libre.io — /moot/

.. (parent directory)

moot's retirement Q&A session from January 2015.

In this "historically significant" 8-hour livestream, moot talks about the early days of 4chan, issues from around internet history, and his personal thoughts and sentiments as to building and maintaining an online community.

Rough transcript from the bibanon wiki. Corrected errors and added more sections. Work-in-progress.

Transcript (WIP)

0 Hours

0:00 - 0:10

00:00:41 Alright, now we get to learn why I’m not a radio announcer. Mic check in front of 24 thousand people, so yeah.
00:00:54 Thanks for joining for what is going to be the final Q&A or PMQ as we used to call them with 4chan, and y’know hopefully I think it’s an opportunity for you all to roast me or... oh god, I hear myself in the background now.
00:01:12 okay, um, yeah, just gonna kinda say our goodbyes and y’know ask any questions, and I’ll try to respond to as many of those questions as I can, and you know, as honestly and as thoroughly as possible
00:01:29 and so let’s begin.
00:01:30 So I’m if you’re not checking the Q&A board, just go to… I’m not going to use the hangouts feature to take questions, and comments are disabled on both the stream and hangouts on the youtube page, and so go to
00:01:45 boards.4chan.org/qa and one of the moderators has put up a sticky which has already 1500 posts, this is gonna take forever, it’s good to see the last time I did one of these, I spent 4 hours doing it, I don’t expect to do it that long this time around, but that was the limit, now there’s an 8 hour limit, so I guess we can go for a marathon maybe.
00:02:06 So the stickies will be capped off and kinda rotated out and so if that sticky is locked, then go to the next one. The unlocked sticky is where you should be asking your questions.
00:02:20 Ah, okay, so the first question, pretty straight shooter, number 520.
00:02:25 When did you feel you were losing touch with the userbase?
00:02:28 I mean It’s hard to ask, first of all it assumes that I have lost touch, which I guess most of my detractors will loudly claim.
00:02:38 But I founded 4chan when I was 15, which obviously means my interests have changed since then. I mean, when I was 15 I used to basically sit on my computer all day every day, and I more or less still do that, although then I used to
00:02:51 read Something Awful and spend a lot of time in chatrooms and IRC, watching a lot of anime, and that’s kinda how 4chan came to be
00:03:01 these days I spend a lot of time on my computer, but seem to mostly be wasting my time on the internet, just poking around, reading the news, reading my email
00:03:13 I have a much more boring existence, and as /a/ knows, I don’t watch as much anime any more. I still play games, on occasion, I might play a few games a year.
00:03:25 I’m afraid to name my choices in games cause /v/ will probably shit all over them, but I played GTA online earlier this year, The Last of Us, a few iPhone games, I’m still trying to beat Hyper Hexagonest on the iPhone, but y’know, again, my interests have shifted over the years,
00:03:45 And so I guess that, you know, to some of the kind of older users and kinda die-hards, the fact that I am not as kinda up to speed with anime and video games and whatnot has kinda been interpreted as I've kinda forsaken, I guess, the early community, but I would just say my preferences have shifted
00:04:10 And again, my responsibility and kind of role over the years has been to, you know, act in the best interests of the community at large and the website and I think that, despite the fact that, maybe I don't, have the same interests I had when I was younger, I've always acted in a way that I think has served the greater community which I think speaks to, kind of a larger, uh, rift over the years is that a lot of people I think kind of fail to appreciate how large 4chan is, and how varied the boards are, and how varied the demographic of users are, and you know, sometimes, [pause]
00:04:55 You know, that's actually one of the reasons we implemented the unique, uh, users and threads just to give people an idea of how many people are actually participating in a thread, but I think that a lot of people sometimes interpret their own world view or their own opinions or views about their board or the site and whatnot as the canonical view and kinda fail to appreciate that there are more stakeholders than just themselves, just the threads they like, just the board that they like. I mean again, about maybe 2 million people will post on 4chan in, you know, any given month, and about 20 million
00:05:31 People browse it. I mean, that’s just gigantic, right? And you know, if you go back and read these old newsposts that I used to make, there’s one called “Full House” that .. I kinda pointed out that 4chan has kinda come to serve a gajillion people since its inception.
00:05:48 And we’ve updated the software, obviously, and we’ve added various features that have kinda helped to scale it to a larger audience, but at the end of the day the basic format of the boards and the way that threads work hasnt changed in 11+ years.
00:06:02 And so we’re accomodating 20 million+ people with about, I think it’s 64 boards, and there are certain limitations on how well that’ll work. You tend to see kind of a decrease in quality as post rate goes up. People have just this very specific view of the site, how it’s being managed and whatnot, depending on where they’re browsing, and fail to appreciate that it’s a lot of people under one roof who have their own different views and own different wants and needs.
00:06:46 The challenge in any sort of administrative role is to serve as many people as possible as best you can. So, that’s been the goal. Let’s see...
00:07:00 “Are the rumors of you selling out to the SJWs true? Tell us why /pol/ has turned into the new /b/.” I’m sure I’ll get this question a thousand times today. I don’t understand what that question means. But no, I have not sold out to the social justice warriors. As far as I can tell, no one really identifies with that term, but that is the boogieman of the moment.
00:07:24 “Can you tell us why /pol/ has turned into the new /b/?”No real reason other than I decided to harken back to old 4chan fun. I think it did actually kind of serve a purpose to drive off a certain percentage of the userbase for the better, and I do think that the flags and IDs actually have increased the quality of the board.
00:07:51 It’s still more or less been moderated [accuracy?] in terms of what content is removed. Really the only things that tend to be removed are blatantly off-topic things, but I have poked around /pol/ since its inception and I would say on the whole it’s better today than it has been in the past.
00:08:12 Again, I’m sure that you could find a thousand people that’ll disagree with me.
00:08:19 So number 541 “Why not just delete /tv/ at this point?” This is a huge question, and more of a statement. Let’s see...I don’t really need to read the stance on this, but why would we delete it? Tens of thousands of people use it. Just because you don’t like it or like its current form doesn’t mean that those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands- in fact, I can actually pull up analytics, I should probably have that up. You know, just because you don’t like it, again 4chan is the epitome of “stop liking what I don’t like”, and if you don’t like it, then going back to the age-old advice of don’t browse it, hide and delete, or rather hide and report.
00:09:06 But if you have a concrete suggestion as to what exactly to change, in the past I’ve always welcomed this by email. I very rarely get constructive feedback other than, you know, “Go die in a fire” or “xyz sucks” or “Fire such-and-such mod” or “Ban this user”. And so… If you had concrete suggestions.. But I feel like the people that complain about a board are usually- unless there’s a real objective problem that exists which every user of the board is facing, which are difficult to find because again, your interpretation of how things are is very much based on your own view and is not largely representative of the view held by the majority of users.
00:10:00 But these types of things are kind of hard to resolve, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to please you.
00:10:05 So /tv/, for example, is visited by 476,000 people in a month or the last 30 days at least, and served 13.7 million page views. And so again if you can find consensus among those 450,000+ people then be my guest. You know, you could probably do a better job with it than I could.
00:10:28 Do you still hate /pol/? # 567? No I don't hate /pol/, I don't hate anything on 4chan, I don’t hate anybody. I find that it is a lot of work to hate strangers on the internet and don’t tend to spend my time doing that.

