[ImSkeptical]

I was just listening to an interview with Elon Musk where he discussed the importance of reasoning from first principles as opposed to by analogy. The author of this wired article would benefit from taking that lesson to heart.

The Wired article is reasoning "by analogy". 4chan is like a teenager, or the soul of the internet, or the id of the internet, or whatever. Then, the author draws spurious conclusions based on those analogies. If 4chan is like a teenager, and it is fifteen years old, then surely it should be time for it to start getting more mature - right?

On the other hand, if you reason from first principles you see that the reporter's conclusions are nonsense. If you start with some basic assumptions - like that the culture of a web community is influenced by the mechanics of that community, you can conclude that 4chan is unlikely to change. 4chan is unlikely to change, not because it is in some psychological period of arrested development the way some human teens may be, 4chan is unlikely to change because the mechanics of how the board work are unlikely to change.

The behaviors on 4chan are better explained by the mechanics of the community than by psychological analogies. No registration. No persistent identities (or at least rarely used and abstruse persistent identities). No sorting of threads or replies. No persistence of threads or comments. Threads live or die based on the responses they attract and not any measure of quality.

The mechanics of 4chan, or any web community, influence how the users behave and not the age of the community. That's because 4chan is a web community and not a human teenager.