Realtime Imageboards: A Promising Patchwork Future for Online Communities

November 10, 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

§1.0.0 Static Imageboard's Inherent Uniqueness
§2 Static Imageboard's Crippling Limitation: Exit Difficulty
§3.0 Realtime imageboards
§4.0 Realtime Imageboards Achieve Free Exit
§5.0 Towards a Patchwork Future

§1.0.0 Static Imageboard's Inherent Uniqueness

In the landscape of digital social communities, imageboards are wholly
unique. Their structure falls somewhere in-between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0,
and the products of their culture are uniquely influential, even onto
the real world.

§1.1 Key Features: Anonymity & Transiency

Imageboards are unique among Web 2.0 social platforms in having no
accounts, usernames or identity of any kind. Users can simply navigate
to the site and engage freely in posting — all posts carry the same
"Anonymous" name by default. In general, anonymity is believed to create
an atmosphere of honesty and openness in debate, free from the egos and
reputation that corrupt non-anonymous discussions. The nature of
anonymous discussion is commonly described as: "What's important is what
is said, not who said it."

Anonymity is bolstered by data transiency: content is deleted shortly on
the order of days, if not hours. There are a certain amount of threads
allowed on each board, and as a new one is made, the oldest one to last
receive a response is deleted; and after a certain number of posts, all
threads stop counting any new responses. This leads to a knowledge that
anonymity won't be broken due to identification of historical speech
patterns and contributes to the noise on the network.

Users are enabled by their confidence in post discreteness. As each
individual post is not connected to any other, they have the freedom to
change their attitude, contradict themselves, disengage a debate, argue
controversial positions, play devil's advocate, etc. without
reservation. There is no motivation to fight a lost argument to save
face when there is no face to save.

The two tenets of anonymity and transiency are central to the imageboard
structure and the culture that it produces. The result is a
reputation-less discussion with no social consequences levied on an
individual's comments, allowing the pure discussion that leads to a
genuine marketplace of ideas.

§1.1.1 Anonymity and Post-Authorship

Individuals familiar with identity-based communities tend to
misalign the freedom enabled by anonymity as also enabling
disingenuous or sophistic communication: as there is no reputation
cost to arguing dishonestly, it must incentivize it. Yet, the
incentive for sophistry itself stems from defending one's
reputation, without it, there is no reason to participate in
disingenuity — except for the sake of subversion, and subversion
itself is harmless when the only goal and practice is intellectual
debate. "Dishonesty" is itself meaningless with no identity
attributed to the speaker; all discussion may as well be taking the
stance of devil's advocate.

In a community without ego or identity, the distinction between
irony and sincerity, humor and seriousness is rendered moot.
Intentionality cannot be derived without an author; anonymity
refines discussion to content, and content alone. This is the nature
of ego-less discourse outsiders bred on less pure forms of online
discussion have trouble understanding, which is primarily what leads
them to being identifiable as such.

§1.2 Cultural Production

In terms of cultural production and influence, it's commonly recognized
that imageboards are significantly overrepresented over their
contemporaneous digital alternatives. There are multitude of aspects
contributing to this phenomenon, but they all fundamentally rooted in
the inherent network effects produced by imageboard's transient,
anonymous communication.

§1.2.1 Complex Self-Organization

Imageboards are known to quickly and suddenly coordinate into
elaborate projects or "operations", organized horizontally, with no
leader, yet capable of impressive results. This behavior is not
unlike those observed in nature as swarm intelligences or in
self-organization in thermodynamic systems; in this way the user
base can be seen as participants in a kind of digital hivemind.
Harnessing their lack of ego, they can perform as daemons,
independent yet identical actors, tapping into the underlying
current of the network, who, through them, can spontaneously
manifest itself into complex structures.
§1.2.2 Distributed Think Tank

The unique, counterintuitive predictions, criticism and analysis
that are produced within imageboard networks are often surprisingly
accurate or predictive. The inherent culture of intense debates and
free discussion operates on principles that lead to the common
attribution of imageboards as a "massively distributed think tank."
The most similar parallel is to the RAND Corporation's Delphi
Method, designed to aggregate the diverse opinions of experts on the
principle that aggregate forecasting is more accurate than the
individual; the same principle is at play in prediction markets —
both systems well-known for their high predictive accuracy.
Imageboards naturally perform the same process, leading the group as
a whole towards insightful conclusions. The opinions that have been
settled into general consensus on any given board can be reliably
counted upon to have the sharpest standards of taste, the most
insightful analysis, or the most contemporaneous positioning of any
other online community, and most individual experts, due to this.

