The "random" board,
/b/, follows the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It was the first board created, and was described in 2009 as 4chan's most popular board, accounting for 30% of site traffic at the time.
[77][78] Gawker's Nick Douglas summarized /b/ as a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other."
[10] /b/ has a "no rules" policy, except for bans on certain illegal content, such as
child pornography, invasions of other websites (posting floods of disruptive content), and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. The "no invasions" rule was added in late 2006, after /b/ users spent most of the summer "invading"
Habbo Hotel. The "no rules" policy also applies to actions of administrators and moderators, which means that users may be banned at any time, for any reason, including no reason at all.
[79] Due partially to its anonymous nature, board moderation is not always successful—indeed, the site's anti-child pornography rule is a subject of jokes on /b/.
[13] Christopher Poole told
The New York Times, in a discussion on the moderation of /b/, that "the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards" and that site staff simply provided a framework.
[80]
The humor of /b/'s many users, who refer to themselves as "/b/tards",
[80][81] is often incomprehensible to newcomers and outsiders, and is characterized by intricate
inside jokes and
dark comedy.
[81] Users often refer to each other, and much of the outside world, as
fags.
[13] They are often referred to by outsiders as
trolls, who regularly act with the intention of "doing it for the lulz", a
corruption of "
LOL" used to denote
amusement at another's expense.
[80][82] The New York Observer has described posters as "immature pranksters whose bad behavior is encouraged by the site's total anonymity and the absence of an archive".
[83] Douglas said of the board, "reading /b/ will melt your brain", and cited
Encyclopedia Dramatica's definition of /b/ as "the asshole of the Internets [
sic]".
[10] Mattathias Schwartz of
The New York Times likened /b/ to "a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene
telephone party line",
[80] while
Baltimore City Paper wrote that "in the high school of the Internet, /b/ is the kid with a collection of
butterfly knives and a locker full of porn."
[13] Wired describes /b/ as "notorious".
[81]
Each post is assigned a post number. Certain post numbers are sought after with a large amount of posting taking place to "GET" them. A "GET" occurs when a post's number ends in a special number, such as 12345678, 22222222, or every millionth post.
[84] A sign of 4chan's scaling, according to Poole, was when GETs lost meaning due to the high post rate resulting in a GET occurring every few weeks. He estimated /b/'s post rate in July 2008 to be 150,000–200,000 posts per day.
[85]