[trowawee]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.