0:10 - 0:20

00:10:43 Who is going to be the new head admin replacing you? # 573 Are there any other chans other than 4chan that you visit? Why did you stop lifting?
00:10:51 New admin? I kinda answered this in the news post that I posted. There is no head admin per se replacing me. I mean I've more or less been the only real “administrator” as far as the only decision-maker/leader/manager/whatnot 4chan has ever had. That's not a role that is going to be filled immediately. In the interim there are three people that I didn’t name by name but I described their roles in that post.
00:11:26 So, one is the lead developer. Most people know this person already if you dig around for it but he's been helping out for about two years now and and he wrote the native extension, the javascript extension.
00:11:43 It’s more of the less all the backend development what not for the better part of two years now and he is excellent when he runs the catalog there or the unofficial catalog rather. He made our catalog and he’s great.
00:11:54 The other is the server admin, out of every man who has been helping out for actually over 10 years. Well maybe not [all time] but he’s the oldest volunteer that’s still serving. He's been incredible over the years, he was once the lead developer and [even as] we all have a real life and real job now, he always continued to pitch in and help with the servers and stuff so we're very lucky to have him.
00:12:31 And the last is that managing moderator, who is the person that I delegated a lot of the HR roles to over the past year. Believe it or not there is a very real orientation process, in terms of going through the janitor applications and doing orientation, and rule clarifications and being present on the team channel and on the Janitor channel and you know on 4chan, blablabla...
00:13:04 He's taking a very active role in the day-to-day management of the team volunteers that we have He surfaces the problems that needed my attention to me, so he's also done a really a excellent job. [In the long-term], there’s not some group of [people] that are the “end all be all” administrators.
00:13:36 I haven’t named those people yet [or] decided what to do about that. In the short term, nothing should change from a user's perspective., [Classifying them] isn't fair to the other team members, The three core team members, who are the three minimum set of people I need to ensure a smooth transition, have all decided to pitch in .
00:13:57 Are there any other chans you visit? Actually, because people ask me this a lot: Obviously I visit other websites. I visited other imageboards over the years but I don't actively use any, because 4chan is a handful, [it] already has all of my interest represented on it. There's not really a compelling reason to use other web sites.
00:14:23 I'm sure I’ll have an opportunity to do this later but, I actually did want to give a shout out to kirtainer (who runs 420chan) [who sent me an email that said] ‘hey, it's been forever’, a day or two ago. To single out 420chan, it’s actually one of the imageboards that I have actually respected over the years. I think that what's kind of defined a lot of image boards, even going back to the first kind of spin off from 4chan (which was 5Chan), 7chan and all these others. They tend to spin out based on a decision I make, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like 4chan, or they don’t like 4chan culture or whatever. More or less over the years, most of those sites have kind of fizzled out.
00:15:10 While 420Chan started similarly to 5chan, (the admin didn’t like me), I really respect that he wanted to have a bunch of topics that 4chan didn’t have but 420Chan essentially [made] into being because it was like:
00:15:24 “Hey, 4chan is never gonna have a drugs board, or a wrestling board, or all these other boards that I want, and so we may as well create a site that caters to that.”
00:15:33 I really respect the fact that he really took it in its own direction, it doesn't look like 4chan. The other sites [based on] Kusaba X (SP) created a whole era of open source clones of 4chan that offered 4chan in a box and emulated our front page and everything. People, for whatever reason wanted to make 4chan that wasn’t 4chan.
00:15:55 He really kind of made it his own. (I think he had another administrator at one point.) So i’ve actually been a huge fan [of 420chan].
00:16:03 Although I've never done a narcotic drug, I’ve never smoked weed or anything like that (I never really had a reason to use it), I don’t watch wrestling either (sorry /sp/ or /asp/), I’ve always actually really respected that site. So, it’s good to see that there are people trying to do neat things out there.
00:16:23 Why did I stop lifting? I stopped lifting probably about a year ago. But I actually stopped going to the gym last September. I think I have it in my phone, actually my last like update on my note was like in September 9th or 10th.
00:16:40 That was a result of The Fappening, because of the emotional and kind of physical toll that that took on me. I mean September was a really rough month. I mean we started it with The Fappening, (you’d have to be under a rock to not know what that is)
00:16:58 One day, August 30th or 31st. or September 1st, I think we served about 93 million page views in one day. Over the month of September (which doesn't include late August traffic) we served 45 million unique visitors and about 980 or so million page views, the closest we ever got to doing a billion page views. In a normal month 4chan will serve about 20 to 22 million unique visitors and about 500 million page views a month (now it's actually closer to 610-615.)
00:17:28 Actually we probably did do a billion just given that so many people, like all of our friends on /g/ block Google Analytics (aka Google botnet). Analytics is not always the best [statistic]. So that month we probably did break a billion page views.
00:17:57 I was just completely overwhelmed. We got many a legal nastygram from obviously all the firms representing the actresses. We spent a shit load of time on the phone with lawyers, and it cost us tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills. I'm so glad that I’ve done such a good job saving over the years because that on a bad day could have easily bankrupted the site.
00:18:25 What else did we have that month? That was when /pol/ was doing the ebola jam too. [And] I guess that was when Gamergate began to find its mainstream audience.
00:18:43 Anyway, September was this long, long, long month. I just was so overwhelmed dealing with all that stuff that I stopped lifting then and I actually haven’t been back to the gym since.
00:18:54 Have you installed Gentoo? # 574. I actually did install Gentoo a long time ago on a really old laptop. I believe it finished compiling but I never actually really used it for anything.
00:19:09 I’m just gonna start skimming through these ‘cause there are probably already thousands of questions already.
00:19:13 Is /s4s/ still your favorite board? /jp/ is actually my favorite board according to what I said at the 10th anniversary panel a year and a half ago. [sarcasm]
00:19:26 But [anyway], I really like /s4s/ a lot. I mean, I like all the boards. I’ve actually been spending a lot of time on /o/. DBT is one of my favourite threads these days, even though they’re pretty silly.
00:19:37 Trying to think of what else.
00:19:41 Yeah, I actually browse /a/ a lot (despite that they all flip their shit when I post) but it’s still actually a fun board. I mean, I would say again, for all the people that complain about /a/’s quality and blah blah blah, and Naruto threads, /a/ is really actually truly one of the best boards.

