>>339528103
So it's been over two years since 4chan was censured for allowing anyone to do anything with the site. And all that time, the anonymity-minded have been lurking around online, in various forms and iterations.

Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the original reason for the online anonymity -- as the early internet users wanted to operate as widely separated, disparate "cyberspaces" rather than as one unifying public forum.

A critical problem that arose, though, was people behaving like jerks online. The usual modes of social control -- the common sense and logic that surround any social setting -- couldn't apply.

That's why we have private groups in real life: Because of the stuff that happens in public.

Anonymous -- and every other kind of "identity-free" pseudonym -- was designed for one of two reasons: 1) to prevent people from causing trouble online; or 2) to change the behavior of people to create a better experience for the rest of us.