It makes me sad that every time any kind of research is done, someone has to denigrate it as a waste of money.
While I don't care about "chan" culture (never visited one of the sites, don't need that in my life), I fully support research into things I may or may not like. Let the Universities decide where to spend their research budgets. You never know what will come out of it.
This wasn't a real research (to really discover something) though (read some other comments here like typon's) except to "prove" how successful trolling is.
If it was generated by the 4chan regulars with their own money, then at least it's not worth discussing it more here...