0:20 - 0:30

00:20:00 I’ll look at the stats really quickly but /a/ is huge. I mean, it has historically been the third largest board, but maybe it's the fourth largest now.
00:20:10 You know, /a/ is very large. And despite the fact that it receives a lot of posts, its quality tends to be quite high.
00:20:21 So let's see. The first sticky is already dead and I'm only like two questions in. I guess we will be here for eight hours today.
00:20:28 /a/ is used by 850 or so thousand users alone per month and serves about 23.5 million page views. For everybody who uses /a/, you now know that you have almost a million buddies.
00:20:47 #589 When did you decide to quit? It feels like you made a decision a while ago, at least a year or two ago. There are a lot of questions in here. But, I mean, I’ve said that in interviews and I think I said that on the news post, but again the announcement that I made on Wednesday is a long time coming. I mean it really wasn’t so much a matter of ‘if’ but rather ‘when’.
00:21:10 It had been on my mind for a long time and it really kinda entered my [mind] probably about eight or nine months before the 10th [anniversary of 4chan].
00:21:22 I actually had this in my news post but I took it out.
00:21:26 You know, one of the questions I've gotten over the years (besides, ‘fuck you’, which really isn’t a question) is “What happens to 4chan if you die?”
00:21:37 I used to joke that, “Oh well I guess. My mother is next of kin so it would go to her, and you’d have Mama Moot baking you some cookies,” or whatnot. (I’m kidding my mom doesn’t bake)
00:21:49 All joking aside, the prospect for the site would be very grim. I am the, again, sole owner, sole manager, sole administrator. I own the company. I own all the hardware. I have every single password,
00:22:05 It’s always really funny to see conspiracy theories that exist about moderators and leaks and whatnot. Or how people seem to think that there's this cabal of SJW moderators managing the site, but 4chan’s hierarchy is essentially completely flat.
00:22:27 Volunteer Moderators (Janitors) are at the bottom, then the Moderators, General Managers, and then myself. The General Manager position didn't exist until about a year or so ago, as a result of kind of my succession planning.
00:22:42 But… that's it. Whenever I see there’s been some really funny fake chat logs over the years and it’s always hilarious because I don't actually talk in the IRC channels that often. I don't consult moderators or janitors. I don’t share my thinking.
00:23:01 In that sense I've been a pretty bad people manager. It's not a committee, it's not consensus driven at all. It’s really just I make decisions and sometimes communicate to them. A lot of the time they’re pretty much completely in the dark. I barely use IRC these days.
00:23:17 So every time I see those chat logs I laugh because… Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the channels are silent a lot of the time.
00:23:26 Anyway, the organisation is basically flat with me on top. That’s really unhealthy [once I consider] what should happen to [4chan] if I were to become incapacitated, if I were to get hit by a bus and die, or get a new job, get married, have kids, get burnt out, whatever.
00:23:46 All of those things would take me away from the site, [and by] a certain point in time, probably would have ensured 4chan’s death.
00:23:59 I've kind of joked in these interviews that… it's the opposite of that saying, ‘the captain shall go down with his ship’.
00:24:09 But this was like ‘The ship goes down with the captain.’ The second I take a step off the ship, the ship would implode. [Clearly], no ship should be designed that way.
00:24:17 So that's what kind of got me thinking about, well, how do I… how do I change that. And actually as it turns out, I wrote a news post in February of last year that I never posted (I just discovered it a few days ago), when I was about to publish the Wednesday announcement.
00:24:36 [It] alluded to this very directly. “Next year, what I'm focused on is finding out how to make 4chan outlast me.” I had realized that the site would basically die without me. Long term planning came to my mind after 4chan hit our 10th anniversary, just because I never expected… no, nobody expected 4chan to make it 10 years, much less continue chugging on.
00:25:02 When 4chan turned five or six, I would think only about the year ahead. I’d think ‘Okay, what do I want to do next year?’ Are we gonna make it to six or seven?’
00:25:16 Once you hit ten, your frame of reference completely changes. It’s so inconceivable, that you make it to ten you begin to think, ‘Well, maybe it's not inconceivable that we’ll make it to twenty.’
00:25:29 And… I can’t... it's hard to name any website that I use that are twenty years, even ten years old. It really is an unprecedented milestone. And even then… for as many people who claim ‘4chan is kill’, [our traffic statistics show that] 4chan still has as much traffic its ever done. Its actually held that amount of traffic for about four or five years.
00:25:54 It's hard for communities to maintain that standard ‘cause they, you know, [fall apart someday]. So 4chan has peaked, it’s been a 4 or 5 year peak, which i think is actually quite, quite impressive.
00:26:08 I’m rambling so I lost my train of thought. But anyway, you know it just became clear to me that if I wanted to make it another ten or twenty years, something needs to change, and that something was me. So I spent the better part of the past year or two just thinking about what needs to change. I wanted to ensure that 4chan makes enough money to support itself.
00:26:32 [Just for example, look at] the servers. We've had some issues these past few days, but we upgraded a bunch of the servers. Even though I made this decision so long ago and I was really imminently going to leave weeks ago I mean we spent thousands of dollars upgrading the servers. That’s why he had that down time, you know it wasn’t a DDOS a few weeks ago. People thought it was. We upgraded all the servers and they all have much faster processors now and more RAM.
00:26:52 When the site isn't kind of having the hiccups that we've had the past few days it’s blazing fast. I released it's a lot faster and more stable than it's ever been. For those of you who have been browsing 4chan for more than a few years, I mean you probably remember how slow and unstable the site would be and it would go down for hours or days at a time and it would just be like you were using a dial up modem, it was that slow.
00:27:13 So that's in a good place and again like the team is kind of in its best place now more than ever. I really truly actually feel that it's in the best place to survive without me and so that's why I decided to step down and kind of allow for that to happen, because again it had to happen at some point.
00:27:30 Have you ever wanted say something but you couldn’t because of your position as admin? Um, no not particularly. I guess that’s a pretty simple answer. Let me skim through these now because I’m only like 5 in.
00:27:48 What makes a good poster? I guess that’s a pretty good question. We’ve had this thing in the rules, maybe it’s in the FAQ, for a really long time that just said we haven’t accepted donations, and it’s something that people often kind of forget, but you know we used to take donations early in the site’s history from 2003 to 2005, haven't taken a single penny in donation since 2005. I fucking hate donations. Again go to the historical news pages, the news post is titled ‘If only it grew on trees’ where I wrote about the 4chan passes, but I explain some of my logic for hating donations. And I think there’s actually one before that from 2012 that kind of touched on it.
00:28:26 Anyway so we've always said because you can’t contribute money, what you contribute is posting right, posting quality threads, uploading images, you know, helping people find the source of something, which I guess you shouldn’t do outside of /r/. I don’t know and I mean it’s just like anything that especially in recent months, it's the people that sit around and whine about how bad 4chan is. Again if you want to say how much I suck, great, so be it. I wish you would do that over email because it really just kind of shits up the board and for as many people that believe we delete all that, we really don’t.
00:29:04 The people who kind of complain about how much a board sucks, or a thread sucks, or a user sucks, I mean really aren’t contributing anything. I mean it really just kind of mucks things up far more than just shutting your mouth. The way you address that is [to] drown out the shit post with quality posts or submit feedback or if there's like a real problem that we can actually address as the administration, email it to me.
00:29:30 I think it’s like sage, you know, back in the day, the sage or sage bombing threads and spamming and dubs and all of that. The quote unquote user moderation really hasn't worked on 4chan for the better part of the past 10 years once we reached a certain scale. I really kind of dislike the fact that people think that, again, complaining and shitting things up further is somehow better than just either zipping it or again deleting or ignoring, reporting and whatnot.

