The founder of one of the Internet’s most notorious sites is moving on. Christopher Poole, better known as ‘moot,’ the founder of infamous image board 4chan, announced in a blog post this morning that he is leaving the site after over 11 years as the site’s sole full-time employee.
In the post, Poole discussed the challenges he faced running the site, and ultimately blamed his own failures for the site’s ills.
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.
For those unfamiliar with 4chan, it’s an image board that gave birth to many of the Internet’s most popular memes, from LOLcats to rage comics to RickRolling. Ever seen an image with bold all-caps white text like this one? 4chan popularized that.
Poole founded 4Chan when he was 15 years old, and saw it grow from a small community discussing manga and anime to the living, breathing embodiment of the Internet it is today. But for all the goofy image-based fun 4chan generated, it also served as staging grounds for Internet lynch mobs, and was an early meeting spot for members of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
Today I announced my retirement from @4chan, a community I founded at the age of 15 and have served for 11.5 years: https://t.co/jEMsDf5nfz
— moot (@moot) January 21, 2015
Eleven and a half years of @4chan, in numbers: pic.twitter.com/YhzUy0XbvQ — 4chan (@4chan) January 21, 2015
Poole said that the site’s control would be transitioned to several senior volunteer administrators in the coming weeks to ensure a seamless user experience. He will also be holding a livestreamed Q&A session from 4chan’s YouTube channel this Friday afternoon.
