On Wednesday, 4chan founder Christopher Poole, better known by the moniker “moot,” announced his retirement from running the site. moot started 4chan 11 and a half years ago when he was 15, and the image-based bulletin board has grown into a staunch supporter of anonymity for its posters since. That notoriety has drawn some of the best and also a lot of the very, very worst to its 63 boards.
In his post today, moot explained the decision:
4chan has faced numerous challenges over the years, including how to continuously satisfy a community of millions, and ensure the site has the human, technical, and financial resources to continue operating. But the biggest hurdle it's had to overcome is myself. As 4chan's sole administrator, decision maker, and keeper of most of its institutional knowledge, I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure.
moot continued to say that he has made sure the site will be financially secure in the foreseeable future and has delegated the tasks of running the site to “a few senior volunteers.”
Throughout moot's leadership, 4chan was most often in the news for stirring up controversy—while a lot of the site's boards are pretty standard fare, anonymous posters have a penchant for throwing startling stuff up there. In a TED talk that moot gave in 2010, he noted that 4chan is the place where Rickrolling and LOLcats started and said that one of the site's community-generated rules is "If it exists, there is porn of it. No Exceptions."
The site again became embroiled in controversy when someone posted the nude photos of several celebrities that had been stolen from the celebrities' cellphones on 4chan's /b/ Web forum. One of the ways 4chan has been able to get around concerns over the sharing of images (sometimes objectionable images) is that content tends to expire rapidly as new discussions appear and roll old ones off the site (although the site has turned over the IP addresses of people posting about illegal activities before). Still, heavy scrutiny after the celebrity photo debacle led to moot saying he would honor DMCA requests in cases of “bona fide infringement.”
moot has not indicated what he will do next, although the 4chan creator did launch a startup app in 2013 called DrawQuest. He invited users to join a livestreamed Q&A session this Friday afternoon and said he would be making updates to his personal blog in the coming months. (And, for the curious, the top post on his personal blog talks about him shuttering DrawQuest.)
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