Keynote: Christopher “moot” Poole (13/03 @ 2PM)

March 13, 2011 | 7 notes

A packed out Ballroom D was the scene for 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, and despite a twenty minute delay, he was warmly received by a mix of delegates, most of whom looked like they’d never browsed 4chan before. Indeed, I had to give a BBC staffer sitting next to me a brief summary of the site, and warned him not too look too closely.

When moot finally took to the stage he launched right into things, giving a basic overview of the site and lightly touching on some of its controversies (although no mention was made of the more, er, illegal material the site is infamous for). He broke out numbers fairly early too - 12 million hits per month, with /b/ (which he pronounced “slash bee slash”) accounting for half of them. By this point my BBC friend had loaded the site onto his iPad and I had to nudge him quietly and whisper “careful”.

Poole kept repeating the word ‘ephemeral’ in connection to 4chan, pointing out that the site’s random nature meant most posts fell off the popular sections “in seconds”. One particularly interesting point came up when he talked about 4chan’s anonymous nature - “the cost of failure is high when you contribute as yourself” he said, highlighting the idea of moving schools as a way to reinvent yourself - a concept an authenticated user cannot experience. He then contrasted this with the expose-everything-to-everyone poster boy Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently believes that anonymity is equivalent to cowardice. Poole suggested that instead it opened new avenues for users.

Discussion then turned to the topic of community management, highlighting the point when 4chan began enforcing captchas on all posts. He talked of receiving 500-odd emails complaining that it would kill the site, but then showed a series of slides featuring witty user submissions build jokes out of amusing captchas. This, he argued, demonstrated the creative and intelligent nature of 4chan posters, railing against the image of them as teenage boys with too much World of Warcraft and not enough sunlight.

Finally we moved to Poole’s new project, Canvas - it’s a collaborative drawing experiment modelled on things like Poole’s favourite internet pasttime, a Flash-powered fridge magnet game. He showed slides of some of the funnier images and talked about the decision to use Facebook Connect which initially seemed like a contradiction after 4chan’s anonymous-only system. He explained that this helped filter out 20% of the trolls and spammers from the start, which made things much easier when getting the community off the ground.

With the bulk of his talk now over, Poole directed attendees to http://canv.as/sxsw where people can sign up for the currently invite-only service. It was then time to open for questions, which were somewhat disrupted by half the attendees noisily making their way out as Poole answered. He claimed to be unable to give a direct number, but estimated that somewhere around 25% of 4chan’s traffic consisted of active users - an awe-inspiring statistic given the scale of the userbase.

It’s still interesting to me that the man indirectly responsible for the introduction of memes like lolcats can now appear as the presentable face of the internet, but perhaps that speaks for its ultimate playfulness and creativity. As I chatted to my BBC friend I suggested that despite Facebook’s overwhelming subsistence on user-generated content, it was all just timesinking without any creativity or value to it. For all 4chan’s anarchy and illegality, it seems that its net effect on the internet is a reminder that when we remove enforced identity and allow people to just create, the raw resources we produce are amongst our most interesting and exciting. Also, the game.

- Matt Andrews