Today I announced my retirement from @4chan, a community I founded at the age of 15 and have served for 11.5 years: https://t.co/jEMsDf5nfz
— moot (@moot) January 21, 2015
Whether you see 4chan as the necessary downside of the benefits of a truly anonymous internet, as a wretched hive of scum and villainy that should be nuked from orbit, or somewhere in between, the resignation of Christopher Poole, the website’s founder (until now) and only administrator is still a pretty big deal. In his resignation letter, he referred to his role on the site as “4chan’s sole administrator, decision maker, and keeper of most of its institutional knowledge, I’ve come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure,” and spoke of working over the past two years to fix many of those deficits, to the extent that he hopes his resignation won’t represent any noticeable changes for users.
The last time there wasn’t a guy going by the name moot in charge of a site called 4chan, I was in high school. And that’s a stretch of time that’s a lot more impressive than it used to be, much to my chagrin. Poole’s resignation marks a discrete end of an internet era, a thing that’s usually not so easy to pin to a place and time. What it will mean for the future is, like a lot of the internet, up to the mob.
(via The Daily Dot)
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