0:30 - 0:40

00:30:00 … or again just drowning out the shit with good stuff. There's really no objective way to kind of say somebody’s a good poster because I mean it’s obviously completely subjective but I think deep down we all kind of know what that is.
00:30:15 –laughs- Did you sell the site to Anita Sarkeesian? No. Maybe she can do another Kickstarter and she can raise the money. Knowing you guys, you’d all probably talk enough about it to actually drive enough traffic to it to maybe actually successfully fund it. Maybe that should be your next effort.
00:30:36 Should I check my privilege? Yeah, always. Early and often. Uh let's see. Why does your website suck? That is very old meme, I respect your old memeing.
00:30:48 How are you today? I am great if you can’t tell. I mean that’s another thing I kind of mentioned in a lot of these interviews yesterday, but last year when I shut down my startup which was this four year slog and was kind of an emotional rollercoaster, I was in a good place but it was a bummer. Just a lot of things got compressed into a short span of time in terms of making the decision to shut down the company and helping the employees transition and actually shutting down the operations at the office, all of that. So that kind of left this emotional burden that took a few weeks and months to decompress and work that off.
00:31:31 Whereas with 4chan, actually like yesterday or I guess Wednesday when I posted that [newspost] I was actually waiting for the emotions to sneak up on me. Maybe I sound apathetic. I mean it’s really not that. I think I’ve reached a point of zen of sorts. I mean I really truly don't have negative feelings. I mean just in general life. For people who are angry on the internet, I really really honestly truly hope that you one day find the beauty in just not caring about things or just not allowing strangers and things outside of your control to rile you up because it’s a very healthy way to live. I'm sure that you’ll add a few extra years to your life by keeping your heart rate down.
00:32:12 Again, I rarely feel negative feelings or angry at this point, and it’s the same for 4chan. I mean I look back and I think I’ve been feeling very nostalgic especially over the past few days just seeing some of the cards people have made me and some of the people linking to the old 4chan.org/flash, flash archive, and just posting old memes and old images and stuff like that and it really just takes me back. A lot of people who probably haven’t used the site for eleven years because I think very few of us have.
00:32:47 A decade is just such a hard amount of time to actually think about and it's just incredible. So I think as I can decompress and reflect over the coming weeks I’m sure more of those emotions will surface. But I mean right now I just feel extremely content and satisfied. Just really proud of the community and again the community is unprecedented. There are very few communities that are 4chan’s size. There are much fewer communities that have actually been around for as long as 4chan has and that's incredible. So I’m very glad that I had the privilege to be a part of that. So nothing but positive vibes right now.
00:33:31 What do you regret the most? This is actually a great question. This is #608. A lot of things. Actually I kind of take that back. I mean on one hand I generally don't feel regretting anything is healthy because it’s kind of both eyes forward instead of one or both fixed on the past. You know you can’t change the past, you can only change the future and so it makes a lot more sense to take your energy and invest it in the future and changing those things. I really do believe that life is up and to the right. If you keep your head up and have a good way about you things get better. So I wouldn’t phrase it as regret so much as if I were to go back and change something or if I could possibly change a thing, which again I wouldn't because I think as long as you’re happy in the present and where you are then you have nothing to regret about that. I mean your past can be so shitty but as long as you’re happy today, then you really don't have anything to regret because the shit is what got you to the present.
00:34:39 I’m so happy with where I am now and where the community is. So I don't think I would change anything, but if you know theoretically I were to go back and change something, I think I would’ve headed [or handed? Can’t tell] off this entire issue altogether with my succession by just doing a better job at managing the team from the start and really…there were a lot of people who I think wanted to help out early on and I didn't really give them that opportunity.
00:35:06 I really chose to shoulder most of the burden myself over the past eleven and a half years and, you know, I regret that in that I think that if I had kind of more people that I kinda trusted and again empowered early on and kind of treated as partners, it's interesting to you know kind of think about where we could be today or at least I’m sure a lot of the 4chan and life in general are these kind of peaks and valleys and I think having more support from you know a group of people that I really trusted and what not would have kind of smoothed out those peaks and valleys.
00:35:44 For a long time I used to describe myself as the loneliest webmaster and that’s because I really didn’t have many friends contrary to popular belief, all these wonderfully wild kind of theories that run about.
00:35:59 I am friendly with a lot of the moderators and janitors now as I’ve gotten to know them but they're not my friends, people that are my friends in real life have really never become involved with the site. I mean my friends outside of 4chan don’t use 4chan except for the people who I’ve met through the site.
00:36:16 I’ve made a lot of friends through 4chan over the years. At least a few dozen people I’ve met and a handful of very, very close friends I’ve met through 4chan. One or two of those people may be involved with the team, but I met them through 4chan and they were probably involved before I became friends with them.
00:36:32 But for a long time I felt very kind of isolated because again like 4chan as a community is kinda peerless and my kinda tenure as an administrator of a giant community for 10+ years is also peerless.
00:36:45 I mean it’s hard to name really any other analogous examples and so for a long time there wasn’t anybody, but once we reached a certain point like sure there are other website administrators that were running communities, but once 4chan got into the millions, tens of millions of users I stopped having people I could ask for advice that at least had kind of first-hand knowledge or experience.
00:37:08 And so for a long time I think I kinda chose to go in alone and felt pretty lonely. So I think that had I done a better job at kind of managing the team volunteers then I could have drawn on them for support.
00:37:22 But for whatever reason, I didn’t and again I would just say I was a terrible people manager early on. I was 15, like what does a 15 year old know about managing people? I mean I had my first job when I was 15 or 16 so.
00:37:32 I never managed anybody up until pretty recently, four years ago with the start up. I learned a lot about just how to direct people to make them feel appreciated and to know that you value their work and all of that.
00:37:52 This isn’t meant to be offensive, but I think a lot of 4channers are probably in their late teens, early twenties and so you may not have had this experience yet in your own careers, you know, leading people or managing people.
00:38:05 Just know that people deserve your respect and kindness.
00:38:11 Probably the worst thing I’ve done is that I would only really kinda reach out to people when they’ve done something wrong, which is like 1% of the time instead of the 99% of the time that they were doing a great job. It really breeds a pretty toxic work culture and relationship if you act that way.
00:38:26 As I’ve kind of grown up and had that first-hand experience I’ve really tried to be better to the moderators, but I have a lot to make up for there.
00:38:36 A lot of the users kind of treat them like shit, which, again, is a bummer because they’re all recruited. They’re all you. I mean they all come from the community. At this point the only way to become a moderator is to be a janitor. Only way to be a janitor is to be a 4channer and apply. They all really love the community and all have served it for hours and hours, days’ worth and weeks’ worth of their lives and rarely get thanks.
00:39:04 In lieu of receiving that praise from the community, which probably won’t change at this point, I wish I had done a better job at thanking them myself.
00:39:12 This is great. This is like very therapeutic. I’m glad we’re doing this. Let’s see.
00:39:22 #605. I think what many people are concerned about is who still owns 4chan in the future? I know you said the contrary in the VB interview, but even though you are stepping down as an admin can’t you still own the site just to make sure no one fucks it up to be some kind of plebbit 9fag facebook crap? We need 4chan to be 4chan.
00:39:44 As I said in that interview and other related interviews, I do want to completely step back. It’s time. It’s been eleven and a half years. It’s time for not only myself to move on, but the community to move on. I really view it as an opportunity for new leadership or the community to kind of go in a direction that I may not have taken it. For better or worse.