This can be framed another way as a pure implementation of John
Milton's marketplace of ideas: "the truth will emerge from the
competition of ideas in free, transparent public discourse and
concludes that ideas and ideologies will be culled according to
their superiority or inferiority and widespread acceptance among the
population." Only through the elimination of ego and reputation can
honest, free discourse be had, and through it, Truth illuminated.
§1.2.3 Lucid Shitposting as Delphi Divination

Imageboards are renowned for their ability to convert the cultural
zeitgeist into resonant memetic imagery and concepts that regularly
filter downwards to the non-anonymous online communities, and even
into real world culture. It's sometime said 4chan is the wellspring
from which all memes flow. This can largely be attributed to the
practice of shitposting, a form of posting that employs constant
layered humor and compressed references, that in its most intense
form one loses oneself in a "lucid state", where it feels as if
one's words are not their own.

The act of going lucid works to subconsciously express the
collective mind, as though it was divined from a muse - in reference
to the aforementioned Delphi Method, the practice can be described
as Delphi Divination: a trance-inducing ritual that uncovers the
touchstones of the collective consciousness of that particular
network, the imageboard community currently being engaged with.
Through aligning with the occult flows of the network, individuals
become a multitude, and so achieve a divine (within the confines of
this digital environ) inspiration that manifests in dense jokes and
memetic artifacts, whose resonance, confirmed by propagation, speaks
to their ability to express the archetypes present in the shared
network. They

§1.3.1 Survey & Comparative Analysis

1.0: BBS, IRC

1.5: Static Imageboard

2.0: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram

3.0: Realtime imageboards

To be Written
§1.3.2 System Design Defines Community Culture

To be Written

§2 Static Imageboard's Crippling Limitation: Exit Difficulty

§2.1 Vulnerabilities

It's a commonly expressed sentiment that the board has become
irrecoverably bad, but there are no alternative options
available^[Captured by two frequently quoted aphorisms: (1)
"[board] was always bad." (2) "Don't forget, you're here
forever."]. It appears that imageboards have inherent vulnerabilities,
that when exploited, leave the community's initial character
unrecoverable.

§2.1.1 First Vulnerability: Foreign Influx

As a general rule, active imageboards always tend towards growth.
Death by stagnation for an already active imageboard is unheard of,
outside of the textboards that slowly became a relic superseded by
the imageboard. Instead, imageboards receive a constant supply of
new users, the majority of whom assimilate. As a form of community
moderation, any identifiable foreigners are quickly shamed — the
idea being: if you're visibly an outsider despite anonymity, you
shouldn't be posting at all^[Commonly phrased as "lurk moar" — that
is, spend more time observing and assimilating the culture before
posting.]. This is most commonly a reflection of the user's
inability to grok the nuances of anonymous posting, or shed the ego
baggages of identity-based discussion.

The small portion of newcomers who reject assimilation, undesirably
affecting the nature and quality of discussion, are known as
"cancer," under the premise that cancer, if left untreated, will
spread. A large presence of cancer makes it difficult for newcomers
to assimilate accurately, resulting in accidental imitations of the
cancerous foreign agents instead of the host culture, resulting in
them becoming "infected" themselves in a kind of self-propagating
epidemic. This often occurs in the event of a large influx of
newcomers, such as when a board gains attention in the media or on
other websites; the community cannot actualize its shaming protocol
fast enough to signal against the wave of foreign agents. This both
leads to confusion on who is the host culture and who are also
newcomers, as well as granting confidence to some newcomers who feel
justified in rejecting assimilation when invading with many peers.

