The slightly longer version
A growing group of people (more on the scale and scope of that community below) are coalescing around a collection of theories and half-thoughts that they believe reveal an untold story of current world events. To decode what they believe is actually happening, followers of Q sift through the president’s tweets, government data sets or news articles.
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, described followers of the QAnon narrative as “an interactive conspiracy community.”
Sometimes followers of Q just look for signs that he exists. A popular Rosetta Stone they use is to look for uses of the number 17 (the letter Q’s placement in the alphabet). So when Alabama’s football team presented Mr. Trump with a jersey with the number 17, it was taken as coded signaling of Q’s influence. (The team was visiting the White House as the champions of the 2017 college football season and had presented President Barack Obama with a jersey bearing the number 15 when it visited after winning a championship in 2015.)
Q’s followers ascribe secret coordination and hidden motives to an endless parade of politicians, journalists, and leaders of industry and other institutions. Often, their theories are wildly at odds with reality.
The community uses the language of mind-bending pop culture alternate realities like “The Matrix” or “Alice in Wonderland.” It is common to tell stories of how followers have been “redpilled,” or have come to believe that observable reality is false and the QAnon narrative is real.
The shared rush to interpret clues from a “drop” of information from Q resembles something close to what video gamers call an MMO, or massive multiplayer online game.