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Abstract

We suggest that the theory of group styles, based on the pragmatist idea of people creatively using cultural tools for meaning-making, can be a fruitful way forward to study the cultures of anonymous online communities such as imageboards. We argue that users creatively build these ‘glocal’ cultures on affordances but also globally disseminated cultural toolkits of, in this case, imageboards. We present such an empirical analysis of Ylilauta, a Finnish-language imageboard with important similarities but also differences to previously studied English-language imageboards such as 4chan. Users of Ylilauta construct strong social boundaries, bonds and speech norms, unofficial rules of conduct and belonging in the anonymous online culture. They resist commercialization of their culture and try to preserve its perceived originality.

Keywords

4chan affordances anonymity group style imageboard imageboard culture online ethnography platform vernaculars Ylilauta

Introduction

Online anonymous communities are often conceptualized in terms of affordances (e.g. Deseriis, 2021; Gehl, 2016: 1226–1227; Gibbs et al., 2015; Maltby et al., 2018; Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2223), focusing on what kind of action technologies afford, that is, what kind of action possibilities do they offer. This article goes beyond this approach by using the pragmatist theory of group styles (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003) to bring culture and agency into the affordance-based literature. We argue that interaction culture, operationalized as group style, can be understood as the bridge between affordances, such as anonymity and online cultures. This theoretical contribution enables an empirical analysis of how local imageboard culture is negotiated by the users themselves utilizing affordances and broader culture from the context of globally acknowledged imageboards such as 4chan.

We consider culture in terms of cultural sociology (e.g. Silber, 2003) as the context in which repetitively patterned forms of common understandings and ways of doing can be intelligibly described and negotiated (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003; Swidler, 1986). Importantly, rather than broad collective representations, we understand culture as habitual ‘toolkits’ (Swidler, 1986) formed in continuous interaction that actors use to make sense of what is happening and to interact. This pragmatist view emphasizes agency in culture and helps go beyond affordances by understanding how both affordances and global cultural elements are creatively used and negotiated by actors in cultural interaction. Creativity of action is a central idea in pragmatist cultural sociology; rather than actors passively internalizing culture and then acting in accordance with it, they creatively use culture to understand themselves and their social surroundings and to act in a social context in a meaningful way, creating socially shared habits in the process of repeated interaction, habits that eventually solidify into culture (Joas, 1996; Swidler, 1986).

This pragmatist view of culture, we argue, is very compatible with the so-called relational view of affordances (Evans et al., 2017), in which affordances are distinguished from mere technical features. In both, agency is in focus, as actors creatively use the tools at their disposal, technical and cultural. An example of such an affordance is anonymity (Evans et al., 2017: 41): technical features of a forum may include the option to post without identifying oneself, as imageboards do; however, anonymous culture is much more than mere technical anonymity. We argue that users use both the affordances of anonymity and broader cultural tools of anonymous online culture in creatively performing and recreating imageboard culture.

Discussing a pseudonymous forum, Maltby et al. (2018: 1778) suggest that a potential of dissociation from one’s personal traits is ‘endemic to the affordances of pseudonymity’. We align ourselves with this observation but take it further: it is not just that socio-technical conditions such as anonymity afford particular kinds of action, but over time, through interaction that is first patterned by affordances, platforms develop particular cultures that are collectively negotiated on the platform in question, which in turn again enables particular styles of action, perpetuating the culture of the platform. In other words, socio-technical affordances act through and are intertwined with culture. Affordances, like anonymity on imageboards, we suggest, provide a framework for possible ways of action for users based on which styles of interaction are created through repeated cultural negotiation.

We ethnographically study the cultural patterns in interaction on Ylilauta, a Finnish-language anonymous imageboard. We operationalize these cultural patterns in interaction as negotiations on group boundaries, bonds and norms of speech, employing Eliasoph and Lichterman’s (2003) pragmatist theory of group style. We argue that Ylilauta’s culture is created upon affordances, but also by users creatively using the so-called cultural toolkit (Swidler, 1986) of global imageboards and applying it in a Finnish context by adapting and translating – localizing – contents of discussions and ways of action from other imageboards. Global imageboard culture has been created on 4chan and its predecessors’ affordances and cultures, highlighting how affordances and culture intertwine in the context of anonymous imageboards. Our analytical focus is on the ways users creatively use and negotiate on this culture created and maintained on Ylilauta.

Affordances of anonymous imageboards

Marco Deseriis (2015: 165–212) suggests that Anonymous, with capital ‘A’, can be seen as a collective pseudonym by which anonymous people can have the common experience of being part of an anonymous community and culture. David Auerbach (2012) considers imageboard culture as one of the ‘A-cultures’ that are anonymous, ephemeral, share collective stigma and most often, normatively offensive and contingent contents (see also Bernstein et al., 2011; Knuttila, 2011; Sparby, 2017). Lee Knuttila (2011) describes the culture of 4chan revolving ‘around the idea of anonymity and anonymous speech’. That is to say, anonymity is widely considered to be one of the cornerstones of imageboard culture. Another common observation about imageboard culture is its elitism, with members using cultural knowledge as discursive weapons against users who might not be aware of specific ‘culturally important’ happenings, lingo, memes and so on (Auerbach, 2012; Deseriis, 2015; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; Sparby, 2017; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020).

