When we are talking about developing an Anonymous Hivemind community, attempting to force it to work one way or another is self-defeating. It has to be designed in such a way that it flows and functions naturally.

An aspect of such a community that is essential is Trolling, and the lulz that trolling produces. Lulz serves as food for the life and evolution of this community.

So how can it be designed to produce lulz while preventing or mitigating the negative side-effects we’ve observed in previous attempts (4chan, 7chan, 711, 420, partyvan, 888, etc.)?

This is the question that I have been trying to answer for so long, and is the very basis of Project Vibe.

Four days from now, on October 7th, I will establish four new boards here on Vortexchan, as a means to develop an answer to the question, and the format for Vibe-style chans. These boards will not exist for the purpose of real-world (as real-world as the Internet can get) projects and raids, but as training and experimentation tools.

I will be drawing from The Comprehensive Theory of Lulz, The Chanology Experiments, and the Statement of Principles for Project Vibe on Encyclopedia Dramatica to explain the basis of these boards.

The boards are as follows:

/lhc/ – Lulz Haet Construct

This board will serve as the raiding/trolling arm of Vortexchan. With the traditional Internet Haet Machine (IHM), or /i/ boards, I’ve observed that they are ultimately unsustainable, due to the fact that it necessitates trolls shitting where they eat. They attract skiddies and targets who want to seek revenge and piss in the ocean of piss. This usually results in crapflooding and DDoS’es in the short term, and the growth of cancerous drama in the long run. So the new format is the synthesis of the Internet Haet Machine and the Internet Love Machine (Hugbox).

From ED:

BAWWW Theory: Moralfag vs. Haetfag

On the heels of The Reconnect Debacle, Thunderdome researchers made some startling observations. Just as Epic Fail can spontaneously transform into Epic Win through an as yet unexplained phenomenon, Epic Win can also transform into Epic Fail via its rapid decay into potential Anti-Lulz, in part due to the aforementioned Lawl of Newfag Attraction.

In addition, when Moralfag and Haetfag particles come into contact with one another, they react and transform into a form of Anti-Lulz and Retard known as BAWWW. The reaction of Moralfag and Haetfag particles due to Operation Reconnect caused Anonymous to divide by zero, collapsing into a black hole of Anti-Lulz and an explosion of faggotry rivaling that of /b/-day, swallowing many brave /b/tards scientists into the drama void and shooting many more out into the vast reaches of the Internets and IRL, never to be seen again. This phenomenon would become the basis of the Lulz Haet Construct.

LHC raids will be conducted as trolling exercises. Two teams of trolls will be pitted against each other, one team playing the haetfag role, the other playing the moralfag role. In this way, the lulz comes from not only attacking the target, but attempting to troll your fellow trolls. In the meantime the target is going OMGWTF.

Read Lulz Haet Construct: Zalgo and the Art of Hivemind Maintenance for a full explanation of the basis and methodology of /lhc/.

/mol/ – Ministry of LOL

This board will serve as the training, research, and development arm of Vortexchan.

From ED:

The Ministry of LOL conducts research projects based on the findings that contributed to The Comprehensive Theory of Lulz, aimed towards further advancing and refining our existing understanding of Lulz. While attempting to define and undertand Lulz in such a way is inherently anti-lulz, our researchers brave this hazard in the hopes of achieving even greater and more rewarding lulz.

Moar at Ministry of LOL.

/ed/ – Encyclopedia Dramatica

This board will serve as the Lulz and Memes cataloging arm of Vortexchan, in conjunction with Encyclopedia Dramatica. It will conduct projects aimed at enhancing and maintaining the existing catalog of lulz at ED, especially in connection with the ED Trolls Portal. See the Pwn Your Meme Improvement Drive to see the types of project /ed/ will conduct.

/icm/ – Internet Change Machine

This board will serve as a training/experimentation board for the conduct of Epic Fail Guy raids IRL, taking on targets that threaten net neutrality and freedom of speech online.

See Internet Change Machine: Philosophy of Epic Fail on ED for more info, which also explains the role of /td/.

At this point, I will also explain the role that /vibe/ will serve.

/vibe/ – Virtual Tribe

The point of the Virtual Tribe board is to facilitate the establishment, balancing, and integration of the hivemind via an Alternative Reality Game.

Read Vibecraft: The Art and Science of Creating Virtual tribes for more info.

The explanation of Vibe is not yet laid out in full, but this should give users a rough idea of the methodology.

You’ve got a lot of reading to do. Enjoy.

