4chan is worth trying to understand, and this essay, though muddy in places, is as good an analysis as I’ve seen. medium.com/@DaleBeran/4ch…

But the inherent slipperiness of 4chan and similar communities makes it hard to say just how influential they are in this political moment.

Are their numbers knowable? As a collective defined by nihilism, do they even vote? Is their influence graded on an internet curve?

For all the noise they’re able to make on Twitter and Reddit outside their self-selecting cesspools, it’s not like Pepe is a household name.

They’re a problem, to be sure, and a uniquely difficult one. But I hesitate to conflate 4chan’s actual scope with its own self-serving myth.