Christopher Poole Quotations

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.

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.

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.

When people meet me, and I'm generally pretty sociable, and I meet some definition of normal, they're almost surprised. And simultaneously disappointed.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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