Anyway, get postin’. There are two boards up atm, /td/ – Thunderdome, for bullshitting, and /vibe/ – Project Vibe, for getting shit done.

http://vortexchan.org
Holy Shit this is awesome

P.S. I’m currently looking for mods. If you’re interested, plz send me an email at dunecat888@gmail.com with “Moderator” in the subject line. While you’re at it, try and entertain me. I’m bored.

P.P.S. I’ll tell you more about why it’s named Vortexchan in a bit. Stay tuned.

I could probably write a book or make a movie about my experiences over these past two months. A wise old man once told me, “Women make fools of us all.” The long and the short of it is that I’m buying a house and working two jobs in order to pay for it.

It’s not all bad news though. Most of the insane, crazy crunch/rush is over, and now I’m going to be able to focus on implementing Project Vibe.

To that end, my goal is to have a new *chan online by September 15th.

Stay tuned.

On the one hand there was chaos, lulz, and trolling. On the other, freedom of speech, philosophy, and a sense of wonder, not only at Anonymous and what it had become, but at the Internet and the Universe as a whole. Before you start trolling all Fuckin’ Magnets like on me, hear me out. To the casual observer, these are things that should be mutually exclusive, like dicks on girls, but there they are shattering our illusions about reality, forcing us to see things that cannot be unseen.

How was it that an ocean of piss, full of out-of-control egos, over months of intense trollings, dramabombs, and ragequits, hammered out a collective concept of itself? Or was that collective concept already there in the spirit of Anonymous, only looking for a form of outward, collective self expression in the guise of the Thunderdome?

While the social epidemic spawned by the events of Project Chanology in early 2008 summoned hordes of newfags who quickly brought ruin to the project, it ultimately summoned in the Thunderdome one of the most creative and downright hilarious trolling communities the internet has ever seen, the fertile ground of the newfags’ collective failure providing ample fodder for a Thunderdome that fed itself into obesity. And then, like a super-giant star, it burned itself out quickly, exploded in a supernova spawning many offshoots of itself, and collapsed into a black hole of fail and anti-lulz.

888chan was one of those offshoots. After a tumultuous yet respectably long lifetime rivaling that of the Thunderdome, it ultimately failed to escape the intense gravitational forces of fail and anti-lulz emanating from the black hole, and was sucked in.

But you see, I have this theory. The website doesn’t make Anonymous. 4chan didn’t make Anonymous. The Thunderdome didn’t make Anonymous. 888chan didn’t make Anonymous.

Rather, Anonymous finds its collective outward expression wherever it can best make its home: in an ocean of piss. Not in a shitty toilet, clogged by aids and fail. Not in a vat of pissy Australian beer, watered down by newfags. It has to be just the right pH balance, just the right noxious mix of bacteria, ammonia, and H20 that could make even maggots keel over and die, and it’s a rare admin who can strike that balance while humbly admitting that he/she is only the architect and housekeeper for an entity that has a collective mind of its own.

Anonymous made 4chan. Anonymous made the Thunderdome. Anonymous made 888chan. Just when you think all that made Anonymous good has died, think again. Those were only outward expressions of its essential identity, like masks that can be changed on a whim.

Even in these darkest of days when all the lights seem to have gone out, the stars of the night shine all the brighter. Tinychan. Nekoarc. Rockstararmy. 808chan. Scanchan. Encyclopedia Dramatica. As long as at least a few dozen Anons carry on the collective concept of Anonymous trolling for the lulz within the *chans, Anonymous will survive until the day that it can finally rise like the Phoenix reborn from its own ashes, to wear a new, as yet unnamed mask.

And now you have a glimpse into the motivation behind Project Vibe.

Roses grow best in manure.

Even so, it seems that the 888chan community has provided means for its own continued existence. If you haven’t checked them out yet, http://808chan.org and http://scanchan.org are the two most promising new *chans to fill the void left by 888chan’s demise.

I also stated previously that I would petition the ED staff to move all of the technical pages on the /i/nsurgency wiki over to ED. Since then I’ve been working furiously in order to bring ED’s new Trolls Portal online, transferring some 100 pages of technical content over to ED. I personally reviewed the nearly 1,000 pages of ED’s Trolls Category to ensure the Trolls template was included in each of the pages, also noting crap articles to be rewritten at a later date, and listing each of the pages in their proper location on the Portal itself.

