>>6565005Once upon a time, using a name was the standard.
Then, 4chan got a new mod called Shii. Shii convinced moot to put on forced anonymous on /b/.
Because of the forced anonymity, people could no longer recognize each other, and new people had little idea of what was going on. It was difficult to know a new person apart from the old ones.
Eventually /b/ grew to become the most popular board on the site. Then a series of events (habbo raids, project chanology, suchlike) drew a lot of attention to 4chan, and specifically to /b/. The legends about the Anonymous hacker group and such started going around and cp became abundant. The new people believed that 4chan was an elite political activism hacker deep web forum. They came in a flood, and with the difficulty of telling the new apart from the old, the culture was replaced.
For the next ten years 4chan would suffer from being seen as the free speech zone of the internet, where anonymity protects all and only idiots step out of the line. /pol/ still carries this baggage and /b/ still has forced anon on. The original userbase and culture from SA is almost entirely dead.
You'll see that /bant/ is the way it is because it is primarily inhabited by people who either remember "old /b/" or old /jp/, or who are too new to have taken part in /pol/ during the 2016 election. This is what the site would look like all over if the political activism ideals hadn't poisoned it a decade ago.
/bant/ is a preservation of imageboards in their natural state.