Online anonymity is often viewed normatively: it is discussed through its ‘merits and dangers’, or ‘allegedly good and bad aspects’ (Bachmann et al., 2017: 255; also Ewerhart, 2024: 2). In addition to privacy, anonymity provides radical freedom of speech (Gehl, 2016), and this withstanding, enables online harassment, potentially affecting the quality of public discourse negatively. Nonetheless, most online discussions in anonymous spaces such as imageboards are not that radical, political or hateful, nor do they by default deal with sensitive personal issues demanding privacy, so there must be more to anonymous online culture than merely what anonymity functionally provides (see e.g. Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020).

De Zeeuw and Tuters (2020) argue that anonymity, ephemerality and contingency as 4chan’s affordances offer ground for ‘mask culture’ to form as an alternative to individualistic ‘face culture’ of mainstream social media. Anonymity on 4chan makes it possible to blur the line between individual users, while ephemerality of short-lived individual threads and their contents lead to the contents that survive and are repeatedly becoming a ‘part of a collectively rather than individually narrated history, in the visual repertoire of memes and discursive tropes’ (De Zeeuw and Tuters, 2020: 217). Contingency, in turn, refers to ‘the fact that every time a user refreshes a page’ (De Zeeuw and Tuters 2020: 217), ‘new arrangements of the random images and comments emerge’ (Knuttila, 2011). These together make possible repetitive use of the contents and collectively narrated history which contribute the creation and maintaining of the established ‘culture of creativity and temporality’ in imageboards like 4chan (Knuttila, 2011). These repetitive contents and collectively narrated history ‘act as a locus of a memory’ for the users by creating consistent recollection of cultural material (Coleman, 2009, cited in Knuttila, 2011).

The obscure and ‘abnormal’ language of imageboards, easily considered all mere hate speech from the outside, often directs attention away from examining the meanings these speech acts carry for the collective (cf. Ewerhart, 2024: 2). For example, the impossibility of knowing for sure whether a message is ‘ironic’ or ‘sincere’ has led to claims such as ‘[o]nline, if something appears to signal bigotry, it’s bigotry. Because that is, quite literally, the message being communicated’ (Phillips and Milner, 2017: 198). We are less interested in whether the content we study is hate speech or not – to be clear, some of it clearly is, although in our analysis we remain agnostic on this. What we attempt is to go beyond that observation, to interpret the cultural meanings given by the participants using this kind of language as part of their common style. It is through the negotiations about the group’s style as group boundaries, bonds and norms of speech – including speech considered hate speech – that we detect a patterned cultural style in interaction between the users of Ylilauta (see Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003; also Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020), an interaction style that creates a sense of belonging that is meaningful for its participants.

Gibbs and others (2015) argue that affordances such as anonymity guide the formation of so-called ‘platform vernaculars’. They are the unique combinations of styles, grammars and logics for platforms and provide the ‘particular modes of expression and interaction’ (Gibbs et al., 2015: 257) for the users of the platform in question and require to be appropriated and performed coherently in practice. Tuters and Hagen (2020) highlight ‘vernacular fluency’ as users’ ability to ‘demonstrate and negotiate in-group belonging[s]’ fluently for others who are otherwise total strangers. We argue that these platform vernaculars are defined not just by affordances but also by collective implicit and explicit negotiations on the platform and its culture by the users, negotiations in which users use affordances but also global cultural influences in creating ‘glocal’ forms of cultures. This can be operationalized as negotiating boundaries, bonds and speech norms of the group (cf. Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). We argue that culture in interaction, conceptualized as group styles, is the missing link in understanding how affordances shape platform cultures: people first act as they can, using the affordances provided, and this action creates, together with direct feedback by others, the basis for habituation through repetition, creating patterns others can recognize as shared culture, further solidifying the patterns as repeating aspects of coherent action.

Group style

Research has noted the perpetual negotiations and maintenance of ways of belonging and acting by users of anonymous imageboards. Culture can be considered as the way users negotiate or maintain, first, bonds between them by way of appreciating other users and content made by them (e.g. Ewerhart, 2024; Hagen, 2023; Schonig, 2020; Tuters and Hagen, 2020), boundaries between them and others (e.g. Graham, 2019; Hagen, 2023, 2024; Milner, 2017: 105; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; cf. also Gal, 2019) and finally, speech norms of their group by labelling and defining what is ‘right’ kind of interaction in the context (e.g. Ewerhart, 2024; Hagen, 2023, 2024; Ludemann, 2023; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; cf. also Gibbs et al., 2015). We argue that the group styles framework (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003) can connect these findings.

Group style is the ‘recurrent patterns of interaction that arise from a group’s shared assumptions about what constitutes good or adequate participation’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 737). The framework focuses on the bonds, boundaries and speech norms of a group, analysing the ways in which people use and understand collective representations (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 739). Group styles base on a pragmatist–cognitive approach to interaction, and the use of collective representations in making meanings (see Luhtakallio, 2012). This pragmatist understanding of culture emphasizes agency: culture is not just representations internalized by individuals, but repeating, habitual, patterned interaction which actors actively utilize to act and make sense of action (Swidler, 1986). This is highlighted by Ylilauta users’ creative ways of utilizing affordances as well as global imageboard culture, creating culture with similarities and differences to, for example, 4chan.