The ultimate result is an irreversible paradigm shift towards a new
set of norms, leading the board to become progressively
unrecognizable to the original community. Exit becomes imperative;
the desire for it frequently expressed, but the inertial nature of
static imageboards makes it impossible to achieve. This is an
observable process on all major boards, which seems to suggest it's
an inevitable function of the imageboard structure, the final stage
in its lifecycle. On a long enough timescale, all boards succumb to
eternal September.
§2.1.2 Second Vulnerability: Moderation Overreach

Administrative moderation is only required to maintain legality —
namely, banning CP — and prevent robot spam; otherwise, imageboards
are effectively independently sustainable. Out of an instinct of
self-preservation, the users naturally self-organize into what is
known as community moderation: a set of practices that encourage and
enforce assimilation by newcomers and thus help slow the
degeneration:
1. Saging. Putting "sage" in the e-mail field when making a post
  results in the user's post not bumping the page and marks the
  post in a different color. This intended to be used as a polite
  manner for not bumping threads if your post is not making
  meaningful or relevant contribution. However, it was co-opted as
  a tool to express disapproval of the thread's content - thus,
  when the community spontaneously performs collective saging, it
  signals to newcomers he thread is of a type or standard
  considered unwelcome on the board (cancer), thereby teaching the
  culture and assisting the process of assimilation while removing
  the possibility of the cancer "infecting" a new poster.
2. Gore. Due to the limited moderation of imageboards, users are
  often exposed to grotesque and disgusting imagery that is hidden
  from the rest of the internet. The community's subsequent
  desensitization to the material is taken as a point of pride.
  It's obvious then that the desensitization can be weaponized to
  repel innocent newcomers of a more sensitize stock, and so gore,
  as well as scat and other disgusting imagery, is shared every so
  often as a cleansing measure, and dumped collectively whenever
  an event might bring significant and sudden outside attention to
  the board (e.g. a news article).
These functions work remarkably well to maintain a cohesive
community culture. However, moderation overreach is very common in
imageboards, be it due to bored trolling, genuine hostility,
incompetence, ego or otherwise; the low-status of the job —
anonymous, unpaid — likely contributes to the frequent disrespect
for the non-intervention principle.

While generally responsible for much of the bitterness that leads a
user base to desire Exit, moderation becomes actively destructive
most when it removes the community's ability to self-moderate. This,
too, is unfortunately common^[Perhaps due to egotistic mods feeling
the community moderation is an affront to their own power, or the
desire to increase traffic without regard to quality in a bid for
increased ad revenue. The most prominent and complete example was
4chan banning not just goreposting and sagebombing, but even the
basic "announcement of sage" along with making the sage coloration
invisible in 2012; entirely ending any practice of community
shaming. Many other examples of hostility to community moderation
proliferate, from the defunct
4chon.net to
lainchan.org]. Removing the ability to shame obvious newcomers and
enforce the practice of assimilation leaves the board highly
vulnerable to cancer, effectively removing its immunity function
such that even minimal immigration quickly leads to ruin.

§2.2 Barriers To Exit

Even the best board cannot survive forever. The lack of community
influence on administrative decision-making processes and the
irreversibility of large changes in the culture makes clear the
necessity for easy Exit for that inevitable stage when a board becomes
lost. Unfortunately, Exit is notoriously difficult for imageboards.

§2.2.1 First Barrier to Exit: Inertia

Activity on a imageboard is understood on a binary scale: active or
dead. When a user examines a non-mainstream imageboard, known as
"splinters," the first thing generally reviewed is the post activity
rate^[Measured in posts per day or ppd.]. If it is below a certain
frequency^[A personal standard that varies by person, largely
informed by their own imageboard usage rate, but the author's own
standard would be less than 5ppd is a dead board], the user
considers the board "dead" and rejects it as one worth visiting
often enough to make a meaningful contribution - in most cases, not
even leaving behind a single post^[This is known based on anecdotal
evidence, general community consensus and the author's own
experience reviewing the Google analytics data of managed
imageboards of various sizes].

If, however, the imageboard has a ppd rate high enough to be read as
"active," there is a very real chance the user will make his
contributions and make repeat visits to the board, possibly even
adopting the board as his new home board^[Imageboard posters
generally maintain a list of the boards they most frequently and
regularly visit — most can recount a personal history of their
migration that can be read as their own cultural lineage]. Thus,
the dead imageboard maintains its inertia and remains dead, while
the active imageboard stays active.
§2.2.2 Second Barrier to Exit: Attrition

With every attempt exit to a new imageboard, only a certain
percentage of the posters will migrate. Even if the conditions of
their original board have become intolerable and unrecognizable,
many stay on by force of habit. Thus, every migration experiences
attrition.

