English-speaking hackers and punks fled 2chan for 4chan, flooding 4chan with disgusting images - “Tubgirl,” a diarrhea-stricken woman in a bathtub, was typical. This means every 4channer gets broadcast at full volume.Ĭhoosing the handle “moot,” Poole posted his inaugural greeting along with a request: “I politely people not to post stupid stuff on these boards,” he wrote. Poole takes pride in what he describes as the site’s “giant communal megaphone”: Unlike Reddit or Digg, where posts have to be voted into prominent view, new posts appear automatically on the top of 4chan threads. “That’s always been my party line.”Ĥchan was a radical reprieve from other online communities, which had strict policies against offensive content. “Anonymity enables people to share things they wouldn’t otherwise do,” Poole says. 2chan users logged on anonymously and didn’t have to register any personal information. Anyone could upload and comment on random art and photos on 2chan, from anime to cars to gore and porn.
His model was 2chan, an image board that was huge in Japan. At 12, he built his own computer, and three years later he launched 4chan. The only child of divorced parents, Poole would routinely stay awake until the wee hours as an adolescent, due to a dysfunction of his circadian rhythms. Not long ago, he was $20,000 in debt and had moved back in with his mom. Poole has never made money with 4chan - he tried to monetize the site’s extraordinary traffic, but advertisers were always too wary of the site’s content. “4chan has given me some amount of notoriety,” Poole tells me the week after he retired, “but it certainly hasn’t provided me with wealth.” It’s a frigid afternoon in New York, and Poole, dressed in a gray hoodie and jeans, is digging into a brunch of poached eggs and bruschetta at a cafe in the East Village. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery. “I’ve come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure,” he wrote in his farewell post.
All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding.
0 kommentar(er)