The group style approach studies group cultures by observing the negotiation processes in which the group members collectively engage in the interaction context. The three dimensions: group bonds, group boundaries and speech norms, are helpful in dissecting different elements of the said negotiations. First, bonds relate to ‘assumptions about what members’ mutual responsibilities should be’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 739), and thus the constitutive principles of the group. Boundaries, second, concern the group’s relationship with the world, that is, with ‘the others’, and the members’ assumptions about what this relationship should be like: ‘a group’s shared understandings of its relations to the wider world’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 740, footnote 6). Third, speech norms reflect the understanding a group produces about ‘what appropriate speech is in the group context’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 739). Analysing speech norms addresses, for instance, how members define the goals of interaction in the group, what would be a mistake or a wrong approach in the group context and how the members describe events in the group (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 786). These dimensions are negotiated collectively by group members, implicitly searching for answers to questions of what is ‘our culture’ and how it differs from ‘other cultures’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003; see also Luhtakallio, 2019; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020).

Group styles help clarify the recurrent patterns of interaction arising from the members’ shared assumptions on adequate and good, but also inadequate participation in a specific scene in the context of the culture. The approach has been used in numerous studies of patterned culture in activist groups and, increasingly, online groups (Carlsen et al., 2021; Eliasoph and Clément, 2020; Lichterman, 2012; Luhtakallio, 2019; Schwarz and Shani, 2016; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020; Yukich et al., 2020).

Empirical set-up

We study the Finnish-language anonymous imageboard Ylilauta, which shares many features – such as visual appearance, anonymity and lingo – with other imageboards, like 4chan. Although due to Ylilauta’s (2024) anonymous nature we do not know much about its users, it claims to have nearly 2 million monthly users. Already in 2017, survey results showed that about a quarter of young Finns (15–25) have used it, and that the userbase is mostly men (Ylä-Anttila and Eranti, 2024). Ylilauta’s contents show that at least some users also use English-language imageboards such as 4chan, and import cultural features from them, whereas cultural features such as memes from Ylilauta, in turn, often ‘spill over’ to mainstream culture. In Finland, Ylilauta – like 4chan globally – appears to be the platform producing the most hate speech (Kettunen and Paukkeri, 2021: 28). In mainstream media, Ylilauta is mostly mentioned in the context of legal and criminal investigation cases, often related to defamations and threats of violence made on or related to Ylilauta (Yle, 2021, 2024). Ylilauta’s cultural impact seems to be locally parallel with 4chan’s globally remarkable influence (cf. Hagen, 2024: 1738; Hagen and de Zeeuw, 2023: 4). There are over 50 thematic sub-boards, for example, fitness, education and sexuality. The ‘mainboard’ is called satunnainen (lit. Random) and has most users with approximately 65,000 unique daily visitors (Ylilauta, 2024). Participating in Ylilauta requires no sign-up. Every user is primarily anonymous, although Ylilauta offers the possibility to use a unique nickname, which is, however, rarely utilized by users.

The main method of this article is online ethnography (e.g. Coleman, 2010; Hine, 2015; Postill and Pink, 2012). The ethnographical method enables to observe and analyse meanings of cultures defined by themselves (e.g. Burawoy, 1991; Geertz, 1973). Our ethnography is participant observation (e.g. Burawoy, 1991), which enables ‘thicker description’ (see Geertz, 1973) than non-participant observation as a ‘lurker’ (cf. Vainikka, 2020), often used in ethnography on Internet cultures (e.g. Firer-Blaess, 2016: 87; Phillips, 2015).

In addition to just ‘plain’ participating, especially for understanding the constantly varying network of meanings, John Postill and Sarah Pink (2012: 128) suggest that living the everyday life of social media users by also exploring same sites as them, catching up on cultural changes and maybe, most importantly, making it one’s routine. The observer should also be familiar with the historical process that has formed the online culture as it appears now (cf. Kozinets, 2015: 107, 123). Ethnography in this sense is more like being and doing the research in the constantly evolving culture rather than on a stable and solidified culture.

To grasp the level of being in the culture the same way the participants are, we used the ethnographical method of a constructed week, developed by the first author, based on a minimum total of 24 hours of participant observation, so that material is gathered for all hours of the day instead of just during daytime, for example. The 24 hours are divided onto 5 days of consecutive weeks for achieving the daily and weekly variety of discussions. In practice, we have conducted hundreds of hours of participant observation, as ethnography was conducted on Ylilauta between June and October 2019, as well as from January 2022 to June 2023, with varying intensity.

The material, which includes cited discussions and a fieldwork diary, was analysed abductively by focusing on the conversation between things arising from the empirical data, and from previous literature and theoretical framework (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012; see also Burawoy, 1991: 5). From an ethical perspective, we did not use any quotes that might reveal identifiable information about users. The rules of Ylilauta (2023b) allow using its discussions as material for academic research.

Because of the ‘messiness’ of discussions on Ylilauta, we have made some simplifications in quotations for readers’ sake. All post-ID numbers are pseudonymized; we use IDs #1, #2, #3 and so on, to denote different users in each discussion thread.

