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Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away from 4Chan
- saurik 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9199626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9199626
- lucb1e 11y agoTL;DR: It was stressing to have to deal with all the illegal or harmful (for victims) stuff posted on 4chan which people then got angry over that it got removed. Some hackers were looking for his personal information and posting it if they found. The site is also expensive with no profit model. And finally, if something actually did happen to him, there was nobody who could take over. This move put other people in charge. The fappening and gamergate incidents were the straw that broke the camel's back after the most stressful month yet.
- puranjay 11y agoChristopher Poole is a modern day Warhol. Not in the sense that he is an artist himself, but because he has been so important and influential for modern culture. Nearly everything that you identify today as 'internet culture' originated on 4Chan. And as this culture is quickly becoming mainstream culture now. He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
- rue 11y ago> Nearly everything that you identify today as 'internet culture' originated on 4Chan That’s an… uh… bold claim.
- sageabilly 11y agoGo check out Know Your Meme and just browse around a bit. A vast, vast, vast majority of content that started exploding across the internet back when we were all young and innocent either originated on 4chan or was quickly picked up and shared on 4chan. I'm not saying that 4chan is the be all end all- Something Awful can probably be said to be even more influential as a whole- but I think 4chan was the very first example of the modern anonymous internet watering hole that spawned international media attention and completely changed how information was disseminated across the world.
- morganvachon 11y agoI think the point was that "Internet culture" is much more than just image memes. Internet culture as a whole has been around as long as the Internet itself and it's constantly evolving, like a living thing. And I'm talking back before the Web; BBSes, Usenet, and e-mail all had their own cultures that stayed around and evolved as the Web was born, and their influence can still be felt today. That's a concept that I feel is lost on anyone born in the 90s or later.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agothe online "culture" predates the "internet"
- ska 11y agoYou are confusing the "the internet" with "the web". The internet has been around for about as long as it's been sensible to describe an online culture. While in the early days (e.g. 70's, 80's) the internet certainly wasn't the only network to be influencing culture (c.f. FidoNet) it was a primary source, particularly via university campuses.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoLol how old are you young man :-) I have been online since the early 80's I used to work for Telecom Gold and Prestel back then. I even get a dedication (to my handle) in one of the books (written by a booker prize nominated author) covering the early online culture in the UK. There has been an online culture at least the 70's - and that is not counting precursor tech like telegraph and radio hams
- ska 11y agoExactly - the internet had been a big contributor to online culture through the 70s. Of course this stuff all had precursors in things like ham radio, model trains, etc. but it's not really sensible to identify those as "online". Nothing springs from the void. Nice to get called "young man" though, it's been a while :) [edited, after parent was]
- puranjay 11y agoI still stand by it. Something Awful, Fark, et al were influential, but whatever they created remained confined to the internet. What 4Chan has managed to create has permeated the mainstream. My non-geeky friend sent me a Pepe yesterday. That is entirely 4Chan.
- morganvachon 11y agoThe Internet existed before 2000. It also existed before the World Wide Web was created in 1993. And so on, and so on. Each generation influences the next, but after a couple of generations have gone by, the newest generation comes to think of the one directly before theirs as "the original". I say that as someone who was on Usenet in the late 80s/early 90s as a teen, and that was when that particular corner of the Internet was in decline. All 4Chan has managed to do is recycle the same level of inanity that permeated the Usenet and BBS spaces before it. You are "standing by" a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.
- panic 11y agoI think you're misinformed: the real source of all internet culture is and was ebaumsworld.com. Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
- sentenza 11y agoAlso, what about Slashdot? The Jargon file? Usenet? I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s and have purposefully avoided 4chan since I first heared of it. At no point has it been difficult to avoid 4chan. I gather it has been very influential in the niche of image memes and I vaguely remember something about teenagers calling everybody a "fag" a few years back, but otherwise I couldn't say what the influence has been.
- DanBC 11y agoYou'd have to make special effort to get some of the Usenet references. meow? snuh? McQ sigs? borkborkbork? yEnc sucks! None of these had much lasting impact. There's a bunch of stuff from 4chan that you have heard of, even if you don't know it came from 4chan.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gozo 11y agoThe legacy of mediums like Usenet isn't jokes but companies, applications, organisations etc. If you grew up during the heyday of Usenet (or BBSes, IRC, some forums, mailing lists) you had a pretty good chance of going on to do something in computing. Joke can help people come together but they doesn't form the substance of a culture. I guess people from 4chan could go on and be the next generation of marketers or something, but I doubt it.
- 9872 11y ago
- Spooky23 11y agoPoole or somebody close to him is good at PR. I'm kind of shocked he hasn't figured out a way to cash in.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- werid 11y ago> it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream do you think it's healthy to stay in an echo chamber for long periods of time?
- mark_integerdsv 11y agoI agree with you to a certain extent. I also very much enjoyed his thoughts on privacy/anonymity and the multi-faceted nature of human personalities. You can find some quotes here: http://observer.com/2011/10/4chans-moot-facebook-and-google-dont-understand-that-were-all-like-diamonds/ http://observer.com/2011/10/4chans-moot-facebook-and-google-... Those concepts are more important in my opinion, to the gestating human identity that we will all be part of via technological evolution.
- tootie 11y agoI remember people "trolling" on usenet back in the 90s. It was way more tame back then however. Usenet and even BBSs were frequently full of pretty horrid material (gore, child porn and the like) as well as predators hiding behind a terminal.