Coupled with the momentum needed to make the new imageboard active,
and thereby successful, Exit is historically very prone to failure.
It is only successful when the migration is both sudden and large.
§2.2.3 Note on Hosting Costs: not a Barrier to Exit

It's been suggested that the costs of hosting an imageboard are one
of the major deterrents for users considering providing an
alternative. The costs of hosting are exaggerated: while outdated,
poorly optimized imageboard software such as 8chan's vichan lead to
unnecessary costs, many efficient open-source implementations have
been released^[lynxchan, pychan, etc.] that make the costs of
running a small-scale imageboard minimal. Further, 8chan allows
anyone to create a board and covers the cost of hosting themselves,
yet the adoption of new imageboards and frequency of Exit between
them is still extremely limited. It's clear hosting costs are not a
barrier preventing ease of Exit.

§2.3 Some Alternative Imageboards Attempts

4chon.net (2009 - 2014),
7chan.org (2005 - present),
76chan (2014 - 2017),
endchan.xyz are prominent
examples of 4chan forks that failed to achieve self-sustaining momentum.
There are many other examples:
https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/List_of_*chan_boards

https://pastebin.com/EUrfHx7n

8ch.net (2011 - present),
420chan.org (2005 - present),
lainchan.org (? - present)
are notably successful forks of 4chan.

§3.0 Realtime imageboards

The realtime imageboard innovates on the static imageboard with one
radically defining feature: posts written by the user are deployed live
into the thread as they are being typed. The original realtime
imageboards - doushio and meguca before its x update - published updates
to the post word by word as it was being typed. This meant that posts
could not be edited retroactively, even mid-sentence. Meguca rebuilt its
reimplementation on golang and in update XX, DATE, showed every letter
as it was being typed, live, allowing the whole post to be edited until
it was submitted. Meguca is the only currently developed implementation.
It has also introduced an 8chan-like infinity feature:

§3.1 History

Realtime imageboards were primarily developed and adopted by migrants
from the jp (Japanese Culture) and a (Anime) 4chan boards. Quietly
hidden, the micro-communities organized on them were happy to have found
a homely alternative to the static imageboards they had left, and
avoided publicizing the new sites for fear of the same cancerous
immigration that ruined their old homes. The communities remained small
and insular by design, enjoying a "comfy" character that was rarely
disrupted by outsider attention. It wasn't until meguca introduced the
ability for anyone to create their own board, and the subsequent
adoption by the pol userbase, described in §4.2, were realtime
imageboards first introduced beyond this specific community that
developed them. They still remain relatively unknown today.

§3.2 Chronological Survey

doushio — ?? [first realtime board]

meguca — a, 2011

chaika — tea, 20?? [unique in being time-limited]

bun — [splinter from meguca's /a/]

meguca — pol, 2016 [first outsider adoption, on politics. splinter
from 8chan's /pol/]

xlr — syn, 2019 [second outsider adoption, on cyber/occult]

§3.3 The Nature of Realtime Imageboards

The change from static to realtime posting may seem like a minor
innovation, but the deeply chaotic, self-organized nature of imageboard
communities makes them highly receptive to any adjustment to the
underlying system. As such, the nature in which the community
self-organizes on the board is radically effected in a few fundamental
ways, all of which lead to an acceleration of the inherent network
effects that have made traditional imageboards so resonant.

§3.3.1 Thread Centralization

The entirety of a realtime imageboard community finds themselves
always gathered in the same, singular "active" thread - a stark
contrast from the traditional imageboard's constant dispersal of the
community across a multitude of threads. The community collectively
migrates to a new thread when the current one becomes too large and
software begins to slow^[\~1000 posts on doushio, \~3000 on
meguca].Threads have no defined topic and are host to conversations
of all kinds.