Double greater-than signs (>>) are used to reply to a particular message. The example below portrays post-ID replies to an imagined original poster, OP:

>>OP

You are anonymous and still you tell your name

In some quotations, we are also show ‘upvotes’ to present how other users have reacted non-verbally to the post. Upvotes show agreement for a post. Later, the platform administration also added a downvote feature.

The simple greater-than sign (>) is used for quoting other posts or actions. This is called green texting (cf. Ludemann, 2023: 2732) and is often done to compress the textual content, as shown below:

#1 [5 upvotes, 0 downvotes]

>>OP

>be anonymous

and still you tell your name

The simple lesser-than sign (<) is mostly used for answering the poster’s own greentext or pointing out a controversy in a quotation:

#1 [5 upvotes, 0 downvotes]

>>OP

>be anonymous

<tell your name

However, some users may deviate from these common practices and therefore we use the signs that original quotations use. Messages are translated from Finnish by the first author in a way that aims to retain the imageboard lingo as much as possible.

Imageboard culture as patterned interaction

During the fieldwork, repetitive patterns of ways of being on Ylilauta became clear, and the ways of interaction and negotiation specific for the group style of Ylilauta began to seem like coherent ways of participation (cf. Jenkins et al., 2006; Sparby, 2017). The inherent meanings were covered by the culturally meaningful mess: memes, vocabularies, ways to interact and so on. What was certain, however, was that the users had some sort of common understanding of the culture they shared. The shared culture was mostly implicit, appearing through memes and other patterned expressions, but also became visible whenever someone was spotted as acting improperly. In these cases, the wrongdoer got to hear about their errors and they were made aware of the collectively valued cultural coherence by for example, getting called a newbie, showing them they were unable to speak in equal terms with more experienced users. This kind of subcultural knowledge and gatekeeping practices (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017) could also be seen through the concept of vernacular fluency (Tuters and Hagen, 2020). As such, there are two sets of ‘rules’ on Ylilauta: the explicit rules enforced by the administrators, who will delete illegal posts, and the implicit, cultural rules enforced by users themselves via social cues. The latter are the focus of our interest here. Paradoxically, in a community that prides itself on absolute freedom of speech, users in fact strictly police acceptable speech, although it is defined very differently from the mainstream.

Whenever bonds, boundaries and speech norms were addressed explicitly, this usually happened as memetic one-liners directed at wrongdoers rather than longer negotiations. These one-liners can also be described as discursive and rhetorical weapons, repetitive ways of using memetic images and text for invalidating wrongly stated messages (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; Sparby, 2017). But even some meta-level discussions of what and how Ylilauta and its culture actually are, and what and how they should be, did take place.

The way users explicitly negotiated the group style, culture and the ‘We’, were moral. The explicit negotiations were discussions on good and bad, right and wrong ways of participating. They were also about the image of the platform; how the culture should be seen and understood from the outside.

Bonds: anons interacting with anons

Bonds are collectively shared ideas of how the members of the group are related to each other and what kind of common obligations they have (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003: 739). During the fieldwork on Ylilauta, it repeatedly occurred that users had seemingly nothing in common. Anything debatable was debated, often furiously. However, we did find three distinct bonds on Ylilauta: a shared sense of humour, the self-identification label ‘nyymi’ (anon) and using boundaries and speech norms as bonds.

For plenty of the users, edgy and offensive, absurd, ‘random’ content is at the heart of genuine imageboard culture, like in the discussion below about a photo the OP posted of (supposedly) themselves with herrings covered in human faeces:

>>OP

>ehehe I play with fishes at bathroom

<epic, great, awesome! Regards, retarted anons

Be ashamed

>>1

>arrive on frog forum [ironic reference to meme character Pepe the Frog]

>get offended when witnessing genuine imageboard culture

You just humiliated yourself.

(7 July 2019)

According to these users, everyone should accept the collective, yet implicit, ‘terms of use’, and to understand the cultural environment of Ylilauta, not get offended by it, but instead enjoy the absurd. These are bonds that are built on a similar sense of humour. This kind of patterned interaction is also about bonding with those who understand what is trolling and irony, bonding with those who ‘get the hook but don’t fall in bait’. These citations also highlight that so-called ‘original content’ is highly appreciated in imageboard culture. This can be understood by recalling contingency as one of the imageboard affordances identified by De Zeeuw and Tuters (2020). Original content is needed to make the milieu contingent.

Whereas on 4chan users call each other anon(s) (Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2220; Ewerhart, 2024: 3), on Ylilauta the corresponding Finnish word is nyymi (from anonyymi, anonymous; anon from here on for the sake of clarity). This concept may be the clearest indicator of group bonds on Ylilauta and refer to the collective pseudonym ‘Anonymous’ (Deseriis, 2015), an affordance of imageboard culture. Users appear to other users not as a monolith of anons, but as a collective of them both calling themselves but also other users as anons:

[A doctor specializing in cancer] is probably doing the same thing at Ylilauta as the rest of us older anons. We are slaves to our habits.

