[curio]

and just like chatroulette or most anonymous forums, the tone quickly deteriorates to the level of graffiti in a public bathroom stall.

[ramchip]

most anonymous forums

Some of the non-/b/ areas of 4chan are surprising. Look at /jp/: there are people programming games and animations, people translating visual novels from Japanese. They even spawned a group project to make a visual novel from scratch: http://katawa-shoujo.com/

I think anonymous forums can work as long they share a strong common interest.