0:40 - 0:50

00:40:12 Maybe one day we’ll all realize how good we had it.
00:40:17 I really do want to yield fully and what I kind of thought about or kind of compared it to in the business world is like when a CEO steps down and remains with the company as the Executive Chairman of the board and you know it’s like that’s bullshit, right. You’re like ‘Oh I’m not CEO anymore, I’m not the President. I’m totally like hands off, guys.’ Right? But then you’re like, you’re chairman of the board. Like, you’re there. You can meddle. There’s baggage, especially when it’s the founder, somebody had this long tenure with the company. I mean there’s a lot of baggage that goes along with having that person continue to be involved in any capacity.
00:40:56 I really view my departure as a giant reset button, for better or for worse, for the transition team or whoever ends up being that long-term successor to make it their…you know.
00:41:10 Again, hopefully incorporate a lot of feedback from the community maybe in ways that I didn’t, to kind of go forward.
00:41:21 I don’t want to be financially or legally responsible for 4chan. I will at some point be transferring ownership and I honestly have no idea what that looks like because that’s kind of what I’m embarking on now is trying to figure out who that long-term successor is, successor or successors.
00:41:40 It would probably be my preference that it goes to some sort of organization of some kind. Maybe that’s a group of the volunteers or some other organization, because I realized in this whole succession planning thing that I really wouldn’t wish my past ten years upon anybody else. I’m very grateful for them and learned a lot and had these wonderful opportunities and experiences. I really do truly feel very warmly about the community and everything that’s happened these past ten years, but being a punching bag for millions and millions of people is not that fun for most people.
00:42:25 I think the only reason I was able to kind of deal with it over the years is because my general attitude toward life, which is very kind of happy-go-lucky and very, not blasé, zen is not the right word either, but… I’ve always been really amused when people think I’m angry on 4chan because anger is just not something I often feel. If I do it’s actually usually, almost 100% of the time, I’m angry at myself.
00:42:51 I think the only reason I’ve been able to kind of have such an even field relationship with the site or with my emotions in general is that I think about it similar to… here are three analogies that are kind of all over the place.
00:43:05 One is kind of like boiling a frog. If you throw a frog into boiling water it jumps out, but if you boil it over time then it croaks because it sneaks up on it. Or maybe a better example would be somebody who earns their wealth over time versus somebody who wins the lottery. The people who win the lottery tend to blow that money within a certain number of years. Where somebody who’s worked their lifetime and earned their wealth probably knows a little bit more about managing money, because they have the luxury of time, right. They’ve built that foundation. They have the tools to know how to do that.
00:43:42 I think that managing 4chan and dealing with the emotional burden of it was like that. I was 15. I’ve run 4chan all through my adulthood and this really formed my teen years and early adult years. So it kind of grew with me, I grew with it. It kind of snuck up on me.
00:44:01 4chan wasn’t an overnight success. It didn’t really peak overnight or something like that. It wasn’t like this overnight sensation. So I had this luxury of time to grow as a person and figure out how to manage my relationship with the community.
00:44:19 My big concern if I were to leave it to, say, a single individual is that it’s hard to find anybody really qualified in that sense. In fact I’ll tell you the one person in 11+ years, and I guess I never released this before, but I did actually try to give it to somebody about a year or two ago who I really felt was one of the only individuals I’ve met ever that I really truly felt was a good person. That’s not true, I’ve met a lot of good people, but you know, kind of had this assortment of really desirable traits. Just a really good person. Somebody who's used the community for a very long time, really understood it, has technical skills, has a real, I think, intuition about what people want and whatnot.
00:45:06 I essentially offered him the opportunity to basically just take it off my hands. I was like ‘if you want to be me, you can be me’ and he declined. Which all the more reinforces the fact that I think this was one of the few right people that I found over the years to yield that role, because people who want power don’t deserve it or can’t handle it. People who don’t want it are usually the best suited for it.
00:45:29 In this case I was basically turned down because I think he realized being moot is actually not so desirable and being able to pitch in part-time on the side and just use the site is a lot more fun than having thousands of angry detractors screaming at you. You know, screaming bloody murder for every change you make.
00:45:49 I hear the same thing from a lot of…we had a lot of janitors resign for the same thing. Not because they get driven out, but because your relationship with the site changes dramatically once you start volunteering for it. You go from being just a user to a certain kind of sense of responsibility or obligation. For the most part it makes it like not very fun.
00:46:13 I think normal users have the luxury of being able to enjoy the site without any sort of baggage. Whereas somebody who volunteers, or say, is the administrator of the site all of a sudden has all this baggage. If you truly enjoy using the site, then it really changes your relationship with the site and it kind of starts to make it look more like work than a leisure thing or a passion thing.
00:46:38 So that’s just a long winded way of saying I don’t really think there are people who are equipped to … I think it would be really challenging to find a single individual who is kind of equipped to take on all of the responsibility.
00:46:53 It’s not to say that I’m some shiny Pokemon and there’s only one of me, in the sense that there’s nobody who is qualified. Really it’s a lot to take on for any individual and I’m shocked that I was able to make it this far.
00:47:07 So I think there won’t be one administrator going forward. I think it’ll probably be an assortment of people, but it’s hard to know who exactly that person or persons will be right now. As soon as I know I’ll make an announcement.
00:47:29 #613. Who do we direct admin questions to? What things will we email? The kind of things that we would email you in the past? How do we get in touch with them? Use the feedback form. So we have this feedback form, it’s linked from the front page. It’s at the bottom of the page. www.4chan.org/feedback. You can submit basically bug reports or complaints or feature suggestions. The transition people all have access to that.
00:48:05 I didn’t do a great job at updating it. We did actually, especially the programmer always checked in, so it’s actually great for bug reports because he checks it very frequently. I honestly didn’t check it as often as I might of liked to and didn’t really respond to many questions. I did, just as I read all of my email, I did read all of the feedback questions. That would be the best way to be in touch going forwards.
00:48:31 #614. Are you gonna add /l/ back before you leave? Nope.
00:48:34 Are you gonna post with a tripcode in the future? I don’t think so. I don’t see why I would. I can post anonymously, or we added an Admin Emeritus capcode that I guess I can use if I do want to be identified.
00:48:46 Are you planning on coming back as an admin? I’ve probably answered this three times already in a very long-winded fashion. I think you guys are just gonna have to learn to love or hate the new admin. Whatever capacity I’ll return as will be as anonymous, or again Admin Emeritus without the keys to the castle.
00:49:12 How do you think the culture of 4chan will change now that your influence from the top will be missing? #615. I don’t know. The team and 4chan has been a mootocracy from the start. Again, I didn’t do a great job at really accepting and asking for the input of the other team members. Every now and then I would run something by and just say ‘what do you guys think about this thing that I’m thinking about’. I really do look at my email and the community in general to help guide my decision making process, but at the end of the day those are just a handful of inputs. I’ve always had that 100% executive decision making ability. It will be really different.