(4 July 2019)

However, anon does not always signify acceptance or a feeling of likeness, rather simply people who use the same platform to discuss (cf. Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2220; Ewerhart, 2024: 3). At times, the other anons seem to be just a necessary evil: people with whom one has to try to coexist and who might make it difficult to discuss on anything (cf. Ewerhart, 2024):

#OP [60 upvotes]

Is there anyone else who is annoyed by the fact that Ylilauta nowadays seems to be full of just other users’ dissing, ‘serving’ and using witty one-liners. It’s not funny when at least 20 anons rush to every thread, without reading the whole thread of course, to comment their own ‘you’re fucking stupid and this thing is fucked up’ opinion and continue their journey to the next thread.

(27 June 2019)

Bonding in this sense is also about the knowledge of right ways to post and discuss, but also to experience temporality through the affordance of contingency on Ylilauta (e.g. Hagen, 2024; Knuttila, 2011; Ludemann, 2023; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; cf. also Schonig, 2020: 42). Anons are the (bonded) ones who share the common sense of being right in the context of Ylilauta. Indeed, bonding also becomes visible when the discussion turns to wrongdoers who don’t interact properly (cf. Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017: 489). On Ylilauta, boundaries and the shared responsibility for boundary-work are in fact the most typical bonds and inalienably connected to speech norms as well. Using boundaries and speech norms as bonds is our third category of bonds, which we turn to now.

Inside the previously presented category of anons, there are nominations for both the ‘newcomers’ and ‘oldies’, uushomot and vanhahomot, which are literal translations from the English newfags and oldfags used in 4chan (cf. Ewerhart, 2024: 14; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). In Ylilauta, newfag is most often used of those who participate in the interaction, but their participation and presence are carried out (a bit) wrong. Newfags’ existence is valid, but their way of being on Ylilauta needs cultivation. Oldfag, in contrast, is used mainly in a positive sense, as a valid and culturally capable member of the group.

When normies are mostly deemed ‘lost cases’, newfags have the right attitude and some potential to become valid members of the group. They just have to, like often mentioned in Ylilauta, ‘lurk more’ [lit. translated as lurkkaa lisää in Finnish] (cf. Hagen and Venturini, 2023: 447; Ludemann, 2023: 9), which is adopted from 4chan to describe the expectation of learning to participate coherently by only reading the discussions until the new user understands what it is to be anon, and thereon gets their communication right. As a phrase, it is, like much of imageboard lingo, translated literally from its English origins (Hagen and Venturini, 2023: 447; Ludemann, 2023: 9). However, new users are often considered to not lurk enough and not understanding the ironic level of discussions, therefore ruining the culture of Ylilauta:

In the present days, no one is lurking months anymore, the threshold for participating imageboard culture is lower and more and more young children find the board. When you grow up your adolescence under the influence of the Ylilauta, the forced memes remain in the head, like you can see from this cringe base of the Finns party youth.

(18 July 2019)

Nevertheless, the amount of lurking needed before being able to get rid of the newfag stamp is unclear and often under negotiation:

#1 [75 upvotes, 87 downvotes]

newfag should anyway lurk minimum 5 years before posting in /b/

#2 [1 upvote, 4 downvotes]

>>1

Not true. Regards 2 years of lurking

>>2

you break the etiquette

(5 March 2022)

Talk about ‘lurking’, adapted from 4chan, is used as a cultural tool: to justify the importance of participating to become a valid member in the eyes of the others. Cultural and historical knowledge is highly valued by older users (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017), which is related to the elitism of imageboard cultures (Auerbach, 2012; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017).

In sum, users of Ylilauta find bonds in shared sense of absurd humour, the collective noun ‘anon’, and creatively using boundaries and speech norms as bonds. These are linked with imageboard affordances such as contingency and the shared pseudonym Anonymous. Next, we turn to inspect boundaries more closely.

Boundaries: drawing lines between imageboards and ‘places for normies’

Boundaries refer to the negotiated limits between the experienced culture and its outside (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003). Most importantly, boundaries seem to arise from the question of what Ylilauta is (and what it is not). These negotiations often nostalgically refer to the past and unwanted changes of the customary state of affairs, revealing what is seen as important. Users negotiated on two main problems regarding changes on the platform: mainstreaming (cf. Hagen and Venturini, 2023: 470; Phillips, 2015; Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2221–2223) and monetization (cf. Hagen, 2023). In addition, we discuss the constitutive bounded out-category of ‘normies’.

Mainstreaming refers particularly to experienced change in ways of talking and thinking on the platform, in which stigmatized and underground interests discussed have allegedly been replaced by more ‘normative’ themes and humour (on origins of imageboards see Auerbach, 2012; also De Zeeuw and Tuters, 2020). Mainstreaming is often referred to in a context where the discussion is about proper topics of posting (cf. Phillips, 2015). Users often seem upset about new, ‘more normie’ users who invade Ylilauta and ‘ruin’ Ylilauta with their too sincere orientation to discussions, in comparison to imageboards’ established stance on irony (cf. Ludemann, 2023: 2740; Phillips, 2015). De Zeeuw et al. (2020) have coined the term ‘normiefication’ for describing the mainstreaming of material from online subcultures (cf. Hagen and Venturini, 2023: 470). Moreover, normiefication can also result in the mainstreaming of the platform where the material is from, in this case Ylilauta:

[The polarisation of Ylilauta is] because of the popularity of Ylilauta. [. . .] The only way to fix this situation is to ruin the user interface/-experience which will cause them to get out. So, paradoxacilly the shitness of the board is caused by that the board is not shit enough

(18 July 2019)

Users like the one quoted consider Ylilauta too accessible and user-friendly for new users. They explicitly comment on the affordances of Ylilauta; they wish for the user interface to be as ‘shit’ as possible, essentially to guard the boundaries of the community. Also, more recent technical features associated with other discussion platforms – for example, up- and downvotes (allegedly) from Reddit – are shunned especially by older users:

#1 [370 upvotes, 27 downvotes]

>>OP

What if we would just get rid of downvotes and maybe also upvotes? We would get back to the roots of imageboards

#2 [3 upvotes, 6 downvotes]

>M-MUH UPVOTES! A-AND DOWNVOTES!

