# Thoughts

These're some thoughts on the "imageboard" phenomenon in general.

## Anonymity Counters Vanity

In an old [document](https://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan) written in 2004, they say:

> Anonymity counters vanity.

> On a forum where registration is required, or even where people give themselves names, a clique is developed of the elite users, and posts deal as much with who you are as what you are posting. On an anonymous forum, if you can't tell who posts what, logic will overrule vanity. As Hiroyuki, the administrator of 2ch, writes:

> «If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work».

And I tend to agree.

For example, on November 5, 2022, [Telegram](https://telegram.org/) has published a new feature called "Topics": an ability to create a classic "forum" available for anyone to join and create threads on.

Later that day, I've seen an [attempt](https://t.me/abuwtf/8142) to translate an existing popular imageboard [2ch.hk](https://2ch.hk/) into such ["forum"](https://t.me/twochannel).

My initial thoughts were:
* Telegram has by far the most polished app when it comes to instant messaging.
* Telegram file hosting is fast and efficient, with very high limits.

What else does an imageboard really require these days?

A year later, I still can see people posting in that "forum" every day, but for some reason, it just didn't feel the same way a classic "imageboard" does.

What could be a reason? I think, it's because of user names and profiles and user pictures: basically, any means of adding unrelated context to the message itself.

Whenever a viewer sees a random comment on a classic "imageboard", it's just that comment's text and attachments, and nothing else discracts them.

Whenever a viewer sees a random comment with a username or a userpicture attached to it, it's no longer just that comment's content. Now it's a comment from that specific person, with all the additonal context that comes with that fact.

People are social animals, and being hyperspecialized on the social aspects was the key to the human spieces surviving through the toughest times and eventually dominating the planet. So whenever there's a social structure, every participant's behavior immediately and reflexively adapts to that structure with the aim of getting to the best position possible inside that social hierarchy.

And with that come many unconscious behavioral patterns. To name a few:
* Participants will be shy of expressing one's opinion in front of the other participants.
* Participants will be shy of doubting or criticizing other participants' views or statements.
* Participants will be bound by etiquette when sharing (or not sharing) thier own thoughts or opinions.
* Participants will start seeking social approval instead of contributing to the discussion, which leads to a bloat of ceremonial offtopic comments that come with no real "value", and that, in turn, discourages other participants from putting any effort into posting meaningful comments because their comments might get lost among the meaningless ones which could be generated without any effort, with no additonal mental cost, creating an uneven playing field.
* Participants will start forming "cliques". Social hierarchy tiers would naturally emerge. Authoritative opinion-makers would rule discussions. Communication would still be free but now within certain limits and ethical constraints, and not as ridiculously free of any restraints and without any limits as it tends to be on classic imageboards.
* In a given thread, participants, having identified each other by a username, will start forming discussion pairs and then branch off into parallel conversations that tend to derail from the main subject quickly, with the only purpose of either winning over their opponent at any cost or forming a sympathetic mutual social relationship, wastefully distracting all other participants in the process.

So I'd suggest anonymity be a cornerstone of the imageboard phenomenon, which can't really be removed without morphing the whole thing into something different.

## Content Being Erased

Erasing all of the previous content as new comments/threads are being posted is a significant issue of the classic imageboards.

Look at [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/) as an example. They're mostly a good-old imageboard, just with some additional features:
* Tree structure of the comments. I dunno about this one. Maybe it's a convenient feature. Maybe it's a point of inconvenience.
* Usernames. These don't appear to be an issue because they're unintrusive and mostly unnoticeable, and there're so many users on reddit that you mostly see random usernames in random threads anyway. A wise decision on their side was not allowing user pictures.
* History. Any thread that has ever been created is preserved and is indexable by search engines. The result is users putting more effort into filling the social network with valuable content, not being afraid that the content they've put work into will eventually be flushed away down the toilet.

So I consider Reddit a better form of a more modern imageboard.

In summary, user-generated content should be preserved.

Server costs? Yes, and as a consequence I don't really see how could an "imageboard" exist in modern age without being a for-profit company because hosting bills won't pay for themselves.

How could an imageboard be a for-profit venture? Maybe selling paid subscriptions could be an option, depending on the estimated server costs.

## Comment Reactions

Modern social networks support "reactions" on comment in the form of an "emoji".

I'd suggest leaving out that idea for imageboards because those emoji reactions are really distracting, offtopic, silly, etc.

It's extremely easy to add a variety of emoji "reactions" to a given comment, which results in a meaningless white noise of distracting emoji spam.