0:50 - 1:00

00:50:00 One of the transition people asked me like ‘what do we do if this comes up or what do we do if this?’ That’s something that really nobody has been prepared [for]. I mean I tried to prepare people as best I could, but nobody has ever been making really any single decision with 4chan except myself in almost eleven and a half years.
00:50:20 I’m sure things will change somewhat, but it’s hard to say how and I think it’s too soon to tell if it’ll be for better or for worse. We’ll just have to kind of play it by ear. I have invested interest in the site not sucking because I do use the site on a daily basis. Again going back to that first question, are you out of touch? Like my interests have changed over the years, but I really actually use 4chan every day. I am the longest running user of 4chan. I’ve been using it since day one, since post one. I’d be really sad if I couldn’t browse /o/ and a few other [boards].
00:51:04 I actually do browse /a/, despite the fact that they yell at me all the time, and /s4s/ and whatnot. So I would be sad if I couldn’t browse those boards anymore if they changed dramatically, so I hope for the most part that nothing changes for the worse.
00:51:19 Are you currently working on any new projects? If so, can you elaborate? #63. There’s actually one idea that I’ve had. I’ve avoided startups like the plague for the past year since my PTSD from my last one. Now I’m out of that. I’ve had a year to decompress, but I don’t really have anything I’m working on right now. There’s one idea that I have, but it’s more of an open-source project. So to the extent that I actually work on it and/or release it then you can expect to see it as an open-source project probably most likely.
00:51:53 But no, I guess I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with myself going forwards now that 4chan won’t be one of my primary focuses. Again, 4chan has never been a full-time job for me. It’s just never been a job, I mean it’s never been my primary focus. I was either in high school, or I was in college, or I was working for other companies, I had my own company. 4chan has always been a labor of love and a hobby of mine.
00:52:57 One of the things I’ll miss the most about 4chan is just to have a project that has an infinite laundry list. We have a to-do tracking software and it’s just got hundreds and hundreds of tasks and I’m always adding little bugs [and] little features or stuff like that, or /qa/ing something, basically driving our developer nuts. It’s actually really incredible to have a project that you can invest time in, so I think that’s one of the things I’ll miss the most. Just having something to invest myself in.
00:53:08 #626 You say that 4chan is easily one of the greatest communities to ever grace the web, however it is widely accepted as one of the biggest shitholes on the internet, especially with gusto, by its own members. How do you reconcile creating and helping survive a place where boards such as /b/ and /pol/ serve as home bases for some of the world’s worst people to come praise and relish in one another’s vile bigotry and deviant socially destructive predilections with your relatively recently discovered identity as a social justice warrior?
00:53:38 I meant what I said. It’s a fact. It’s a statement of fact. I mean it is one of the largest and greatest and most storied communities to ever grace the web possibly ever. I mean it really is awesome. For as much as we’ve had our detractors over the years as a community, as a site I think 4chan has done far, far, far, far, far more good than bad. If you look at the stats, we’ve served a billion people according to google analytics over eight or so years. Those stats are from March 2008 or March 2009 onward to now.
00:54:31 Let’s just say google is full of shit and it’s not a billion, it’s 300 million or something like that. The fact is, hundreds of millions of people have used 4chan in some capacity, in some fashion, for minutes, hours, days, whatever. I would say there at least have been more than a hundred million dedicated users over the past ten years and for those people 4chan is really important to them. For a lot of people it functions as their third place; It’s not home, it’s not work, it’s not school. It’s a place where they go to blow off steam.
00:55:12 One of the things that’s actually really kept me going over the years, that helped me survive burn out, was the fact that for as many nasty emails as I’ll get for the multitude of reasons over the past ten years, every single interaction I’ve ever had with some community person has always been very positive. For the most part they just say ‘hey, thanks for 4chan because it really helped me at this time in my life where I kind of needed help. I was in high school and going through a rough patch’, or ‘I was going through a break up’, or ‘I was miserable at work’, or ‘I was procrastinating for finals’, or something like that.
00:55:50 Essentially every single person I’ve met in person who’s come up to me on the street, which happens probably a few times a month, has said that. So I think knowing that the experience that the vast majority of people have with 4chan is a very positive one. For the most part, the fact that 4chan has kind of helped 100+ million people get through their day, I think the greater good has been served.
00:56:17 4chan obviously has this negative reputation as this question alluded to and some of it is deserved, but I think actually a lot of it is not. I mean obviously /b/ and now I guess /pol/ kind of are the lightning rods of sorts. They kind of represent the most extreme portions of the site and that’s where a lot of people draw on and base their conclusions off of, but they represent just a fraction of the site and the community and the contents and posts. I mean when you look at boards like /a/ and /po/, which like nobody uses, but it’s like most people use 4chan to discuss their hobbies, right, their shared interests with a bunch of strangers who they have at least one thing in common with. That’s kind of boring, right. That’s not this sexy story and that’s not what the media will cover. That’s not what, as you said, the social justice warriors and people who are 4chan’s detractors, that’s not the story that they’ll tell because it’s nowhere near as interesting as talking about how /b/ is a boogeyman of the moment.
00:57:26 I think the boring truth is that 4chan is pretty tame and actually very positive community for most people. One other thing that’s interesting to note about why 4chan has that bad reputation is that 4chan is very unique in that it’s one of the only kind of platforms, I guess you could say, on the web that enables any person, regardless of their following or whatever, to get a message in front of 1000s of people, right. If you want to post ‘moot is a cuck’ to one of the boards, say /b/, you can do that. You can inform thousands of people of my fetishes and whatnot. We basically don’t prescreen comments except for banned mp5s and spam keywords and stuff like that, so almost any person on the entire internet can reach an audience of thousands to tens of thousands of people with a mash of their keyboard and a click of their mouse. That’s incredible. There really aren’t any other platforms on the internet that enable that to that degree.
00:58:40 I mean you have communities obviously like Reddit, you know our favourite, that sure you can get something in front of a lot of people on Reddit if you get on the front page, but what percentage of content makes it there? And it requires upvoting and karma, and all this hierarchy bullshit and whatnot, whereas 4chan is completely egalitarian in that sense. Other platforms like, say, Twitter. If you want to get a message in front of people on Twitter you have to have a lot of followers. How do you get a lot of followers? You have to have influence. If you upload a video on YouTube, five people will see it unless you have some way of getting on the front page and that usually requires you to have a following.
00:59:17 4chan is really the only website I would say on the entire internet that forwards you an opportunity to get a message in front of just a gazillion people without anything, without building that following. That was the beauty of anonymous posting. I mean that’s what I’ve given talks about. Contrary to everybody screaming about free-speech, my point in all of my talks, and verbatim basically quoting myself, Is that anonymous speech enables people to be equal and to say things that they might not otherwise be comfortable sharing on a platform with identity. So that coupled with an ability to reach

1 Hour

1:00 - 1:10

01:00:00 So that, coupled with an ability to reach a large audience without any investment or effort really makes it very, very unique to this (down) of the internet. Hopefully there will be more sites that follow in those footsteps.
01:00:13 "Can you please", #636, "Can you please open a discussion thread with the new mods at some point? So users can communicate more openly to them?"
01:00:23 Uh, you know, that'll be for them [to decide]. I mean, I have my own thoughts, and I'll let them decide on that, the transition is still happening, I would say once the transition is kind of complete to whatever degree we're able to complete it soon, then I think that would be an opportune time to reach the community and take that feedback. You can email /feedback in the meantime. But I really expect things will be business as usual.
01:00:56 I mean, who knows? There's going to be a time where people don't have to listen to me. But when we give moderator and janitor orientations, we say, "ease into this, don't rock the boat, do things by the book, and take it easy".
01:01:12 Really, there is a sticky in /j/, it's funny, every time we have a leak people gloss over this giant sticky that says, "Take it easy". Let me pull it up...
01:01:30 This was on the general moderator’s board: Subject: General Reminder to Take it Easy. A comment says, “give people the benefit of the doubt. A creative thread might appear off topic at first glance. People are allowed to argue. They are not allowed to troll. Not everything that gets reported needs to get deleted or banned. Don’t hesitate to use the clear button if no rule is broken. Janitors cannot readily tell if an anonymous poster is ban evading. Ask a mod to check or br for something else, help make sure nobody gets banned for more than 3 days for something they didn’t do. Don’t increase bans beyond 3 days, Accept appeals for minor things, be forgiving on Q & IRC. Keep in mind, people come to 4chan to have fun, but it should not come at the expense of others.”
01:02:08 That comment was posted August 8th, 2013, to /j/. That is representative of the advice we’ve given Janitors, Moderators, for a long time, which is again, “You serve the community, you are a member of the community, you are right by the community, and take it easy. And don’t go bonkers”. I would say, [that’s] my advice to the people who will at least take over interim is similar. For the most part, things are pretty smooth sailing so don’t overturn the boat unless you want to deal with the fallout. So again, it will be up to them, but I don’t think that much will change immediately from a user’s perspective.
01:02:48 Somebody asked, #644 said “Would you go back and do it all over again?” Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I? 4chan has served hundreds of millions of people, it’s changed the world,
01:03:02 It's influenced culture in ways that very few other sites do. It hasn't defined me as a person, but it's defined my entire adult life. I learned a bunch and made a lot of excellent friends and amazing opportunities out of it. And that's just me.
01:03:29 There's hundreds of millions of people that have been touched by this site either directly by using it or indirectly by it's content and culture. 4chan's community has really left a ripple on the world. Of course I would do it again, I mean, why not? I truly believe that this site has done more good than anything, and it's yours.
01:03:59 # 650 Can you be transparent about the following:
01:04:02 1. Other than behind-the-scenes technical stuff, your presence on 4chan wasn't that notable in the past few years, with you admitting that you had decided to leave a long time ago in the recent Techcrunch article. What does "Moot stepping down as admin" really mean? Or what makes it such a big change that you have to announce it publicly?
01:04:15 I mean, you're right, I haven't been visible in the past few years. But again, I think people misinterpret me the [lack of regular posting or lack of news posts] as "me not being around". I mean, I browse the site every day and I've still been responsible for everything . Even though I decided to do that behind the scenes - One of the reasons I'm less visible is, whenever I post, it's a distraction, and it's not very fruitful. The thread gets derailed, people use it as an opprtunity to ask me questions, or call me names. Ultimately, it's [the fault of] those people.
01:04:52 It's funny, first there are people who say nice things, then they get shot down by people who accuse them of brown nosing, and it becomes this total shit show. [In the aftermath], people resent me for derailing the thread, and not the people who actually shitted it up. So I haven't been really posting that much over the last few years for that reason.
01:05:32 The other thing is, it's been unrewarding to answer controversial questions. It doesn't matter if I answer it anyway, people usually had a circlejerk claiming that "everything you're saying is a lie".
01:05:50 As I've learned, arguing on 4chan consists of "you're wrong until you agree with me". Whenever I answer a question honestly, (which, yes, I've tried to do all the time), people essentially say "you're lying or baiting or this and this". [And what they actually mean is], "I want you to agree with me, and until you agree, you're wrong, you're lying."
01:06:09 So again, it's become pretty unfulfilling to even try to respond to you honest questions or criticism because, as I've learned, you just can't win. Though it's not about winning, it's just that, if somebody doesn't want to I believe something, then it's very hard to appeal to reason.
01:06:29 As we've learned in the last few months, or at least I've learned is that, one of the things my detractors use is "The Opposite of Occam's Razor". Where they take the most reasonable, simple solution or explanation rather, and come up with the alternative that is the most hilariously convoluted conspiracy. Ultimately they almost always go with the latter.
01:07:07 I actually find this very funny, but also a little bit disheartening and sad. But I've just come to accept it, take it easy and don't really let it get to me.
01:07:24 "What's you're deal with /pol/ in the last few months? Why mess with it?" I think people sometimes read too much into my actions. First off, it was fun. I think a lot of people actually had fun with that. It kind of harkens back to the old 4chan of sorts, where we really just kinda mess with boards.
01:07:46 And in a lot of ways, it did purge the board of a vocal minority that was just intent on shitting the board up than constructively discussing politics. In the long run, I think it was actually healthier for the board.
01:07:24 "What's you're deal with /pol/ in the last few months? Why mess with it?" I think people sometimes read too much into my actions. First off, it was fun. I think a lot of people actually had fun with that. It kind of harkens back to the old 4chan of sorts, where we really just kinda mess with boards.
01:07:46 And in a lot of ways, it did purge the board of a vocal minority that was just intent on shitting the board up than constructively discussing politics. In the long run, I think it was actually healthier for the board. We've done purges like that with /b/ a long time ago, which, at least in the short term, helped the quality of things.
01:08:09 Gamergate brought a huge shitstorm to /v/. You made a sticky about it telling people to rein it in, but overall, what is your assessment of Gamergate and how it's affected /v/?" (I know I shouldn't comment on Gamergate outside of the sticky), But actually, I met a self-identified Gamergater just way back when you know just after that sticky actually at an indie gaming event here in New York. And we just chatted for about 30-45 minutes, since he was passionate about it, and it was interesting to hear his points. However, my response was, "Thanks, but this just isn't an issue that's that I care about, really."
01:09:12 The only thing I care about is 4chan, and as I said in that sticky... It's funny how there's a lot of people out there saying, "whoa whoa, we're not doxxing anymore! We used to do that, but we haven't now, we've been good." But 4chan, more or less, has always had a pretty blanket... It's funny actually a lot of other people then it took issue with me, comparing to Chanology (and I'm sure it still will), and said, "Oh, you're lying, blah blah blah".
01:09:33 But the fact is, (going back to Chanology), we did in fact [ban people for raids]! People who identified as "Anonymous" fucking hated me and hated 4chan for the first few years! Because we did actually push it out of /b/, deleting those threads, and I think at some point, just thinking about it, that's where the Boston fail party came from too. I mean like 4chan, once the the "moralfags" who were the anti-Scientology people were pushed off,