[. . .] I often forgot the existence of that reddit-tier cancer feature, and I don’t even know how those votepoints work[. . .]

(14 June 2023)

Up- and downvotes are considered to lead to excessively simple ways of interacting and communicating, distancing discussions from purely image- and text-driven ways to discuss afforded by the original imageboard features, away from a remembered, ‘pure’ imageboard interaction and culture. The reasonings of how Ylilauta should be explicitly an imageboard, a discussion platform with a simple layout and focusing only on discussion, are often repeated. The pure imageboard experience is often linked in imageboards’ ‘original’ technical features and affordances. Any technical features that ‘break the original imageboard experience’ are opposed. The hate towards Reddit and especially its platform vernaculars is also present on 4chan almost word-by-word in the same form as on Ylilauta, such as ‘Reddit-spacing’ (e.g. Hagen, 2023; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017: 493). This kind of ‘boundary policing’ (Hagen, 2023) seems to be transferred and adopted almost unchanged from 4chan onto Ylilauta.

Second, we saw vehement criticism of monetization, referring to the increasing mass of (mainly online casino, electronic cigarette, nicotine pouch and Finns Party campaign) advertisements and additional paid features for removing advertisements, accessing the sub-board for pornography, posting with proxys and VPN, and seeing more statistics (‘gold account’: Ylilauta, 2023a). Monetization was also discursively linked by users to other commercial platforms, like Reddit, or the Finnish forums Suomi24 and Vauva.fi, which are owned by media companies. Monetization is presumed to follow from a need to cover the servers as well as the salaries of the administration, consisting of owners and employers of Ylilauta (excluding voluntary moderators). In addition, monetization is connected to Ylilauta being purchased by a limited company in 2017, after which this feature has been connected to a need to generate profit for shareholders. Users justify their hatred of monetization by the assumed desire of the administration and shareholders to make money on Ylilauta’s users and by this way ‘destroying the imageboard culture’. These accusations are often grounded with the antisemitic trope of the ‘greedy jew’ (cf. Tuters and Hagen, 2020):

>>OP (Admin)

You can see it from the current state of discussion. Ylilauta didn’t overtake the Suomi24, it became Suomi24. Fucking greedy shit.

>>OP (Admin)

[. . .] Fucking jew that destroyed the imageboard culture for getting money

(3 August 2019)

This kind of alleged desire to profit ‘on the backs’ of a ‘democratic’ userbase is against the ideals of web 2.0, which was the context of the emergence of imageboards, in which users participate, generate and exchange content (Jenkins et al., 2006; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 61; cf. also Marwick and Partin, 2024: 2538). The users expect the admins to maintain Ylilauta, but users are the ones who create the content and therefore the platform should not align with the administration’s goals, but the ideals of the users and what they consider imageboards to actually be. These ideals can be linked to the original imageboard affordances of ephemerality and contingency. However, like most popular discussion platforms, Ylilauta has factually become a commercial platform.

The increased need for advertisements to cover the costs from the server and administration expenses has also increased voluntary moderation of the platform to become more advertiser-friendly (e.g. explicit prohibition of pornographic content on other than the paywalled sub-board for it and discussions on paedophilia). This is a profound change, since imageboards have always had a strong commitment to freedom of speech – to which we will turn later in the section on speech norms.

Finally, we discuss the boundary drawn to the constitutive outgroup that is ‘normies’ (normot), those who are not anons. The normie is a so-called rhetoric weapon adopted from 4chan and other online communities (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; Sparby, 2017) to be used against moral outsiders of Ylilauta, used to reduce these individuals into a total ‘normality’, as in being totally mediocre and uncritical without any true individual features (cf. Hagen and de Zeeuw, 2023: 3), as opposed to the bonded but enlightened anons. Originally, the category of normies was established by those who spend most of their time on the Internet, for example, otakus, people with marginal interests (cf. Auerbach, 2012; Vainikka, 2020: 7). Today, for Ylilauta users, normies are most often understood as users of the globally more popular social media platforms – for example, Instagram, Jodel, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok and X/Twitter – but also people who are ‘normal’ and (thus) allegedly lack abilities of critical thinking (Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2224; cf. also Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020).

For example, and connected to the discussion on humour above, normies do not understand the humour of Ylilauta and are too morally invested against the ‘edgy’ culture of Ylilauta (cf. Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). In the quotes below, we return to the thread where the OP posted a photo of (supposedly) themselves with herrings covered in human faeces:

>>OP

[. . .] What drives human in a condition where they think that it would be ok to shoot and upload videos of you being naked with herrings?[. . .]

