The beauty of 4chan is its deregulated mystery. It’s a place where anything, no matter how silly or dumb, canpotentially happen. Moderators only swoop in when real, constitutional laws are being broken. Consider it a preservation of the Internet we once knew.
For instance, last month some guy on 4chan posted this message:
Luke Winkie
That’s right. He’s claiming that the PayPal account in the photo belongs to him, which means he has $3 million dollars in digital funds locked up in the ether. Let’s take a closer look:
Luke Winkie
Obviously you should take everything with a grain of salt, but this looks surprisingly legit. There’s even a timestamp.
Anyway in the post he says that the first person to “roll dubs” will get paypalled $10,000. “Rolling dubs” is a 4chan allusion to the number that’s attached to the end of every post on the image board. To roll dubs, you want the last two digits of your post number to be the same, which is something you don’t have any control over.
Sounds like traditional 4chan silver tongue false promises, right? I thought so too, except a couple threads later we saw this:
Luke Winkie
Oh my God, did it really happen?
Luke Winkie
Now, there’s a chance that this was just engineered by the original poster to get /b/ worked up. In fact I’m leaning toward that reality. But man. Maybe there is some altruistic soul lurking on the Internet, bestowing his dubiously acquired cash to the good people of the Web. Can the dream come true? Just this once?
Photo via Chris Potter/Stockmonkeys.com (CC BY 2.0)