1:10 - 1:20

01:10:01 Again what we now know is kinda capital-A “Anonymous” were pushed off, it was kind of this rift of sorts, but again, it was this minority, you know, and this was why I kind of compared GamerGate to it, but it’s essentially a minority of users in the hundreds to thousands were kind of using 4chan as a platform for activism and kind of speaking the name of the site and the entire community, and felt it was their right to drag the greater 4chan into this battle.
01:10:35 But you don’t. Nobody has that right to do that, and that’s why we had a blanket ban on anything that looks like personal information raids or activism or whatnot. Because this minority doesn't have the right to speak for the entire community. Nobody does! You don’t get to drag, "4chan" or "/b/" into this cause you are fighting for, be it right or wrong.
01:10:58 We’ve really had a history of crackdown, and that why I kinda compared it to Chanology, and so you actually see a similar thing: Now that those people hate me, just like the early anonymous people. again, you know, I wish we had the unique visitor/unique poster ID thing at that time, but they were dozens to maybe a few hundred people posting in the thread to any given time.
01:11:24 Again that doesn't represent... Let's look at these stats... Where's /v/... that's going to take a minute... But you know, /v/ is used by, probably more than a million people a month so again no group of persons gets to kinda dragged them into whatever holy war they they should choose.
01:11:53 Again, my overall take is, I just don't care. I know that's that's hard for some to believe, and I'm sure everybody always crying I'm a liar and blah blah blah, but I really just truly think that probably my greatest gift as an adult has been to choose where to invest energy and where not to.
01:12:13 So, /v/ is visited by 1.4 million people a month, and it serves close to 50 million page views a month. A few hundred people don't get to speak for the 1.4 million people who browse the board, nor the 20 million people that browse 4chan. They have no right to use 4chan [as their personal army].
01:12:37 I think that the splintering is probably for the best. I think it's the best for their movement, now that they have real centers to organize, and it's best for 4chan in that it insulates 4chan from getting mired in even more controversy. My interests are always that of 4chan as an institution, and the 4chan community as a whole (which, again, is tens of millions of people). [I want to make sure] that 4chan can survive and it can't be mired in controversy or legal battles that both exhaust its bank accounts and my energy.
01:13:20 That was another interesting thing about The Fappening. The fourth question in this series is, "Was it a coincidence that you've decided to step down as admin following the two events highlighted above and The Fappening I suppose or incidents pushed you to step down? You know, like this, as I've said this isn't your thing?"
01:13:32 I mean certainly... I guess I wouldn't say it accelerated it, but it was very draining. It was even more draining I think to see some of the fallout on the community. You know, we introduced a DMCA policy, and then people scream bloody murder. We implemented a blacklist for some of the images that we've received DMCA notifications about.
01:14:05 That policy exists to protect the site. To insulate, "4chan", the institution, which is something that millions of people have a vested interest in preserving (I'm guessing 4chan detractors don't). But In order to continue to run 4chan, that was a policy that we had to introduce.
01:14:22 That wasn't optional, that was the letter of the law. 4chan has always been compliant with the spirit of the law of the DMCA. When someone emails us saying, "I own this image, can you remove it?" If we reasonably think that they do, then we would. And we always have. We're good actors in that sense, we've always been good actors with the rights holders and with the law and everything like that.
01:14:45 That's the reason 4chan made it to 11+ years. Some people think we should always be fighting you're fighting the fight and sticking it to the man, but we've always been good actors when it comes to US law. Be it criminal law (or in this case), something like the DMCA. But we were not compliant to the letter of the law without that policy.
01:15:13 The DMCA's actually a specific in terms of, not only do you need to have a a DMCA policy publicly posted, but you also have to have a DMCA contact, by name (actually a lot of people break this cuz they put up a generic contact). You have to have a name, you have to have a telephone number, and a fax number. An email is actually optional, I think, (though email is obviously preferred since it's the fastest). And you need to have that on file at the copyright office too.
01:15:38 That is the letter of the law to to be afforded safe harbor protection for a tort stemming from copyright infringement. (We had it, but just not in writing). It's either we have that policy and insulate the site, or we don't, and get sued to death. I mean there is a very, very, very, very real chance that we were going to get the shit sued out of us, sued out of existence.
01:16:06 And even if we prevailed, (I mean it would have made a really interesting case as far as case law because it would have really tested [the Safe Harbor Provision]. My lawyers would be pissed at me right now for talking about this, because it is kind of exposing us, but it would be interesting to see. The court would say, "You were adhering to the spirit of the law, maybe not the letter of the law".
01:16:29 But a single lawsuit would bankrupt 4chan. In this section, I am answering any question about this, and I am actually planning to write about the finances and the financial picture... Because again, it's shit! And I realized actually very recently: "You know what? It's so shitty, I really truly have nothing to hide."
01:16:44 For all the people that think I'm rolling in riches, you could not be further from the truth. I am very frugal. I've saved a lot. 4chan's finances are separate from my own. I mean, it is all my money and that's how it works in a sole proprietorship. (though it's an LLC) That money passes through to me as tax. I maintain it separately, it has its own ledgers and everything. But 4chan has enough to weather [any situation].
01:17:13 And thank God it had enough to weather that month! [We had] tens of thousand dollars in legal bills. But a single lawsuit would potentially wipe out the site. It is in my interest, in your interest, in the interest of the institution to avoid getting the shit sued out of us. They're very expensive, even if you win, they can just completely drain you both financially and emotionally. It is in nobody's interest for 4chan to get sued.
01:17:40 That's a big reason the finances have always been a huge pain the ass. I am really excited to write about this, because it it'll be an interesting case study as the least profitable top 500 site in the world. People block ads, they don't buy passes, we don't much to work with.
01:18:10 Then there's the liability side of things. People again asked earlier one, "You don't have to be admin, but why don't you maintain control or ownership of this site?" [At this point], I do not want the ultimate financial responsibility if I'm not going to be involved in it's management going forwards. Because believe me, it's not worth potentially being mired in legal battles, or basically bankrupt as I was 5-6 years ago.
01:18:49 Definition of Cuckolding: "Does watching your significant other engage in coitus with another gentleman cause you to enter a state of arousal?" I had to actually, believe it or not, I had to actually Google on Wikipedia about "Cuckolding". I was familiar with it from /pol/, over the past few years because they're obsessed with cuckolding. In the recent months I was like, do I even understand what this is? Is there something more to this than I've been led to believe in the past?
01:19:13 I had a fun time reading at length about cuckolding. Just to make sure that I actually have a full picture. But no, it does not... Although I was recently informed by my friend, who went out with a person I don't now, who was informed that cuckolding is "the thinking man's fetish". So maybe we should all revisit that someday.
01:19:38 Let's see... "You said we're here forever, you baka! Why'd you lie?"
01:19:50 Yeah. I guess even though I won't be administrator, I plan to continue [using 4chan]. Though I think I need a break, so I'll take a few weeks off from browsing for a few months, or even a year. But I'm sure at some point, I will come back.