>>3

LOL to normie, I don’t think your place is here [on Ylilauta]

(7 July 2019)

Here, it is established that the ones who do not find bizarre and absurd content entertaining, should not even be on Ylilauta, instead, their place is in ‘more normal’ places. In relation to ‘more normal’ places, the ‘real’ imageboard experience seems to include all the randomness its contingent nature affords. Like Elyse Graham (2019) describes, this kind of unconventional humour can also be about trolling outsiders, leading them to believe that for anons, things like ‘herrings covered with human feces’ are actually entertaining, rather than just a way to laugh at normies’ expense. This is of course also about speech norms, to which we turn next.

Boundaries of Ylilauta users delineate their group from users of other sites and also new affordances derided as detrimental to the so-called original imageboard experience. Remembrance of ‘original imageboard culture’ also is shaped by the affordance of ephemerality, since the history of imageboard culture is preserved only in the users’ collective memory and narrated in the discussions themselves.

Speech norms: using vernacular to post as freely as anon can

We found three distinct elements of speech norms: vernacular (cf. Gibbs et al., 2015), freedom of speech and ‘being anon’, the last one already mentioned under bonds as well. All of these were valued highly in discussions on Ylilauta, and breaking against them was sanctioned in the discussion.

Correct vernacular includes conventional ways to use culturally coherent concepts and suffixes, like anon or -fag (cf. Ewerhart, 2024: 14; Phillips, 2015; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020), and the correct way to create and reply to threads, for example, how to make a thread out of a news article. Vernacular mistakes in creating new threads, like not using images on an imageboard or using a heading to set the topic, are pointed out by simple one-liners implicating the error made by the user:

>>OP

>no image

go to hell, newfag

>>OP

>no image

>heading

yep, yup

(28 April 2023)

Using an image to open a thread is a fundamental feature of imageboards and affords a way to frame the discussion. While this is seen as the correct way to frame a new thread, using headings is a more recent feature, not included in the affordance toolkit of ‘original imageboard culture’, thus on Ylilauta it is a cultural indicator of inexperience or not belonging.

We include under vernacular an ironic attitude towards everything, which is expected (e.g. Phillips, 2015; Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2226; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). Being ‘unironic’ and sincere on any given topic, and unable to understand the ‘ironic levels of the imageboard culture’ are considered errors only uncommitted users slip to. Failing to recognize even the most obvious baits and irony is considered a sign of not belonging to the culture of Ylilauta:

#OP [111 upvotes, 185 downvotes]

Finns Party member served junkies! CANNABIS WILL NEVER BE LEGALISED, CRIME IS A CRIME

#1 [23 upvotes, 5 downvotes]

>>OP

Most retarded post in this month

#2 [5 upvotes, 1 downvote]

>>1

How can such obvious sarcasm go so high over your head, just asking

>>1

You fell in shitty troll bait, and based on the upvotes, so did many others too.

(30 March 2023)

The lack of ability to frame posts correctly is considered a marker of inexperience. OP’s above reference to the rhetoric presented on more mainstream platforms should be seen in the context of Ylilauta as parody – or as a troll or bait – rather than a sincere opinion. Users who do not understand this parody do not fully understand the nuances of posting on Ylilauta either. However, for many users, this lack of understanding irony obviously acts as an incentive for creating baits and trolling.

Freedom of speech and expressing oneself seem to be one of the most shared values among the users of Ylilauta, as the speech norms pattern around the ideal of being able to say anything you are thinking about. Although the expressions of ‘what you are thinking about’ are often memetic and patterned in themselves, this is also the way to ‘talk like an anon’. While the rules of Ylilauta allow almost all kinds of discussion and language, it is the users who maintain the discussion and negotiate on what are the allowed ways of posting. A good example of such ‘freedom of speech’ is the repetitive, forcing and ongoing usage of slurs considered as hate speech in other contexts, especially against immigrants, ethnic minorities, women, sexual and gender minorities, or any other group that is considered – in mainstream discourse – to have less societal power. Often, it is also used as an argument: being able to use such language, prohibited on other (mainstream) platforms, proves Ylilauta is the last bastion of ‘freedom of speech’. In this frame, these words derive their meaning from their prohibition on other platforms.

Using deliberately offensive language in the context of imageboards has multiple meanings, as we have already discussed. These include at least keeping out the easily offended, and to ‘prove your belonging’ (Ewerhart, 2024: 13) – that is, boundaries and bonds. Detachment from the surface meaning of expression varies: rather than a simple sincere/ironic dichotomy, we must understand that meanings of text can be more or less detached from their surface-level meaning; think of hyperbole, messages that may be intended to convey political meanings, even if perhaps not intended as extreme as may seem (see Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). Naturally, we cannot know the level of ironic detachment of any particular post. It should also be noted that with belonging, culture becomes self-evident to its members, leading to difficulties to self-analyse, criticize or even verbalize it for its members.

Under bonds, we previously addressed ‘being anon’. This can also be considered a speech norm. Untraceability or technical features for providing anonymity are almost never mentioned in discussions, but they are implicated in the culture itself. Acting properly in the context of Ylilauta is first and foremost simply being ‘anon’. Therefore on Ylilauta, anonymity affords users the ability to focus on the content of the messages rather than the individual posting. Rather than on individuals and in addition to content, users focus on categories, like newfags, normies or just anons. Paradoxically, it could be argued that the resulting loss of individuality is reminiscent of the faceless mass anons attempt to reduce ‘normies’ to.

