So, I’m an occasional /co/mrade.
You get what you ask for, I suppose.
That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. 4chan has long since stopped being the great unknown of the internet. It’s one of the largest ‘community’ sites in existence, and since it has a Comics and Cartoons board, that by extension makes /co/ simply one of the places you have to know about if you’re at all interested in what’s happening in comics today – reactions, issues, what’s popular and what’s not.
Of course, anything even remotely associated with 4chan gets a bit of a rep these days. Creators poo-poo it, news sites paint it as the refuge of Internet Hate Machines and paedophiles, assuming that since /b/ is part of 4chan, all of 4chan must be /b/ (and for the record, no, I’ve never gone to /b/ ) But personally, I think it’s a fantastic resource. All these people, all these ideas. It’s a giant melting pot of piss and fire, where everyone can just throw whatever they feel like saying out there because even if it’s hated and rejected, it was Anonymous and quickly disappears underneath the next wave of botPREG and ’90s threads. Quite often to kick-start a blog post, I’ll pop over to the ‘chans and ask a question.
Being Anonymous can be a confronting thing for an aspiring creator. We like to think that we, and we alone, own our ideas. That what is ours is sacred and integral to who we are creatively, and to not only post them up on a public form, but also unattributed and anonymous, is paramount to saying “Here, I have this idea. Please take it from me. I worked hard on it so that other people could take credit for it.” Of course, one could always be a tripfag tripfriend, and validate your existence externally, but even then attribution towards an idea only lasts as long as the subject is popular.
Of course, it’s all very po-mo to start telling people that they can’t actually own an idea, nor have any original ideas of their own in the first place. And nor am I saying that /co/ is the perfect place to sound ideas and concepts off. But the next time you’re doing some research, or just trying to give an idea legs, don’t disregard it entirely. There are genuinely some decent and intelligent people on /co/, just like there are on any community site on the internet. The real trick is filtering out the idiots.
And the furries.
