Janitors

Composite sketch of the average jannie.

Janitors (also affectionately known as “Jannies”) are the unpaid, yet tenacious, enforcement arm of The Fediverse. Every forum and online social group you encounter typically will have some form of moderation staff to maintain the will of its owners. However, Jannies go above-and-beyond the devotion of the typical moderator, spending vast amounts of their waking lives maintaining “order” on sites like 4chan.

While Janitors post on the same sites as Anons, most of them are by no means part of Anonymous. Rather, they represent a dead-end evolutionary cul de sac of online social dynamics. Jannies are the final sad fate of unremarkable sociopaths, who clawed their way to the top for these unpaid positions, in order to feel better about their poor sense of self-worth. Once empowered (and realizing they have nowhere else to advance in society) they immediately turn into tyrants, finding new and creative ways each day to enforce their wills on the rest of Anon.

Many of them are in fact, furries and pedophiles, and will have no second thoughts about using their positions to silence opposing views to their unpopular lifestyles. Nor will they have any qualms about ratting you out to private investigators, law enforcement, foreign intelligence, the Office of Special Affairs, their third-cousin Rosanne (twice removed), or anyone else for that matter, just for the sake of getting brownie points. Many of them lead double-lives as wingnuts and shills.

Clean it up, jannie.

If you are running ops on any of the imageboards (or any forum, chat room, Facebook group, etc) jannies will most likely be the primary line of defense you will have to work around. Since jannies usually have the power to ban you from the site, and will usually hold influence and sway with other powerful members on the site, this can make then a genuine tactical nuisance if they are not planned for in advance.

The janitor will oftentimes have a hyper-developed sense of paranoia, as they are constantly watching for threats to their hegemony and power. Because of this, many of them live in a state of constant hyper-vigilance. This sense can be incredibly attuned, to the point where some jannies can sniff you out as a potential threat before you even do anything.

Their weakness, however, is in their limited ability to deal with actual problems. Simple triangulation tactics are oftentimes enough to distract and incapacitate the feeble-minded janitor. Having one party make a gigantic mess for the jannie to clean up, while you smooth-talk other community members in the background of the chaos, is a historically-proven technique (especially if you time it in off-hours when there are only one or two jannies around).