> These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
Simultaneously one of the best and worst parts about the website was how much a single person could create influence. Some guy spamposting "30-year old boomer" memes eventually turned boomer and zoomer into mainstream terminology.
I remember a long time ago, a general that I would frequent attracted the attention of a lunatic who would frequently try to ruin threads by spam posting corrupted unloadable images until the bumpcap was reached. It made a successful thread with no incidents feel like a moment of success.
I like how this was the origin of the "virgin/Chad memes". Some guy kept spamming a meme about the "virgin walk" to make people feel self-conscious, and then someone made a joke response called the "Chad stride". Years later, those two are inseparable in popular culture.
A literal thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Milhouse is still not a meme.
That's true. But on the other hand, "Millhouse is not a meme" is in fact a meme.
Mods of any decently sized forum can point to very special users participating in intense sockpuppetry, flamewars, getting back after being banned 20 times, and so on. It's not specific to 4chan.
The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the posters.
It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy that constantly makes threads that are designed to devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine people.
No, those people (or sometimes groups of people) go to great lengths to camouflage themselves, especially after repeated bans. This is not the case of “all accounts registered to the same e-mail” or “10 different posts from the same IP address” (though those are not uncommon, too, and might be allowed if community rules aren't broken). 4chan is hardly an outlier.
Moreover, you can make hundreds of anonymous posts on your own, but if no one reacts (and considers the thing/idea/joke uninteresting), they will still remain the only replies in your precious shilling threads.