Nick Bilton/The New York Times Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” is the creator of the message board 4Chan.
In 2003, while still in high school, Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan. The site includes content that many people find offensive. Nevertheless, or maybe because of it, the site has millions of users and has been responsible for many of the strange memes that have propagated on the Internet, including LOLcats.
The 4chan site is a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language. As Gawker’s Nick Douglas described in 2008, areas of the Web site involve people hoping to “shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other.” One of the largest Web forums in the United States, the site continues to influence mainstream culture. Here is an edited and condensed version of my chat with Mr. Poole:
Nick Bilton: You go by the name “Moot.” Why?
Christopher Poole: As a teenager, I used to use the nickname “Moo” as a moniker online, and then I turned into “Moot” for fun, which I didn’t even realize was a real word at the time, and it just stuck with me.
How old were you when you started 4chan?
I was 15. I’m 22 now.
What were you trying to do when you started the Web site?
On my summer break, I discovered Japanese animation and I started watching a lot of anime on online forums. I soon discovered an image-board Web forum called 2chan, and I had never seen anything like it before. What really struck me about it was how fast it moved. Even back then you could sit and hit refresh on your browser and continue to see new content.
So then what happened?
The code for 2chan was publicly available, and I took it and translated it from Japanese to English using tools online, and I threw it up on the Web and sent it out to 20 people.
Read more…