4chan’s Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away

At 11 a.m. on January 21st, Christopher Poole posted a note online saying he was retiring as the administrator of 4chan, the notorious website he had founded as a high school student in upstate New York 11 years earlier. The news was as shocking as some of the site’s content: The Zuckerberg of the online underground was walking away.

Poole had started 4chan as a way for fellow anime obsessives to post and discuss images. But over the next decade, it morphed into the Net’s greatest factory of memes and mayhem. LOLcats and Rickrolling started on 4chan. So did Anonymous, the international collective of hacktivists and geeks. Most recently, 4chan has been in the crosshairs of two of the biggest controversies on the Web: the celebrity nude leaks called the Fappening, and Gamergate, the increasingly vicious battle over sexism in the video-game industry.

With 20 million unique visitors a month — and more than 40 billion page views since its inception— 4chan is one of the most-trafficked websites ever. Poole, a lanky, acerbic 27-year-old with a mop of light-brown hair, has given a popular TED talk and been the keynote speaker at SXSW Interactive, and in 2010 Facebook brought him in to give an informational address to employees (one asked if he could ever see 4chan becoming a part of Facebook; Poole’s response: “Uhhhhh, nope!”). Jeff Moss, founder of the offline hacker conference DefCon, calls 4chan “the embodiment of the original Internet spirit.” When Poole topped Time’s poll in 2009 as “The World’s Most Influential Person” — beating out Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama — many thought he deserved it, especially the 4channers who’d gamed the vote to make sure he won.

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.

“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. 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. Not long ago, he was $20,000 in debt and had moved back in with his mom.

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. At 12, he built his own computer, and three years later he launched 4chan. His model was 2chan, an image board that was huge in Japan. Anyone could upload and comment on random art and photos on 2chan, from anime to cars to gore and porn. 2chan users logged on anonymously and didn’t have to register any personal information. “Anonymity enables people to share things they wouldn’t otherwise do,” Poole says. “That’s always been my party line.”

4chan was a radical reprieve from other online communities, which had strict policies against offensive content. 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. This means every 4channer gets broadcast at full volume. 

Choosing the handle “moot,” Poole posted his inaugural greeting along with a request: “I politely [ask] people not to post stupid stuff on these boards,” he wrote. The stupid stuff came anyway. English-speaking hackers and punks fled 2chan for 4chan, flooding 4chan with disgusting images — “Tubgirl,” a diarrhea-stricken woman in a bathtub, was typical. “I’m not easily offended,” Poole says, “but I have never sought out the grotesque.”

Poole created more than 60 message boards, on everything from video games to LGBT. But the one that got the most attention is what he calls “the nuthouse”: the Random board, most often identified by the last character of its website address, /b/. Racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes pervaded the forums. Around 2006, the self-described “/b/tards” moved toward more extreme pranks, like inundating an online children’s game with swastikas, or calling in bomb threats to a high school and an NFL stadium.

Poole excelled at making 4chan look like the Wild West, but he had no problem playing sheriff. Whenever the FBI traced bomb threats to 4chan, Poole complied with authorities, which sometimes meant turning over the IP address of the suspected user. He also complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which required him to remove content if a copyright holder objected (although he had cover if anything slipped through the cracks: The Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity to webmasters and Internet service providers over members’ content, protected him). 

Poole also implemented rules of his own: no one under 18 allowed on the site, no posting of anyone’s personal information, no spamming. Violators were banned. Poole has never had any employees. Instead, a couple of dozen volunteers around the world monitor threads, kept discussions on topic and removed snuff films, child porn and other illegal content.