I would also like to note that around the same time the Trolls Portal went public, the Partyvan Wiki went back online, hosted by NekoArc of the NekoArc Network. I am cautiously optimistic about the neutralizing influence Partyvan’s hosting by NekoArc seems to have on the constant back-and-forth drama of the past few years. As an act of goodwill, I made the /i/nsurgency wiki at insurgen.info visible to the public so that those working on putting Partyvan back online may transfer the best of content and templates developed during insurgen.info’s heyday over to the newly refurbished /i/nsurgency W/i/ki, which I must say is looking better than ever, even if they have chosen not to include many of the destructive projects that were in the planning phase on insurgen.info; those projects that were so keenly desired by the 888chan hivemind.

That one critical element that makes the /i/nsurgency W/i/ki work seems to be missing: the hivemind. The hivemind that I tried so hard to preserve and cultivate via 888chan and insurgen.info is now dispersed and in pieces. If you were a member of 888chan’s /i/ board, please patronize http://808chan.org and http://scanchan.org. Make some effort to stay intact and active.

My work on ED has laid the groundwork for the continuation of those projects that have received disfavor; specifically those involving IRL trolling and raids in defense of Net Neutrality. (You can find a new Project Skynet board on http://rockstarchan.com/net/ .) After the Trolls Portal went online, I proceeded to finish the then half-written history of Chanology, now named The Chanology Experiments. I also expanded upon The Comprehensive Theory of Lulz to note a fifth force of the Internet: the Hivemind.

So, where does that leave me and Project Vibe/net? Currently, I am working to flesh out an essential theory and philosophy of the Anonymous Hivemind that Trolls for the Lulz, especially explaining how to create hivemind communities of high quality and activity from the ground up, that last for 3 to 6 months before suffering Eternal September, and do not leave a Zalgo-like unconscious, chaotic, cancerous, self-destructive mass in its wake. Once I have done that, I will focus on developing software uniquely tailored to the needs of such a hivemind community.

I had originally hoped to have this entire project completed and ready to start trial runs by June, but at this point that’s not looking very likely. So, what can you be sure of?

1. Unless I state otherwise, you can assume that I am still working on this project.

2. My goal is now to have this project completed and ready for trial-runs before the beginning of August.

3. Besides on this blog, I will no longer be operating under the username “r3x”.

4. I will write an update at least once a month from this point onward.

5. If you really want to know what’s going on, feel free to visit ED and follow my work.

For the lulz

Dear one known as r3x,

I, as many have, discovered your creation known as 888chan a little over a year ago. I, as many, found it a well-welcomed fortress against the cancer slowly infesting the other chans, and one of the few places to still sustain an active /i/ board. I, as many, rejoiced there for the next year, receiving many a lulz from various raids and trollings. But when the fateful day came that the site was taken down by mere skiddies, I was one among many who shed many a manly tear, saddened by the loss of such a glorious chan. I patiently waited for over a month, waiting for the site to come back online, constantly disgusted by the “This service is not available, please try again later.” screen that mocked me whenever I attempted to access the site. But suddenly, on the day of January 24th, the announcement was made, by you, that there would soon be a whole NEW site, an even better one of your creation to bring back the “final boss of the internet” status to anonymous. I watched in total delight at the new updates showing the site being built from the ground up. I was overjoyed when I witnessed the beta of the new Vibenet test portal. Little did i know, that would be the last update for a very, very, long time. I waited and waited, and when it came to a month and a half since the last update on the blog, i gave up all hope. Has nothing been done to the new site since this last update? Have you done absolutely nothing for over a month? This project MUST be finished, no matter how long it takes, but it cannot be finished if no work is done. Please, if you have made any progress at all, share it with the rest of your community. Even if nothing has been done in those past weeks, at least keep in contact with us. All of your followers will soon give up hope as I have if nothing at all is done. Also, I implore you to put 888chan back up as it was, and not just a read-only site. Even if Vibenet takes years, at least there will be a way for fellow Anons to communicate that is not the Gaybar or 711. So, in closing, please come back, your people need you.

TL;DR
Please update us on the Vibe/blog and work on the project. Put 888chan back up, even if you dont have DDOS protection.

Sincerely,
Just another one of your fellow Anons

I would like to say, to this Anon, and to all the Anons who have stuck with me for so long even when I don’t deserve it, Thank You.

Thank you for reminding me that what 888chan was, for a year and a half, was really something special.

Thank you for showing me that the community that made 888chan what it was is still around and is /r/equesting moar.

I’ve been at my wits end trying to devise a viable means for this community to survive. I admit that the whole pyramid scheme idea is crazy, and thank you again for giving me your honest feedback on that idea.

