Christopher Poole Quotes
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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.
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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.
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4chan gets almost one million posts per day, hundreds of thousands of which are images.
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As kids, we say stupid things, and because there's not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we're sacrificing the ability to be youthful.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone who posts illegal content on 4chan is an idiot.
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I didn't want my parents to know about 4chan at first because of the adult content. By the time I was 18 and could talk about it, the site had become notorious for its exploits and the adult content on there.
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With 4chan, the cost of hosting it added up very quickly and at that time when I was 18, I didn't have the income of my own so it was a challenge to make money and break even on it.
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The world is changing so quickly, it's hard to get anything right for long.
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I don't hate anyone. Sometimes I wish I could interact with the community in a more normal way, though.
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There aren't many sites like 4chan where you can pop in every hour and see all new stuff.
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When we think of memetic culture, it is the 'sausage factory' of the old days.
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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.
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When people meet me, and I'm generally pretty sociable, and I meet some definition of normal, they're almost surprised. And simultaneously disappointed.
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I think 4chan is going to stay the same.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A journalist asked this to my father. He spent a day with me and interviewing my friends/colleagues and didn't understand how I could be the one that created 4chan and, as he put it, 'couldn't understand how to fit the square peg into a round hole.' The best way I have of describing it is, 'I didn't define it, and it doesn't define me.'