"It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived presti

"It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige." Unlikely. I can't speak for everybody, but I can speak for myself, and I would be extremely hesitant to cite a random webpage in a journal article for several reasons: 1) It can change. ArXiv has versioning, but even so, this is still a problem. You cite something, and months later you go back and find the thing you cited says something slightly different. 1b) It can disappear. Again, less of an issue for ArXiv, but a big problem for any other website. Linkrot is real. 2) There's probably a better source. Maybe in this example a 4chan thread is the original provenance of an idea, but 99 times out of 100, there's a better, original source for the idea. 3) There's no peer review. Peer-review is not a pre-requisite for publication, but if you don't have it, it just makes people more skeptical of your results. 4) It's perceived as lazy. This is closest to your point (i.e. prestige), but not the same. Like it or not, if you cite informal sources in a paper, people start to wonder about the rigor of everything else you do. It's an intangible, but when you're trying to get papers accepted, intangibles count. Basically, citing a webpage is risky. You avoid it if you can.