Conclusion

In this article, we expanded the affordance viewpoint of anonymous imageboard culture by using the pragmatist cultural sociological theory of group style to empirically analyse the negotiated culture of Ylilauta. We found out how users of Ylilauta collectively negotiate the group style of the imageboard by defining its bonds, boundaries and norms of speech. The negotiations were both implicit and explicit, carried out both in meta-level and everyday discussions. By this negotiation, the users collectively drew the limits thereof, that is, the shared assumptions on what is excluded, what connects the users, and what is appropriate in the Ylilauta culture. Although Ylilauta is its own platform, the similarities with imageboard culture of 4chan are clear. Differences between 4chan and Ylilauta, in turn, can be seen in localizations – like translations, contents dealing with local issues and ways to use memes in local context – of these platform vernaculars adopted from global imageboard culture.

We found that group bonds on Ylilauta can be approached as ways of defining and justifying ‘a set of good members’ obligations to one another as participants’ instead of merely backing up the boundaries (Lichterman, 2012: 21). The bonds arose from a shared sense of humour, collectively shared ideas of being anon, adopted from 4chan (Ewerhart, 2024: 3; Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2220), and creative usage of boundaries and speech norms as bonds, including through vernacular nominations adopted from 4chan. Oldfags are conservators and gatekeepers of imageboard culture, whereas newfags are inexperienced and/or new users who should, by lurking the discussions, learn what the Ylilauta culture really is, and how to participate in it coherently (cf. Hagen and Venturini, 2023: 474; Ludemann, 2023: 2735; Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017: 449). Normies, in turn, are the opposite of anons. However, being a normie is not only being ‘from’ somewhere else, for example, more mainstream social media platforms (cf. Tuters and Hagen, 2020: 2224), but also being morally opposite to the ideal anon: uncritical, unindividual, unironic, unhumorous (cf. Van Schenck, 2023: 380–381). Hence, when defining normies, anons are defining themselves and the bonds between them. These designations are used for collective evaluations of how well others use the established cultural tools that signify belonging (cf. Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017; Tuters and Hagen, 2020).

Boundaries, in turn, appeared through collective remembering of what Ylilauta and also broader anonymous imageboard culture ‘really’ are and used to be in the past. Mainstreaming and monetization were framed as threats, and a strict boundary to ‘normies’ was drawn.

Finally, speech norms appeared through (policing of correct) vernacular, the ideal of freedom of speech and again, correct ways of ‘being anon’. Although Ylilauta has been mainstreamed and monetized, users still feel it should be the last bastion of ‘freedom of speech’. This concept, however, is often used on Ylilauta merely to justify racist, antisemitic and misogynist speech (cf. Manivannan, 2013; Tuters and Hagen, 2020; Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). Maintaining coherent ways to be anon enables anonymous untraceability for users of Ylilauta (De Zeeuw and Tuters, 2020: 217).

This article provides a step further in understanding the formation and maintenance of anonymous online communities by their negotiations on what is belonging and participating in their group. Specifically, we have argued that while affordances produce kinds of action in online spheres, these actions habituate, forming cultural patterns of interaction which are then recognized by other users and further repeated and negotiated, or in some cases, not. This repetition can manifest as ‘glocally’ established practices. For example, in the case of up- and downvoting, some users in our analysis consider it a technical feature that affords the wrong kind of interactions as opposed to their ideals of ‘real’ imageboard culture.

We have argued that culture in interaction, conceptualized as group styles, can be seen as the intermediator through which affordances shape cultures: people first act as they can, using the affordances provided, and this action creates, together with direct feedback by others, the basis for habituation through repetition, creating patterns others can recognize as presenting a shared culture, further solidifying the patterns as repeating aspects of coherent action. As users create local online cultures, they creatively employ affordances and cultural tools, resulting in unique ‘glocalizations’.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Kone Foundation, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 804024), and the Research Council of Finland (Grant number 339797).

ORCID iD

Arttu Siltala

Author biographies

Arttu Siltala is PhD student in sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. His interests are in (online) cultural studies, online interaction, multi-method online ethnography and polarization. His dissertation focuses on moral–cultural conflicts and bubbles in anonymous online discussions.

Tuukka Ylä-Anttila is a University Researcher in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on polarization, morality, the public sphere and political culture. His work has been published in journals such as Populism; Discourse, Context & Media; Social Media + Society; Acta Sociologica and the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology.

Eeva Luhtakallio is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in political sociology, social theory and sociological methods. Her work focuses on democracy and citizenship as culturally patterned practices, including studies on activism, young people’s political engagements and visual politicization. She has recently published in Distinktion, Ethnography, The British Journal of Sociology and Theory and Society.

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Culture in online anonymous interaction: Negotiating imageboard group style on Ylilauta

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Affordances of anonymous imageboards

Group style

Empirical set-up

Imageboard culture as patterned interaction

Bonds: anons interacting with anons

Boundaries: drawing lines between imageboards and ‘places for normies’

Speech norms: using vernacular to post as freely as anon can

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biographies

References