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Neither did I, but then again this is a collaborative paper written by intelligent individuals who attended MIT and University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community is about what happens in a large scale anonymous, transitory community and how such a community produces so much of the internet’s shared culture. The goal of the analysis is to understand the concepts of anonymity and ephemerality and how they effect community behaviours which in turn generate internet culture.

The analysis goes into depth discussing 4chan’s impact and gives some statistics on /b/’s traffic, which in turn is the lifeforce of 4chan. 4chan is described as a fast-paced and chaotic experience, deleting “old” content as soon as new content is posted, feeding the ADD riddled visitors, appeasing the need for a consistently changing and updated visual content ( that last part is my opinion, not that of the analysis).

In other words, it’s an interesting read if you give a care about the dynamics of 4chan and /b/ and its users.