The creation of new threads is a spontaneous and intuitive decision
made by any one in the community. Sometime the timing is too early
and migration doesn't receive enough momentum to be understood as
the new active thread, leaving the board with non-starters in its
archive; some more resourceful communities make use of the
non-starter threads when the correct time to migrate arrives as a
rule. This element of spontaneous migration can be seen as
representative of the inherent logic of imageboards: intuitive,
anonymous, self-organized democracy.
1. §3.3.1.1 Note on Time-limited Boards
  
  Despite retaining static image board's functionality to host
  many threads on a board, it's found unnecessary to realtime
  imageboards. When retained, the function instead acts as a de
  facto archive of past threads for review. However, some realtime
  boards (tea and syn) choose to perform a reductionist
  elimination of multi-thread functionality, with little apparent
  consequence to the self-organization of the community beyond an
  extension to their transiency. Interestingly, they also operate
  on an open/close schedule, where the site is only online for
  certain hours of the day (tea: Y - X UMT; sys Y -X UST). This
  forces the users to funnel into a smaller active window and
  presumably functions to make activity rates higher. It
  presumably also makes the storage costs of hosting much lower
  due to the daily purging of data.
§3.3.2 Imageboard-irc

The posts come rapidly and at an average length of one to three
lines, in contrast to traditional imageboard's average post length
of one to three paragraphs. Multiple, discreet conversations
regularly occur simultaneously without confusion. In this aspect,
the medium of conversation much more closely follows IRC than
traditional imageboards.

However, in contrast to IRC, the post length is longer than IRC's
average of less than ten
words^[http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a602658.pdf,
p 3] and the filesharing functionality is more robust, with an
emphasis on image sharing (hence the name "imageboard") that are
embedded empathetically with the text, the users are anonymous, and
the conversation is highly transient, allowing them to "post without
ego," making the nature of the conversation largely similar to
traditional imageboards. In this way, they are something a
combination of both platforms, imageboard-irc.

Realtime imageboards not only retain traditional imageboard's
fundamental emphases on anonymity and transiency but extend them as
discussed in Section §3.3.3
§3.3.3 Extension of Inherent Network Traits

Realtime imageboards greatly further the transient element of
imageboards due to the rapid rate of posting. Conversation is
centralized to a single main thread, produced in real-time, leading
posts older than a few minutes to be rarely referenced as
conversations rushes forward. Anonymity is bolstered, too, as far as
transiency benefits it: in its speed, and the attributive confusion
gained in speed. There is a sense of presence on the realtime
imageboard: that if you look away for a moment, it will irreducibly
change. Memetic artifacts are produced and consumed quickly, trends
form and die on the order of days, not weeks. The velocity of IRC
introduced to the inherent structure of imageboards leads to a clear
intensification of its culture-production: the sensation that it has
reached even closer to the heart of the network is distinct. In
every aspect the inherent network effects achieved by the
traditional imageboard, as described in §1.2 are accelerated. It
remains unclear what forms we will see the realtime imageboard
produce once mass adoption is achieved.

§3.4 Other Commentary

3.4.1 Note on Retroactive terminology

The realtime innovation has resulted in a need to coin new
terminology to describe the previous, and previously
undifferentiated, iteration. Users of realtime image boards refer to
original imageboards as traditional or static imageboards and
non-realtime posting as "static-" or "deadposting." Realtime
imageboards are sometimes referred to as liveboards, and realtime
posting as live posting. The nature of realtime posting also makes
obvious the typing speed of posters, assuredly a term to identify
and mock low WPM posters was coined: snailposter.

§3.5 Note on Antecedents

§3.5.1 Stickies**

Interestingly, the format does have two antecedents in the
traditional imageboard experience. On the rare occasion of an
unlocked (open to posting from non-staff) sticky (thread pinned to
the top of the board by staff) on a popular board, there invariably
results in a flood of users gathered in the same thread. Whereas
normal use of even a popular static imageboard would usually
experience at most, in a highly active thread, about one reply a
minute, a sticky could receive tens of replies in the same time; and
where in normal use, the community of a static imageboard would
always be entirely split among many threads (even many discussing
the same topics), a sticky would gather a high portion of the
community into a single thread — both factors producing a kind of
pseudo-realtime analogue, as is sometimes noted by new users of
realtime.
§3.5.2 Generals

The other, impartial, antecedent to realtime imageboards are in the
innovation of generals that came late in the traditional
imageboard's lifetime. Unlike realtime posting, this innovation is
not one of software but of community self-organization. Generals
first appeared on 4chan's v, the videogames board, with the
release of Pokemon Black & White in 2011. The game received such a
large, consistent and long running fanbase on the board that it
transpired that there would always be at any time an active thread
on the subject, a new one being made the moment the current one ran
out of posts. This resulted in a sub-community forming within the
on-going threads that eventually had them be dubbed as "Pokemon B&W
General" and numbered. Now, rather than spontaneous creation and
discovery of a thread discussing the game as a subject, members of
the sub-community could search for and always find their desired
general that existed as a never ending thread.

