As a teenager, I used to use the nickname 'Moo' as a moniker online, and then I turned into 'Moot' for fun, which I didn't even realize was a real word at the time, and it just stuck with me.
Christopher Poole
For a lot of people, 4chan is their tree house - they go there to hang out. You can actually see the culture shift with time zone. Seeing how threads unwind and unravel is just a thrill, and you can't really share that magic.
4chan is a framework of pictures and text. I've always been extremely hands-off with dictating what gets posted, past general categories and rules. I support providing a place to discuss anything, although I don't agree with everything that's posted.
I don't hate anyone. Sometimes I wish I could interact with the community in a more normal way, though.
A journalist asked this to my father. He spent a day with me and interviewing my friends/colleagues and didn't understand how I could be the one that created 4chan and, as he put it, 'couldn't understand how to fit the square peg into a round hole.' The best way I have of describing it is, 'I didn't define it, and it doesn't define me.'
I didn't want my parents to know about 4chan at first because of the adult content. By the time I was 18 and could talk about it, the site had become notorious for its exploits and the adult content on there.
As kids, we say stupid things, and because there's not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we're sacrificing the ability to be youthful.
I get a lot of e-mail messages from people who say thanks for giving them a place to vent, an outlet to say what they can't say in real life with friends and work colleagues - things that they know are wrong, but they still want to say. Is it right? No, of course not. People say some disgusting, vile things.
The world is changing so quickly, it's hard to get anything right for long.
There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.
I think 4chan is going to stay the same.
With 4chan, the cost of hosting it added up very quickly and at that time when I was 18, I didn't have the income of my own so it was a challenge to make money and break even on it.
When we think of memetic culture, it is the 'sausage factory' of the old days.
For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral, and it took me a while, but I finally realized that that's just totally wrong.
There aren't many sites like 4chan where you can pop in every hour and see all new stuff.
Because there's no structural barrier to joining 4chan, the community is really dynamic; for every five people that leave, five new people join, bringing their perspective and culture. A lot of other communities get set in their ways.
4chan's culture is unique and spreads and draws people in like no other. It's also important to realize that 4chan wasn't some overnight success, and there was never 'hockey stick' - like growth.
4chan gets almost one million posts per day, hundreds of thousands of which are images.
Anyone who posts illegal content on 4chan is an idiot.
When people meet me, and I'm generally pretty sociable, and I meet some definition of normal, they're almost surprised. And simultaneously disappointed.
