Author of popular Audacity fork harassed by 4chan

As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.

That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…

Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.

The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat.

The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course).

I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin.

The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.

I.e., they see X as appropriate punishment, they should themselves be subject to X -- let them live by their own rules. Currently, they do not - they make their own rules, make all kinds of threats, and then just laugh about it on their chats in their basements.

What is actually effective is highly reliable and under-proportionate penalties, but that would require massive tracking systems that almost none of us would be willing to even consider, much less implement. E.g., if every anti-social act resulted in a fine between $5-$500 (scaled for income/wealth so it wasn't just a license for rich ppl to be a*holes), it would rapidly decline. But it would require a nearly insane tracking and judicial system.