The General concept was quickly picked up by the parallel
sub-community around newly released Mass Effect 3 forming nascently
at the time and eventually began to spread to other boards. At this
point in time, generals have become the dominant form of discussion
on 4chan and despite their arrival often being heralded with serious
detraction, they are quite possibly an inevitability following
4chan's meteoric rise in users; generals can be considered the
organized form a traditional imageboard takes in the late-stage of
its lifetime. In any case, they can be seen as the predecessor to
the realtime imageboard's own single active thread format, which
could be understood as board-encompassing generals, or conversely,
as if generals themselves were each their own independent board.

§4.0 Realtime Imageboards Achieve Free Exit

Realtime imageboards, heretofore largely unknown, resolve the key
momentum problem that have kept traditional imageboards isolated to a
few major sites, and so have high potential for mass adoption in a loose
decentralized patchwork, moving closer to the inherent qualities of the
community and greatly increasing its overall resilience in the face of a
rapidly gentrifying internet.

§4.1 Low Momentum Barrier

Due to the short message length and irc-like conversation of realtime
imageboard discussion, a significantly lower online user count is
required to project the "active" state than traditional
imageboards^[Despite having a high ppd activity as noted above,
meguca/pol/ reported a unique IP count of about 30 users online at any
point in the day whereas 8chan generally reported \~200 total unique
IP's within 24 hours] — the main barrier preventing all past attempts
at Exit. Even if only two users are online and posting, the illusion of
very high activity is projected. A realtime board of no more than 5 or 6
regulars would be read as highly active throughout the day assuming
users found their schedules sufficiently aligned such that at least two
posters were engaged in conversation at all times.

Exit suddenly requires only a few like-minded individuals to perform a
quiet departure, with enough strength to cultivate a stable, long-term
base to accommodate a slowly growing population, rather than requiring
the exceedingly rare mass exodus on the order of hundreds to reach
stability. A new board can achieve sustainability with a significantly
smaller migration, and slowly accumulate new users from that point,
needing neither the size or suddenness of a traditional imageboard's
Exit.

§4.2 Low Cost

Realtime imageboards are also low-cost relative to traditional
imageboards. The lack of frequent threads, which require images on all
imageboards, and nature of IRC-like posting leads to a lower rate of
file-posting, contributing to lower bandwidth costs, and the heightened
transiency means that content stays stored for a shorter time. The
natural upper limit of a community hovering lying around 100-150 users
results in distributing the overhead between multiple hosts.

The net result is that an average size realtime imageboard can be hosted
at zero-cost within Amazon Web Service's free tier, as demonstrated in
§Appendix 4. Money is removed as a barrier to Exit.

§4.3 Exit Case-study: pol from 4chan to 8chan to Meguca

The two cases of undeniably successful, meaningful Exit to a splinter
imageboard are both tied to the same highly unique and uniquely
controversial board, pol - politically incorrect^[Originally known as
new - news, the board was removed from 4chan in January, 2011, shortly
before its 1 year anniversary, and returned later that November under
the new name, /pol/]. Notably, they were both trigged by the hostile
misbehavior by the board's administration: the apparent driving point
required for large scale migration; quality drop alone appears
insufficient.

§4.3.1 4chan -> 8chan

Originating as 4chan's political board, the admin of 4chan
temporarily destroyed the board by inviting the rest of the site to
raid it and leaving it handicapped under a series of word
filters^[7 Stages of Cuckolding], prompting its user base to
perform a mass migration^[Known by the migrants as the Great
Exodus. However, from the perspective of the users who did not
migrate, the event was known as the /pol/ocaust.] to a previously
dead board of the same name on 8chan, an independent imageboard site
that touted the ability for anyone to create a new board. The new
community thrived and it wasn't long before 8chan came to be seen
not as a temporary bunker or an underdog splinter, but a rightful
successor to their ruined home.^[Their original 4chan home board
came to be characterized as existing exclusively of foreigners from
Reddit — the second largest non-"social media" online community
after 4chan and the most common source of the latter's newcomers.
The users are known for having a distinctively uniform character and
typing style that are both bitter to the imageboard poster's palette
— and shills — the neologism for insincere posters who come to push
a certain psyop program (Psychological Operations. The CIA and NSA
have been known to target online communities for some time, though
they certainly aren't the only groups with incentive to manipulate
imageboard culture), political narrative or commercial product.]
The community enjoyed the freedom of speech and activity provided by
what was initially a hands-off moderation team, who overtime began
to increasingly intervene on the community in negative ways.
Attempts at Exit were made making use of 8chan's board creation
feature, as well as to other imageboards^[Primarily, endchan and
nextchan, which came to be seen as nothing more than "bunkers" to
congregate on in the case of 8chan downtime.] but all failed due to
low momentum.^[The most successful fork at this time was
undoubtedly polk.] Complaints over moderation lowering the
quality of discussion aside, the users remained on 8chan's pol.
§4.3.2 8chan -> Meguca

