The article doesn't focus much on the 4chan aspect of the story, but I think it's interesting to realize that your only real currency on anonymous message boards is the quality and content of your post at that moment in time. In the real world, or anywhere online where you have a reputation, that reputation can give you credibility when credibility is not deserved. It also attaches an ego dynamic to everything you say, and every time you're called out. With anonymity, that's all gone. If your ideas stand, it has nothing to do with your reputation. And if you're shown to be wrong, it's much easier to change your position and adjust your worldview.
real currency on anonymous
message boards is the quality
and content of your ...
I suggest to generalise this great insight: anonymity, and the requirement that one's arguments must be valid independent from any reputation associated with the speaker, is the core essence of the scientific method. The edge case is mathematical proof: nobody would accept a mathematical theorem because it was from <famous person>. Instead it must be accompanied by a proof, a proof so detailed that everyone can verify it. Over 2000 years ago, Plato (in his Meno) use the slave boy as an example for "everyone", while today, we are even more stringent: even a machine (e.g. Isabelle/HOL, Agda, Coq, Lean), the prototypical mechanised slave, must understand a proof.
Scholarly tools like anonymous peer review, double blind reviews, double blind experiemnts, anonymous grading etc all work precisely because of anonymity.
A key mechanisim behind the positive qualities of anonymity is that the anonymous author no longer must fear punishment for the anonmous speech. The key invention here was the invention of writing, which enabled the separation (in space and time) between author and audience. This was amplified by the invention of the printing press (which amphified the audience), and later the internet.
I'm not a historian of writing, but I suggest the following hypothesis: contemporary arguments against online anonymity (e.g. leads to trolling etc) are structurally somewhat similar to (but not idential with ) historical arguments against writing and the printing press.
And indeed, this will likely always be the case, as the true purpose of proving a mathematical result is almost never to actually get the boolean true/false output, but to illustrate how to solve the problem in the first place and what methods were helpful for that.
Which means that the proof doesn't have to be machine-checkable; in fact, it'd be less effective at doing its job if it included every trivial step. It's not code. It's pseudocode; the purpose is to communicate to humans.
> And indeed, this will likely always be the case, as the true purpose of proving a mathematical result is almost never to actually get the boolean true/false output, but to illustrate how to solve the problem in the first place and what methods were helpful for that.
As a working mathematician, I wholeheartedly agree with the second part of the quoted sentence! But I think that the first part isn't quite right: The function of proofs to determine truth is extremely important, especially considering that, especially in pure mathematics, we often can't check our results in any other manner (like conducting physical experiments or checking many cases with the computer).
Bad experiences with proofs which later turned out to be faulty led Voevodsky to initiate his univalent foundations program (also called homotopy type theory), where all results should be checked by the computer. (For the particular area he was working on, no existing theorem prover turned out to be sufficient. He made a breakthrough in finding a new foundation to base theorem provers on, which made it possible to formalize results in his area of mathematics not only in principle, but also in practice.)
The hope is also that with computer-checked proofs, we can advance to new areas of mathematics which are currently inprenetable to our puny human minds. I'm very much looking forward to this future!
I think that view is rather rose-tinted, because it assumes (A) a majority of the the anonymous audience are able to independently assess its quality (B) they'll do so accurately (C) it's so easy/fast that they'll actually do it.
For every "undiscovered genius whose treatise finally gets a fair shake", there are hundreds of cranks, trolls, or attention-seekers who -- freed of reputation -- can create a hundred mutated iterations of low-quality stuff until something takes off just due to random luck. Sockpuppets are another concern, since it's easier to fabricate a consensus approval.
None of this is especially new either -- BBSes and usenet and web-forums have been around for decades.
>I think it's interesting to realize that your only real currency on anonymous message boards is the quality
Perhaps initially, but an equally effective currency is shock/bait value. And when reply counts are the only way to keep threads alive, it's often the most provocative but not necessarily highest quality threads that garner replies and snowball. In fact in the case of many boards it often leads a pool of low quality drudge as the user count increases.
It also means you get nothing for your hard work and anyone can claim your work as their own. They won't be successful if they also don't understand it, but it still muddies the waters. If you try to come forward to put your name on it, you'll find resistance and be forced to prove who you are, but that's going to require records from 4chan and maybe your ISP, which may no longer exist. I've forgotten if 4chan post hashes (to identify a unique, anonymous user) can be reasonably brute-forced to find a collision.
The standard solution to this is to include an encrypted message that says something like "The author of this document is My Name", and then publish the decryption key when you want to claim authorship.
I think it would be more accurate to say it's not exactly quality that matters, but rather the ability to get attention. On 4chan, sometimes that's through a good quality math proof, sometimes it's through a live update of you murdering someone.
