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01/29/10(Fri)16:10 No. 48017426 "One
Toshiaki (the default name for an anonymous poster ) is as good (or as
much a loser) as another." There is no reason for anyone to feel like
they stand out as someone important in this Japanese community. If
nicknames were used, as the creator of the board Hiroyuki Nishimura
once explained in an interview, those people would gain authority in
this network over time... an authority which would make it harder for
others to tell them "what you say is wrong/boring/lame." Nishimura
says, “All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument
will work.” And: "People can only truly discuss something when they
don’t know each other." Some people might remember your name and
personally dislike you, they might want to disagree with you no matter
what your argument is. On the other hand, some people might like you
and agree with you no matter what. All of that happens in regular
internet forums, where social interaction takes place on many layers,
many of them subconscious. 4chan is stripped off many of these harmful
layers of social interaction because of anonymous posting. Each Anon's
post has the same weight, there is no hierarchy. People constantly have
to provide proper arguments in order to be taken seriously, they can't
rely on a good name, previous merits, a long postcount, a nice avatar
picture, or their gender. A: In a forced-anonymous system,
every post is taken completely on its content and value, Good threads
are posted in, bad threads are generally ignored (or devolve into a
shitfest of trolling, which happens in both forced-anon and systems
with registration). In a system where tripcodes are rampant, posts are
taken on past-reputation, off-the-topic posts referring to the tripcode
user (ex. tripfag posts something, the people who hate him call him a
fag, he defends himself, thread inevitably de-rails) tl;dr Anonymity in fact contributes to the quality of a board, rather than taking from it.