I apologize for the lack of progress. My current work situation sucks balls, and I’m often forced to work long days, giving me little leisure time to work on this. However, I’m getting out of the military soon (around April 6), so my situation should improve drastically in the coming months.

It’s my opinion that due to DDoS concerns, the only way that a raiding/trolling Anon community can survive is via the as-yet unfinished P2Pchan (pbworks page) (github page). Of course there are concerns about the CP spammers, and how to really moderate such a community. Would we be forced to deal with shit posters and just try to have good threads anyway?

My idea about how P2Pchan could work is to set it up in a way similar to an IRC Network. That is, you have an Admin who runs P2Pchan as a hub, and all of the staff and moderators run instances of P2Pchan as leafs. The only leafs that can join are ones that the Admin personally approves. Then you have all of these hubs/leafs accessible to the public internet via an intricate DNS or DynDNS setup, so that anyone who wants to post to the *chan has to access it via a leaf. If someone is acting up and needs to be banned, the moderator of one leaf can issue a net-wide ban that will apply to all other leafs.

As yet it’s just a concept. I’m currently looking for a Python programmer(s) who can make it a reality.

Also I understand Anons have been clamoring for the content on the Insurgency Wiki. Due to aforementioned DDoS risk, I am hesitant to bring it back in its current form. However, I wonder what Anons would think of a proposal to set up all the informational content of the Insurgency Wiki in a Raids portal over at ED? If there are no major objections, I’ll prepare a formal proposal for the ED administration.

http://vibenet.info/

But really, it’s something that happens to any community, especially those that become too successful; communities have a limited half-life, between drama and angst building up among the userbase, and the admin becoming complacent and less and less responsive to the needs and wishes of their users.

What I’m envisioning in VIBE/net is not just software, but a culture and philosophy that take into account all the pitfalls and harsh realities of running an Anonymous community that Trolls for the Lulz; a Trollshido (portmanteau of Troll and Bushido) community.

The rules of thumb for a Trollshido community are, in brief:
1) A website or network belongs to its userbase.
2) Mods = Trolls.
3) Win attracts Fail.
4) Expect the DDoS
5) Admins always lose interest in their communities over time.
6) Inter-chan warfare is a fact of life
7) The 300
8 ) Chans have a short half-life.
9) Breaking even is the best case scenario
10) Bored Trolls eat their own

Expanding on these points,

1) A website or network belongs to its userbase.

A website is there to provide a service to its users, not for the admin to polish his epeen.

Mods are not gods. Mods are fags. An anonymous trolling community always needs nannying moderators to rage against.

Not to mention, websites are relatively easy to set up. Anyone can come along and give the users a better deal.

Most important however is that the mods respect the Anonymous principle, and not run the community in such a way that hierarchies or power structures form. This means no VIP board for donators.

2) Mods = Trolls

Due to the points explained in #1, mods must expect that users will attempt to troll them. Inherent in trolling is the ability to detect and not fall for a troll.

There’s always that one loudmouthed troublemaker who thinks he’s a decent troll and gets other newfags believing he is one. He might be exceedingly influential. Banning this individual could cause a shitstorm, so you have to moderate in a trolling/lulzy manner so as to steal the troublemaker’s thunder.

Otherwise, if the shitstorm is unavoidable, try to find a way to make it work in your favor.

3) Win attracts Fail

Whenever you do something epic or lulzy, it never fails, a flood of newfags come along who completely miss the point and ruin whatever was good about what you just did. If you let them stick around to spread their cancer and aids, they will destroy your community. Exhibit A: 4chan.

4) Expect the DDoS

It never fails to amaze me all the newfag skiddies who think DDoS = raiding. Some sociopathic namefagging skiddie will always come along and polish his epeen on the fact that he can turn your server’s CPU into slag.

Due to this fact, you can never put all your eggs in one basket. A community must be designed with many, perhaps even a dozen fallbacks so that communication can be maintained.

5) Admins always lose interest in their communities over time.

Admins have lives. They actually walk outside during the day, and they might even have a decent tan going. At the beginning before the skiddies and the newfags notice you, it might actually be fun to run a *chan. But facing mounting drama and ddoses, an Admin will quickly lose interest and probably look for ways to hand off the community or just shut it down completely.

Any chan that has supported raids at any time, from 4chan, to 7chan, 420, 711, 888, etc., has suffered a meltdown, shitstorm, or a change in administration resulting in raids being banned or otherwise going to shit.