But, emoji reactions are very convenient to have in smaller-group discussions, say, of less than a dozen people, where participants are in a somewhat close relationship to one another and, as a consequence, where such social rituals aren't percieved as annoying or offtopic because those discussions also serve, perhaps primarily, as a means of "bonding" an already formed group.

Imageboards are different from such tight "bonding" groups the same way shorts don't fit a business meeting or the same way etiquette suggests that people shouldn't express their political views at work or have sex in a public place, etc.

## Extinction

Most of the imageboards that have ever existed have gone defunct. I could see several reasons:

* Costs
  * Hosting costs include server costs and "content delivery" costs. While one could write an extremely efficient imageboard engine that would come with next-to-nothing hosting costs, one can't get around the costs associated with "content delivery". And that's a [lot](https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/3/13155072/4chan-struggling-with-hosting-costs) of money.
* Content
  * Imageboards, due to their strong adherence to the freedom of speech principle, usually end up attracting (at least some constant amount of) "toxic" posters that end up flooding the boards with hate speech or explicit content ("NSFW"). The result is that businesses aren't attracted to the idea of advertising at such imageboards due to compliance reasons or bad PR.
  * Spam is an issue. CAPTCHA doesn't really stop the bots from spamming.
  * Imageboard culture comes with a mentality that encourages "raids" and "wipes".
  * An imageboard popular enough for haters to care could be experience regular DDoS attacks, and anti-DDoS protection costs money.
* Workarounds
  * Proper full-time moderation would resolve the issues outlined in the "Content" sub-section above, but that would imply salaries.
  * Full-time moderation would go hand-in-hand with demanding user account registration using a phone number. That would remove the "anonymity" aspect, even if just for the moderator staff, which may be frowned upon by the purists.
  * Paid access for unrestricted access, aka "premium subscription". That would affect the "anonymity" aspect because payments can be anonymous by the means of cryptocurrency.
* In summary
  * Small "enthusiast" imageboards have manageable hosting costs but are "slow" and "niche". Those can easily get "raided", "wiped", spammed or flooded with illegal content, which would effectively destroy them.
  * Large imageboards can't exist being a "enthusiast" thing and have to transform into a business venture. That makes them resilient to the hosting costs, "raids", "wipes", spamming or getting banned for the content that violates the law.

## Links

* [Nameless Rumia Wiki](https://namelessrumia.heliohost.org/w/doku.php?id=start) — A comprehensive history and overview of a lot of things related to the internet culture and particularly imageboards and such.

* [Nameless Rumia Wiki: imageboards](https://namelessrumia.heliohost.org/w/doku.php?id=imageboard) — A comprehensive list of imageboard engines with some history and a list of known imageboards.

* [WrongThink → About](https://snerx.com/wrongthink) — WrongThink is an experimental pseudo-anonymous imageboard by an author called [Odilitime](https://gitgud.io/odilitime) running on an experimental [Double Plus](https://gitgud.io/odilitime/lynxphp/) engine that claims to support many features and having 4chan-compatible "read" API and lynxchan-compatible "write" API. As of November 2023, it looks to be not very active, and page loading speed is reeeally slow. But its  "About" page is an interesting read, and that's primary why it gets mentioned here.

* [MotherFuckingWebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) — Offtopic. I just found that website hilarious. The author has been experimenting with web "brutalism" and simplistic minimal designs, promoting the idea of returning back to the roots of text-content-focused web design, criticizing the trend for bloating the web with unnecessary and unrelated content.

* [Chanlist](https://chanlist.wagecuck.club/) — A list of active imageboards, plus some introduction to the "imageboard" phenomenon in general and the history of popular imageboards.

* [imageboards.json](https://github.com/ccd0/imageboards.json) — A list of imageboards in JSON format.

* [imageboards.net](https://imageboards.net/) — A list of imageboards from `imageboards.json` in a human-readable format.

* [chan.city](https://chan.city/) — A list of imageboards from `imageboards.json` in a human-readable format.

* [The True Tropes Wiki: Image Boards](https://the-true-tropes.fandom.com/wiki/Image_Boards) — A wiki page on imageboards.

* [Dollchan list of imageboards](https://dollchan.net/chanlist/chanlist-en.html) — A list of imageboards.

* [A list of 40 imageboards](https://allchans.org/2022/03/24/top-40-most-popular-image-boards-march-2022/) — A list of imageboards.

* [Overscript](https://overscript.net/) — A list of imageboard engines. [Backup](https://github.com/tanami/overscript).