Since returning to posting on the rickety 8chan copy 8kun, QAnon’s drops have been both less frequent and less interesting. The first 8kun posts went up in early November, and Q has only made about 500 drops since then – mostly tweets, links to news stories, memes, and even carbon copies of old posts.

Conspiracy theory researchers and Q watchers have mocked these new drops for how low effort and cheap they are. While there’s no such thing as a good Q drop, the old ones at least told interesting stories and spun an entertaining mythology. Remember the “Air Force One almost shot down by a missile” drops? Or the “Trump cut a secret deal with Kim Jong Un, who’s actually a CIA puppet?” Good times.

But in the last week, something has changed about the Q drops again. They’re still boring and lame, but they’re much more frequent.

QAnon, whoever they are, is posting like a sugar-jagged kid in a candy store. In the last week, Q has put up nearly 100 posts – 19 on the 28th, 30 on the 30th, and 52 on over the weekend. Even just Monday morning, Q put up 6 posts, another mix of memes and reposts of old drops.

This is as many posts as Q has ever put up in a short period of time, calling back to the high-wire days of November 2017, when the QAnon conspiracy theory was so new that it didn’t even have a name, and Q was telling tales of Hillary Clinton being arrested and the National Guard flooding the streets.

But that was then, and this is now. Whoever Q is, they’re putting very little effort into what they’re doing. Which prompts one to ask the question: why bother doing it at all? We’ve already seen that Q’s actual posts mean very little to the movement these days, with Q going silent for months at a time, and movement gurus keeping things going all on their own. We’ve also seen that all of the Q movement’s many conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak came not from the top, but from the bottom, with followers coming up with their own theories, and Q magnifying the most popular ones.

QAnon believers don’t need new material from Q, anymore than believers in the Bible don’t need new verses. So what’s the point of the posting spree?

I don’t know, but my fellow Q researcher @pokerpolitics has a theory: that the Q poster is trying to get to the magic number 4517. 45 for Trump, and 17 for the letter Q, of course.

With the most recent drops, Q is at about 4100, depending on when you read this. And they’ve put up about 110 posts in the last seven days. If Q keeps spamming drops at that rate, they’ll hit 4517 about about the end of May. What happens at the end of May that would necessitate such a frenzy? Nothing I can think of. Maybe the Q poster wants to hit the magic number and call it quits, taking a nice long summer vacation before returning for more grift in the fall. Maybe they’ve realized they’ve taken this as far as they can and want to go out with a bang. Or maybe something else.

Could #4517 be when they finally reveal their true identity? Or kick the movement into some new gear with new stories or riddles? Or post some undeniable proof of Q’s link to Trump (not that anything like that exists, but still…)? That’s what Q tried with drop #1776, which showed a cropped photo of Trump’s signature with “#1776” written in obviously different handwriting below it. It was clearly an attempt at the Q proof to end all Q proofs, though nobody with a working brain could have fallen for it.

Trump’s birthday is June 14th, so maybe the frenzy will be dragged out until then. There’s no other big political events coming up that quickly, and with the pandemic still going, who even knows when anything is going to happen? Maybe it has something to do with an established event, and maybe not.

It’s also entirely possible that the frenzy of posts means nothing more than the Q poster being bored and wanting to wind up his followers. Q often drops hidden countdowns and vague predictions into posts, only for them to mean nothing. It’s how this all works, after all: say vague things, jump on them if they come true, and forget about them if they don’t. It’s enough for most Q fans that Q is posting, the content doesn’t even matter.

The bottom line of all of this is that the Q movement has gotten to the point where the people who believe in it are going to do what they’re going to do, regardless of what Q posts. We’ve seen a spike in violent incidents, medical misinformation, and major Q figures banned from social media in the last few months, almost all due to coronavirus, which Q is way behind the curve on. So the movement is clearly driving toward something. If the internet troll who created the movement wants to drive toward something, too, then that’s their right.

Just don’t expect it to be very interesting.