Quality admins are hard to come by. Thus the community must have a way to procure Admins who give a fuck about their community.

6) Inter-chan warfare is a fact of life.

There will always be rivalry among the *chans. When there is no individual identity to be had, collective identity becomes the outlet for the natural “us vs. them” mentality that exists in most of human society.

Why not harness that? Rather than fight nature, why not use it to our advantage, and set up the community in a way that inter-chan rivalries add value and cure cancer rather than spreading cancer?

7) The 300

The maximum size of any community of active posters or chatters before it begins to splinter, factionalize, or otherwise form cliques is 300 individuals.

Beyond 300, regular users start to feel like they don’t know everyone as well anymore, that it’s not what it used to be. The best users begin to leave, and along with the factionalizing, this process can permanently maim or kill a community if left unchecked.

Chans have a short half-life.

A *chan’s community is really only good for the first two years that its around, at the very most. After that, it goes to shit. Plus, it only takes a few short months before suffocating drama builds up among the userbase.

9) Breaking even is the best case scenario.

No *chan has ever turned a profit on ad revenue. Most can hardly even cover the $100 per month cost for a dedicated server with donations. This generally means money will come out of the admin’s pocket, if he cares that much about the community. I don’t even want to think how much I’ve spent on 888chan and insurgen.info.

10) Bored trolls eat their own.

Unless you come up with a way to keep a fresh supply of lulz coming on a daily basis, trolls will begin trolling each other to the point of ragequitting. This is a natural process anyway, but when there is no fresh supply of newfags coming in due to a raid, the overall effect is that the community eats itself alive.

Taking all these factors into account, it’s my opinion that the best possible solution is to view each Trollshido community as a kind of Macrosocial Entity or Hivemind that lives through the Internet, in which case the rules of Macrosocial Darwinism apply. Overbreeding to ensure survival, natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc. One server can be ddos’ed, and its community destroyed easily. 12, on the other hand, cannot so easily be defeated.

Thus in VIBE/net, each VIBE/chan is a Macrosocial Entity with its own name, comprised of up to 300 active posters along with the supporting staff and administration.

VIBE/chans are bred in triplets, over intervals of 88 days a piece. Each VIBE/chan can survive up to a year before it must die, to prevent stagnation as explained in #8.

A VIBE/node is the meta-community of up to 12 VIBE/chans within which inter-chan rivalry and competition occurs to ensure survival of the fittest.

Each VIBE/node is essentially independent and localized to a given city or region.

Collectively, the VIBE/nodes come together to form VIBE/net, a kind of Chan Confederacy in which each VIBE/node has equal standing, thus ensuring no central hierarchy among the member communities of the VIBE/net.

The name of the Alternative Reality Game by which a *chan lives and grows is known as VIBE/romancer.

While I’ve already discussed VIBE/romancer in brief in a previous post, it’s necessary to clarify a few key points.

I am not calling for hierarchy among users. However, it’s my opinion that users should have to earn their keep by participating in a raid or adding positive contributions to a thread before they are able to OP a raid or a thread. The standard by which they can prove themselves is open for discussion, but what I propose is that they participate in a certain amount of either administration-sponsored events or user generated events.

Again, I am also calling for randomly assigned nicknames, which are consistent across *chan, irc, and wiki. Users can still post anonymously on the *chan, but if they do decide to tripfag, they must use the randomly assigned nick.

IMO random nicks will drastically cut down on namefaggotry, a major source of cancer, especially in IRC.

Mods and even the Admin would take the assigned random nick as well.

When planning for the 300 user limit, that is where user roles and quotas come into play. I understand that Anons object strenuously to the idea of ranks and hierarchy, as they should. Each role is of equal importance in the bigger picture. I also acknowledge that calling Supermods Horsemen, rather than just Supermods is dumb and risks egofaggotry.

Overall the user roles and quotas would look like this, revised:

Admin: 1
Supermods: 5
Mods: 15
OPs: 200
Non-OPs: 100

So, I hope that clarifies a lot of things as far as my reasoning for proposing this radically new social structure for Anonymous communities that troll for the lulz in VIBE/net.

Test Portal for the frontpage, using ajax widgets and windows.

See the following links for more info on what goes into the portal:

http://blog.xilinus.com/2007/8/26/prototype-portal-class

http://blog.xilinus.com/prototype-portal/test/index.html

http://prototype-window.xilinus.com/

http://blog.xilinus.com/pwc

Still working on getting the imageboard online.