Christopher Poole Quotes

The world is changing so quickly, it’s hard to get anything right for long.

There aren’t many sites like 4chan where you can pop in every hour and see all new stuff.

4chan gets almost one million posts per day, hundreds of thousands of which are images.

When we think of memetic culture, it is the ‘sausage factory‘ of the old days.

4chan’s culture is unique and spreads and draws people in like no other. It’s also important to realize that 4chan wasn’t some overnight success, and there was never ‘hockey stick‘ – like growth.

For a lot of people, 4chan is their tree house – they go there to hang out. You can actually see the culture shift with time zone. Seeing how threads unwind and unravel is just a thrill, and you can’t really share that magic.

I don’t hate anyone. Sometimes I wish I could interact with the community in a more normal way, though.

Anyone who posts illegal content on 4chan is an idiot.

For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral, and it took me a while, but I finally realized that that’s just totally wrong.

I think 4chan is going to stay the same.

4chan is a framework of pictures and text. I’ve always been extremely hands-off with dictating what gets posted, past general categories and rules. I support providing a place to discuss anything, although I don’t agree with everything that’s posted.

I get a lot of e-mail messages from people who say thanks for giving them a place to vent, an outlet to say what they can’t say in real life with friends and work colleagues – things that they know are wrong, but they still want to say. Is it right? No, of course not. People say some disgusting, vile things.

There’s a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that’s the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.

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.

Because there’s no structural barrier to joining 4chan, the community is really dynamic; for every five people that leave, five new people join, bringing their perspective and culture. A lot of other communities get set in their ways.