Crash Course: What Is 4Chan?

In light of the recent story of the two Florida teens than set a threatened gopher tortoise on fire, 4Chan's /b/ finds itself again in the headlines. In the extremely graphic video the girls can be seen attempting to set the tortoise on fire multiple times before smashing it on the ground and ultimately killed the tortoise by stomping on it. /b/ users took matters into their own hands and doxed(released private information) about the two teenagers.

This is far from the first time that /b/ has come to the aid of an abused animal but before you think of joining the community due to what you perceive to be a common interest in the well being of animals, I will try to clear up some common misconceptions about 4Chan.

All of 4chan is /b/: 4Chan itself is a user submitted imageboard whereas /b/ is 4Chan's random board, other popular boards are the fitness based board /fit/ and the gif/webm based board /gif/ among others.

/b/ is evil: Just like most online communities you are going to find good and bad about people on /b/, one of the best things you can do is per their own advice "lurk moar(more)". Currently on the /b/ catalog are a variety of "rate me" threads, "YLYL(you laugh you lose)" threads, race bait and general opinion threads, also included is a thread that states "4Chan will automatically XXXX your credit card number if you input it with you expiration date" and as far as I can tell nobody actually fell for it. Take the old saying "if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all" and abridge it for /b/ as "don't say anything at all.

/b/ is the hacker group Anonymous: No, just...no. 4Chan users post under the name Anonymous with varying ID's and may have a history with the group, but few users of 4Chan are members of Anonymous and if somebody tells you that they are, they are full of shit.

Tits or GTFO: One of the most widely accepted rules, if you are asking the community for help then you should be prepared to offer tits. Most of the time offering tits will go a long way towards getting help from the community but there have been a handful of times that it has backfired, if you are going to offer your own tits then you should make sure that you remove identifying information from the picture. When you take a cell phone picture, information such as the location in which the photo was taken is stored, the information is easy to find and even easier to remove, try making a copy of the photo with removed information or just upload the photo to Imgur.

I could keep going on about 4Chan but maybe you should just check it out for yourself, you will not need any additional software nor will you need a new antivirus. Be forewarned that even more so than on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter I have wasted hours of time checking the different boards, also if you see a thread that looks too good to be true then you may want to save from it early before it 404's.