- benihana 11y ago>He needs more recognition for this. He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.
- typon 11y agoIf that's true then that's really sad state for Internet culture considering everything that comes out of 4chan is stupid
- xyzzyz 11y agoThe spin in this article is pretty interesting. 4chan has been a cesspool for years. The stuff highlighted in the article, the leaking nude photos of celeb, and harrasing some game developers, is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered, or getting scores of people to actually commit suicide, or leaking nude photos of random women, or harassing some new target every other day. The article calls these "the good times", though. If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
- breadbox 11y agoSounds like what changed wasn't him or the events; it was the fact that the events were noticed by the world at large.
- exo762 11y ago> All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding. "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure," he wrote in his farewell post. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery. Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle. Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses! As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts). There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons. Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
- ablation 11y agoSometimes, things just get too toxic to have to worry about. I can't imagine it was pleasant to have to endure looking after 4chan.
- gadders 11y agoMoot has a login here, doesn't he? Be good to hear his thoughts.
- lawl 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923999
- Giorgi 11y agoActually, everyone knows what happened, he got tired years ago paying hosting bills and supporting board, abandoned site, then SJW attacked and he broke down. That's that.
- ionwake 11y agoMy only question for Moot has always been this: How did he host the site on a pc in his room for years without getting into trouble with the law with all the dubious content being uploaded to the server?
- jusssi 11y agoMy guess is, visiting the site provides useful data points for PRISM and similar.
- chippy 11y agoThe article answers this question by saying that Moot has always fully cooperated with the law as far as possible, far beyond other social media sites. Just because users were anonymous never meant there was privacy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago4chan had privacy. Just not from the law.
- debacle 11y agoIt's been widely assumed for years that 4chan is a honeypot.
- bunderbunder 11y agoFTFA: The Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity to webmasters and Internet service providers over members' content, protected him.
- justtopostthis2 11y agoIt was never hosted on a pc in his room, and had to change hosts many times early on because of the dubious content and massive traffic.
- jsf666 11y agoStill i prefer a place like 4chan where there is true freedom of speech and not a place like reddit ruled by facistic mods. On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
- gbanfalvi 11y agoYet somehow the quality of the discussion/information is better in reddit and even moreso in heavily moderated subreddits such as r/askhistory or you know... simply on here. Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
- nxttuesday 11y agoExample? /tv/ sucks Yet all the content is seen, including the good stuff - I think a filter reduces good stuff and shit stuff and you get a crappy middle
- Loughla 11y agoIt depends on what you're looking for, really. If you want mindless brain candy, to giggle at absurdity, or revel in the filth that is humanity - then the larger boards on reddit, and /b/, and /r9k/ are the place to be, and in that context, are better. If you want curated debate and discussion, then more moderated boards and places like hn are where to go, and would be called better in this case. I would say that the discussion quality is better on more heavily moderated boards, but the exposure to varied topics is definitely stifled. The flip side of heavier moderation is that it is much easier for dissenting opinions to be stifled. And even if it's not intentional, or not even occurring, knowing that there is heavy moderation will always lead a very vocal minority of users to claim discrimination and censorship. It's harder to avoid being just an echo chamber, too.
- morganvachon 11y ago"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum, it means that you can speak your mind and your government can't arrest or censor you for it. If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you. Similarly, if you go onto an Internet forum that is owned by someone who is not you, they can moderate you into oblivion because it's their forum. > On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything. That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right? I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
- Paul_S 11y agoThe history of 4chan is always whitewashed/demonised depending on what point you want to make. Moot is not a saint and not the victim he's trying to paint himself to be. As to 4chan itself, it's a message board - it's the people that used it that have done all these things and if 4chan goes away people will just move to 8chan or other places so all this agonising over whether or not to censor/shut it down is pointless.
- erikb 11y agoThe thing is that most people here will agree with you that its the posters responsibility what content they upload. But the law says otherwise, at least in my country and I guess in the US as well.
- astrange 11y agoProviders are safe carrying most content as long as they comply with legal requests as they come in and aren't actively conspiring to keep illegal content up. The only thing you're required to proactively report and delete is child pornography.
- erikb 11y agoI don't think you can't make money out of 4Chan. Give this website to Kim Dotcom and you have a few millions a month later. Also ad providers... there are certainly a lot of them who don't care about legal and serious traffic. Think about all the illegal things marketing departments do to get the ad to your browser and your data back. Reading this article I think moot was just too nice a person for what 4chan was.
- anon3_ 11y agoA does leave out a couple of things. The same time the gamergate / fappening controversy began, he had an activist feminist girlfriend around the time. Gamergate discovered that the press uncritically reported the allegations of a lot of frauds and charlatans. It never focused on how gamergaters themselves are on the receiving end of threats. As for the fappening, nothing too special there. Find and arrest the hacker - that's pretty much all you can do, it was never a 4chan thing. 4chan risked reaching the tipping point of becoming reddit. People are happy to have a place to express themselves without a bunch of moral police hypocrites pushing them around. When Poole, in chan terms, went full cuck, he gave up his publicly displayed value just so he could have sex with his feminist girlfriend. So yeah, I'm not surprised a total hypocrite like that gets disrespect. It's sad to how a girl gets in the way of guys greatness.