I always appreciate what moot has to say, and I think he's absolutely correct about anonymity creating a stage in which it's fine to fail publically. There's almost no judgement based on past efforts, which means that you can frequently see new ideas pop up.

This is especially true of the boards with topics, which tend to have smaller communities than the random board, allowing for more effective meme propogation. For example, a recent tweet [1] by musician Lorde ended with the words "o i am laffin" which has since become a sort of alternative to "lol" on 4chan's music board (especially when a given thread is about Lorde herself). It became a meme not because karma reinforced its popularity and not because moot or any other admin endorsed it, but because enough anonymous people thought that it was funny that they ALL want to keep posting it for no good reason.

moot mentions snapchat in the article, which I think is related in a fundamental way to what has made 4chan successful. I've had snapchat since June, and the way I use it with my friends is to share small jokes and the tiny frustrations of modern life. This is stuff that is amusing enough that I want a few people to see what I've written once, but not so funny that I think it should exist for eternity online. But it's always been more about the jokes for my friends and me than about security.

Apparently I'm not alone. When news got out about the snapchat leaks[2], many people thought that this would be a damaging blow to Snapchat. These were people who I assume don't use snapchat very frequently. To me, it never mattered that the photos leaked, because there's so much noise in the snapchats that it'd be difficult, I am thinking, to use the data maliciously. The worst thing is that the database of snapchat ids leaked, so people can spam snaps to people they don't know. But this is not a problem that is difficult to deal with.

Point is, moot is right about nobody in silicon valley really understanding the value of anonymity. While the Mr. Altman was discussing the negative face of people shedding their identity (e.g. people with bones to pick doing so anonymously in public) he didn't see the positive benefits that moot describes. Perhaps a gossip app is not the best place to see creativity blossom on the internet.

I want to relay one last anecdote from my time on 4chan:

4chan has an advice board (/adv/[3]) that is as anonymous as the rest of 4chan[4]. On this board, people ask for advice. Often it's relationship problems, even more often it's the problems of sad men who like girls but have no idea how to transition from that point to a relationship with one of them. If Mr. Altman's hypothesis that "Anonymity breads meanness"[5] were true, one would expect this board to be full of people just trolling depressed neets. While that does happen from time to time, more often than not it's full of people genuinely trying to help these people that they don't know and have never met. They expect nothing in return, but they are a fully anonymous community that just tries to help people who feel they don't have anywhere better to ask for help.

Maybe anonymity isn't so bad.

[1] https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-ph...

[3] http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ (probably NSFW)

[4] there are actually different levels of anonymity on 4chan, but, for the most part, everybody is more or less completely anonymous with each post.

[5] http://blog.samaltman.com/anonymity