Where did Chris Poole go

Last week there was an event which, perhaps, no one expected.

Chris Poole, founder of the legendary image board 4chan , announced his own withdrawal from the company, which he, in fact, founded more than 11 years ago, at the age of 15, in the form of a regular graphic forum.
The resource and the community, which literally blew up the Internet in the middle of zero with its own ambiguity, will now be managed by several experienced volunteers who have been involved in the work some time ago.

Chris himself writes: “As the only administrator of 4chan, the only one responsible for decisions and the only possessor of all knowledge (about the resource), I came to the conclusion that I was not satisfied with the current state of affairs and was inclined to consider a lot to be my own mistake.” Paraphrasing, we can say that he realized the need for constant movement, but 4chan became an “anchor” for him, not giving a chance to move.
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Since Poole founded 4chan as a schoolboy, with relevant interests, the resource became known primarily for the huge amount of “heyte” content: from online harassment, pranks, to the sensational Sarah Palin account at the time of hacking .

And even despite such a bad name, which the other resource owner would not fail to take advantage of, Chris did not earn a penny from 4chan even at his best times. In order to pay the bills, he was engaged in a third-party project called DrawQuest. Just over a year ago, this community dedicated to art and people practicing its pictorial part also began to stagnate and the creator, in fact, stopped devoting time and attention to it.

We return to 4chan - in many respects it was under his influence that the hacker group Anonymous appeared on the Internet, referring to the main form of representation of the user's identity on the resource — anonymous. His success was attempted by the countless number of other communities, from the Russian 2ch to countless Japanese anime imagboards.

And this is not to mention the fact that it was on 4chan that a huge amount and volume of various “seals” appeared, which over the last 10 years had enslaved the expanses of the Internet and our hearts. Not to mention the great variety of other memes. 4chan are photographs of naked celebrities, 4chan is animal protection and the search for their oppressors, 4chan is almost the entire “uncontrollable” Internet of today, from which the social networks and services we use today have grown (on Instagram and, moreover, Snapchat laid the basic mechanics that functioned on 4chan).

Obviously, Chris Poole seeks to not only give the community independence from the “omnipotent” moderator, but also to protect himself in this difficult information age. The lawsuits against the creators of Silk Road and Pirate Bay prove that he cannot feel completely safe sitting on a highly controversial and explosive resource, where the community sabotages everything for sabotage as such.

How the world of 4chan looks like in terms of numbers can be understood by looking at the illustration that “moot” (the main pseudonym of Chris Poole on the resource) attached to his farewell letter.



Chris Poole was also the first person in the modern history of the Internet to openly stand up for “anonymous” - he did this during his lecture for TED in 2010. Then he spoke about some of the "laws" that brought the community out of its own existence. One of them: “If it exists, then there is porn with it. With no exceptions".

What will be in the future, Chris Poole - is still unknown. He promised to keep his readers informed with the help of a personal blog , the top and last post in which is dedicated to the end of DrawQuest. Most likely, it will continue to develop and realize itself in the field of managed communities, since its experience and skills are, in fact, unique.

Whatever the young star of online communities chooses as a continuation of the path that he embarked on - we will closely watch his progress.