After two years of healthy activity on 8chan, the second migration
occurred following a hack on April 1st, 2016 that ruined confidence
in 8chan's management and data security^[In what became known as
the April Fool's Hack, the site was taken down for multiple days
with the homepage replaced and revealing the admin had been logging
poster IP's (despite claiming otherwise) and evidence that the IP of
a poster who made a mass shooting claim had been shared with federal
agents.] Users gathered on fall-back "bunker" boards^[Endchan, c
discussed in FN 4.2.2.3 above.] and discussed their options, many
believing the datamining unacceptable and proposed using one of the
bunkers as a new splinter.

Following a day of dispersal across multiple previously-dead boards,
a new board was announced that quickly took prominence over all
other splinters: a realtime board. The realtime imageboard site
meguca, previously host only to an a (anime) community, had
recently implemented an update that offered the ability for anyone
to create a new board to be hosted on the site: the creation and
introduction of a pol board (dubbed "megu/pol/") was the first
time the realtime board was ever introduced outside of its original
a community. The board quickly reached extreme rates of activity
with a ppd often outstripping 8chan pol even at its
height^[3000ppd average during the first year; 8chan touted
1-2000ppd before the hack; 600ppd as of Nov 2018.], and while many
users chose to remain on 8chan after it came back online - and all
the other splinters returning to death - meguca/pol/ remained the
dominant 8chan splinter two years after its founding, maintaining a
dedicated community and high activity^[2000ppd as of April 2019.].

Similar to the users who migrated from 4chan to 8chan, the users of
meguca understood themselves to be the true vestigial remains of the
original culture, carrying on the mantle of the community, and those
who remained on 8chan to be a foreign mixture of cancer and shills.
Despite the attrition that doubly accumulated being the splinter of
a splinter, the new board was a success: only possible due to the
uniquely low momentum barrier of realtime imageboards.

§5.0 Towards a Patchwork Future

Realtime imageboards extend the inherent network effects of the
traditional imageboard while dissolving their Exit barriers. In an era
where the imageboard seems to be dying in the face of manipulative,
self-limiting Web 2.0 social networks, the realtime imageboard offers a
way forward.

Other future-minded implementations^[NNTPchan, Zerochan.] have sought
to modernize imageboards by employing decentralized protocols to achieve
robustness and security from the State, but the primary barrier to a
healthy universe of online communities is ease of Exit. Imageboards fail
due to unassimilated immigration and moderation overreach, not State
threats, and contemporaneous privacy-focused solutions do nothing to
eliminate the inertial barrier to Exit, and suffer the same consequences
for it. What does robustness matter if there's no one to use it?

We envision a Web 3.0 patchwork of thriving micro-communities, networked
by webrings but independent in hosting, built fundamentally on the
principles of anonymity and transiency — diametrically opposed to Web
2.0's centralized, identity-based social networks. Realtime imageboards
are non-manipulative, easily self-hosted, founded in anonymity, and
enable a genuine market of ideas. Knowledge aggregation is a powerful
tool, producing synergistic insights more powerful than any individual
analysis; accelerating the internet towards true interconnectedness is
essential for reaping the benefits of the noosphere.

As imageboards broke through the malaise of the millennial web, showing
what true hyper-networking could achieve, realtime imageboards could
lead us to the next stage forward.

Originally posted at https://chen2.org/realtime_paper.html
Archived at https://archive.is/pntig <2022-10-15>
Archived at https://rentry.org/realtimechan <2023-09-16>
A new experiment: https://sturdychan.help/ <2024-08-02>