Yeah, I flubbed the question. Let's try again: Why is it possible for 4chan to have the line far afield of what we'd normally think of as acceptable behavior? It's not only survived, but prospered.
A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken.
I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.
I guess I'd take some issue with the claim that it has prospered; it's survived, but according to every report I've ever seen, it's never actually made money. As for why it's stayed alive, given the anonymization, it's hard to draw significant conclusions about the community there without having access to 4chan's own analytics, but my suspicion is that the number of people who are long-time contributors to the site are actually relatively few. I'm biased, but based on the people I know who were or are 4chan users and my own personal experience with the site, I suspect most users start using it young, probably in their teens, see their highest level of involvement there over the next few years after they join, then drift away from it. That was the pattern I experienced, and the pattern I saw repeat in a lot of other people. There's a constant influx, but it's not what you would think of as a contiguous community (unless you want to get into some Ship of Theseus questions about what defines a community). 4chan has some of the hallmarks of other web communities, but it diverges from somewhere like HN, Metafilter, or even Reddit by virtue of that lack of continuity. You can survive for a long time on suburban teenagers who want somewhere to play-act as nihilists, but that's never going to be a demographic that produces much by way of value.
> I guess I'd take some issue with the claim that it has prospered; it's survived, but according to every report I've ever seen, it's never actually made money.
I don't think it was ever meant to make money. Lots of great (for various aspects of great) things exist for non-monetary reasons.
4chan is a very niche community. There are some who don't care what kinds of shit gets posted, but there's a very good reason their user base is so small compared to other sites like reddit.
A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken.
I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.