat the whole purpose of the format to begin with.

If you want to host an anonymous board, be ready to do a lot of work in moderation. In fact, it's probably not worth it for a lot of applications. While the benefits might be nice, the costs are high too. Anonymous boards are a utopian pipe dream, but I'm going to keep dreaming for as long as I can.