Christopher Poole - 4chan Founder - Talk at SXSWi - William Hertling's Thoughtstream

Christopher Poole

4chan founder

new internet memes are born from this board
there are about 15,000 people browsing the index page for random all day, just looking for what is coming up

posts created on the random board fall off in minutes
it’s survival of the fittest: what manages to stay on the board is what survives, and the other stuff falls of

the community is very dynamic: people coming and coming, it’s not the same 12M every month
see threads change as the day goes by and different time zones: here are the americans, the japanese, the europeans as the day goes by
many different parts of site from origami to anime to the adult stuff. (don’t go clicking around if you don’t know what you are clicking on.)
Starting thinking last year: what could we be doing better?

the way content is created: many participates coming together, being squeezed together in one space.
the product is a meme.
the process itself is fascinating to watch how it unfolds.

after TED last year, August Hill came up to him and said he liked that people could chat anonymously.
there’s a loss of the innocence of youth if your identify is tracked across the internet. you get stuck in who you are. the cost of failure is very high when you are contributing as yourself. the mistakes are attributed with who you are.
when you have the ability to choose to be identified, to be able to experiment, to poke and prod, then
Mark Zuckerboard equates anonymity with a lack of authenticity. But in reality, it’s the exact opposite: you can more fully be exactly yourself without the concern of people’s opinion.

when you have identity, then you start to judge by their reputation. “oh this is from so and so, and therefore it must be good.”

we added recaptcha a few years ago to deal with spam
users hated this
up until this point there had been no structural barriers
people made the best of the situation: they started to make captcha art, saving really funny captcha

in the beginning the internet was like a letterpress. you could only contribute text.

now it’s more malleabe: you can draw something, push it up, someone else can download it, then draw on up, push it back up.
pictochart as an example
people are now using pictochat to do animations

it’s been around for 10 or more years
when describing 4chan, for years he had been saying that the content is fleeting. but realized that actually about 90% of the content was reposted.
but what is special, fleeting is the experience: the experience of using it at 9pm on a Sunday night will never be recaptured.
it’s like going to a drive-in movie: there’s something special about the shared experience.
the refrigerator magnet game…

sometimes people forget how important it is to have a place and a community to hang out with

people had described it as 4chan 2.0. that’s not it at all.
it’s a great site to build, share, create, and hang out – based on the lessons of 8 years of 4chan
we started using facebook connect

people were asking “how can the 4chan people be using facebook connect?”
we were sort of forced to.
we don’t disclose any information, we still allow people to post anonymously, but because the user knows that we know, it’s filters out some of the worst behavior.

reduce the amount of steps and friction for someone to take an image and edit it.

by comparison, in an photoshop community, if you came with an MS Paint image, you’d be laughed out of the community.

certain threads are really popular: they start with an image seed, which then gets edited into a bunch of somethings by other people.
almost everyone who joins the site goes in and plays with the image editing tools at some point.

this was surprising, as they thought that only a small part of the community would use artistic tools.

in canvas, like all other communities, a small percentage of users create all the content.

chat: synchronous but fleeting
commenting: asynchronous but lasting
reading a chat log is not interesting. chat is just not lasting.
it’s like improv comedy: it’s really fun to be in the audience, be live, and feel the tension. it’s not the same watching taped improv.
they started it to be very chatty, but then slide back over to commenting.

4chan was not an overnight success. it’s been a slow steady build over 8 years. there was no hockey stick.

you want the core community to form over time.
with canvas, concern about the culture growing: if we let 10,000 people into the site tomorrow, it would destroy the fragile culture that is developing.
people focus on scaling – as an architecture problem. the real problem is not scaling, it’s building a community worth scaling.