/b/ 4chan: Evil Anime Lovers?

What? You never heard of 4chan? Don't ever admit that, or you'll be smitten by the /b/'s thunderous hammer! Huh? You're clueless of what I've just wrote? So let me enlighten you...

4chan is an image board website. Yep, just that. It started in 2003 by the infamous "moot" and was primarily used for people to post images of anime and manga and discuss things related to it - actually it mimicked a famous Japanese image board site (2chan from Futaba Channel).

Composed of image and message boards, 4chan soon included not only things related to Japanese Culture, but also several other boards where all the possible topics that can interest a geek are talked (or most of the time joked) about: from hentai, to the new geekiest toy, technology hype news, hobbies, games, travel, torrents, you name it, there's something on 4chan about it.

But the most famous board of 4chan isn't related to anything... Hmm, or you could say it's related to EVERYHING. It's just a point of view. It's the devilish RaNdOm BoArD! Here you'll find a bit of everything: a bit of useful things, lots of trivia, numerous rumours and misinformation, gags, hacking and even evidences of web terrorism attacks...

Yes, the /b/ board is that big! Also, 4chan has a feature that makes it stand out from regular boards - and scare the s*** out of me. People don't need to register. Everyone can be anonymous. And I mean literally anonymous. You won't be anonymous56820204 because 56820203 people before you already went that rout. You can post as anonymous always. So how we know who's who? That's right... we don't!

4chan isn't completely bad. You'll find in the middle of all the thousands of trash posts some real jewels: useful information; links to a nice website where you can investigate further your topic of interest; cool trivia; or simply images that will make you laugh a lot.

You'll also find a lot of pirate links to anime and games, lots of manga scanlations, guides to be a super hacker etcetera etcetera if you dig that kind of stuff.

Another positive (ahemm) aspect of 4chan: It's a place where you can be whoever you want and aggravate whoever you like. So if you feel rebellious in a particular day just go to /b/ and be an a**hole. No one will stop you for sure and many more dumb f**** will join your a**holing. So we can say 4chan provides for a liberating experience <_<'

Ohwee, where to start?

Well, apart from illegal programs, images,movies that it links to - which, in itself isn't that bad, because, lets face it, everybody everywhere does it - 4chan real evil lies in the anonymity status that provides to it's users.

Yes, the evil of 4chan is 4chans's Anonymous. The evil lies in people... as always... Called by many cute names as 'hackers on steroids', 'Internet hate machine' or 'domestic terrorists', the global entity of Anonymous is the real devil. A devil that loves anime, manga, and a whole lot of geeky things. And also, that loves to be a jerk... just because he/she can!

As a side note, I've been reading recently the book SuperFreakonomics. Chapter 3 talked about a topic that caught my eye... Altruism and it's natural presence (or absence) in the average person. It depicts a lot of interesting economical studies that for several years made scientists think that there was a mankind had a warm and giving nature in it's core. Then it came another economist that took the same lab experience that was used to 'prove' this - and giving it's authors a Nobel prize - tweaked them a bit and managed to turn the same charitable human beings of the experiments into heartless jerks.

And know why? Because they we're given the option to be jerks and also (and very important) they didn't felt observed while doing it!

It's exactly the same with 4chan and particularly it's /b/ random section. By providing an invisible (notice how this word is similar to invincible) power to the users, 4chan makes they're already rotten core stand out and do the most outrageous things...just because they can!

This includes:

• Massive prank calls and DDos (denial of service attacks) to radio shows / websites, that eventually makes those services stop work and, on top of that, cost thousand of dollars in expenses - this happened to Hal Turner;
• Making the Suastica (yep, Nazi's symbol) stand on top of Google Hot trends list for several hour;
• Intercept, illegally access Sarah Pallin's mail and disclose private info, like mails of the vice-presidential candidate and even the password of said account;
• Starting false rumours of Steve Jobs, Apple main CEO, dying of an heart attack, which influenced, among other things, Apple stock prices;
• Launching en mass (and I mean thousands of thousands!) pornographic videos to YouTube in a single day, disguising them as Hanna Montana and other kids favorite stars videos, deliberately trying to make children stumble upon it.
• Use 4chan /b/ to share threat messages, including terrorist bombing; homemade videos of violence - including abuse of domestic pets; using 4chan to warn and gloat about mayhem events, like school mass murder shootouts.

^{More details at 4chan's wikipedia entry.}

Neither! 4chan is just a website. But it provides the appropriate setting and tools to anime lover geeks, technology lover geeks, Internet lover geeks, alas, all the kind of English-speaking geeks that exists on the World Wide Web to be, not only, geeks, but also dumba** jerks!

4chan extremists have become the modern terrorists, only worst. Because normal terrorists support a cause - normally political or religious - that can be arguably wrong, but at least it's well defined. 4chan /b/ jerks are terrorist without a cause. It's just because they can. They're a kind of anarchists. And that, my anime friends, is the worst kind of fool.

It's actually a risk for me to be writing this. Someone of 4can can read it and then entice a whole atack on hubpages and myself. They can try to shut me down. Just because they can... and also because I called them jerks ^_^'

Something like 4chan /b/ is one of the worst threat to people like me, that show my face and identity on the web. How can you protect against someone you don't know? But I'm really don't care. My name is Ricardo Silva, I'm from Portugal. And I'm not afraid of these /b/ jerks, no matter how cruel and evil they might be. I pity them. Because they can actually attack me and do me harm, but life is so much large than a stupid website or webpages. Or even money.

Life is living peacufully with everyone else in a real world, not making fun of them online. And trying to find good in the small things. Cruelty and borderline stupidity is just another step into the hell of the soul. And I'm not a religious person, btw :)

Stop being evil 4chan users! You can still be unique and witty. But learn where to draw the line... Because somethings you did/do actually hurt people. And that's not cool!