1:20 - 1:30

01:20:04 "Who are you selling your body to?" I don't know, how much are you offering?
01:20:09 #695: "Have you read your own Encyclopedia Dramatica article? And if so, what are your thoughts, and how much is accurate? Yeah, I've seen it over the years anytime I'm googling for something, it comes up. It's not accurate, but that's the point of ED. Anybody who reads ED, I feel sorry if you go to ED and expect anything other than pretty hilarious distorted articles. But I have a good sense of humor about what people say and think about me,
01:20:46 Again, it's one of the only things that has kept me sane over the years. If I'd actually cared what strangers screamed at me on the Internet about, I wouldn't be here today. Nor would you be. So I think I am glad that something like that got meted out at me early on.
01:21:02 "Hey Moot, how did you feel when Australians BTFO'ed your site (Referring to the April 2014 FWG Affair)?" #701
01:21:06 That was actually a lot of fun. The funniest thing about that was that "based Aussie". Somebody asked him, "If you had access, why didn't you delete the site, or just blah blah blah? He pointed out, "I just hated this user on /int/. I like 4chan. I use 4chan all the time. I mean, he's been hassling us for years. I wish you would use is his efforts for good, rather than messing with us or messing with these users.
01:21:49 I mean the most disappointing thing about that was that he did have access user Personal Identifiable Information (PII), he got the IP address. We actually notified the user, because that's we take very seriously. For any outsider, and even people who have privileged access to misuse even an IP address. Really, the only thing we have is IP addresses for the most part. I wish based Aussie hacker would come work for us rather than be a pain in the butt sometimes.
01:22:28 But no, it was funny. And it actually [turned out OK], in the sense that, all the "hacks" we've had over the years have allowed us to revisit all of our security. That one in particular really had us tear things apart. [That restructuring] made things much, much better in the long run. So the cost-benefit was really worth it. We've really stepped up [the security].
01:23:00 Obviously nothing is ever 100% secure. It's hard to make any promises, but I really do think that we did a good job at addressing the vulnerabilities that he exploited. We're doing our best to ensure that in the future, stuff like that doesn't happen. I wrote a whole post for my blog, "ChrisHatesWriting.com". It's called "Getting hacked twice in one day." I did a whole look back at how exactly he got in and what he accessed.
01:23:25 It was embarrassing, a lot of little mistakes that added up to a big one. In the interest of full disclosure, I want to let people know what had happened and what we'd done to address it. In that case, it ended up being well worth it, because I think it will benefit the site in the long run. The Aussie... I don't know, maybe the new lead developers and co-developers should shoot him an email.
01:23:56 "Moot, what are your current thoughts on the other chans? Especially Cripple-chan? Do you feel they're making a dent in 4chan's traffic like they believe they are?" # 704
01:24:02 It's funny that people have this convenient memory for things I've said in the past. Back in the day, I used to tell people, "Don't like 4chan? Leave it. It's a Mootocracy. Feel free to go somewhere else or start your own thing." In fact I think it's probably healthier in the long run.
01:24:27 4chan really does dominate the english-speaking [anonymous imageboard] community. These other kind of image boards have not really made a dent in our traffic. They've reached their own formal audience. There are two cases: one where (I guess three, but the third always dies). The first type is an imageboard that appeals to another language/culture. Krautchan is a great example. Hispachan (which actually does a lot of advertising on 4chan...), only targets our Spanish-speaking traffic.
01:25:02 They've actually been a great supporter of us. It's kind of funny that these websites, who might theoretically be our competitors, help keep 4chan afloat. [Not to mention that] we don't serve non-English speaking traffic outside of /int/. We're an English imageboard. So these language/culture sites have done exceptionally well.
01:25:23 The second type is sites that cater to interests that we don't cater to. A good example is 420chan, with drugs and wrestling, stuff like that. OperatorChan, which is basically military, weapons, and stuff. We have /k/, but we're never gonna ten of them. I mean, we kind of have /out/ (innawoods culture) and /diy/, maybe. (New boards won't be my decision moving forward), but my preference as a user is to avoid having a bajillion boards.
01:26:02 5chan was kinda the first splinter from 4chan 11 and a half years ago. They had 200 boards from day one. iichan or wakachan, these sites that had far too many boards for the amount of users they had. They spread their users so thin that there's never a critical mass. It's just not that fulfilling to use, the board's not "gonna go fast" enough for people, and they all just kinda died out.
01:26:29 The third type are the website that say, "Fuck 4chan! Fuck Moot! He killed /new/ and /r9k/ and based /b/. We're going to do 4chan, but we're going to make it better!" And today all those sites are going down, like 7chan or 4chon (STI shut that down, shortly before last Christmas 2014, and is actually selling it!)
01:27:08 For all my detractors and that people use alternate sites, here's a piece of advice I never gave years ago to STI: I think that when you create a community with the binding culture or common threat as: "We hate that guy, we hate those guys, we hate their website, and we're better and we're just going to do the same thing better! We're different!"
01:27:33 As it turns out, that's not really a culture. At least not a healthy culture. After a certain point, you spend so much time pigeonhole-focused on "We hate those people and we're so much better", that you never really create your own culture. At least not one that is able to sustain itself over time. 4chon is like a case study in this recent uptick in the "Fuck 4chan" crowd.
01:27:53 Going all the way back to 7chan, which started in /b/day, [they split off] when we took a hardline stance against anything that remotely like underage women, "jailbait" threads. (Was that August 2005? It was like, August 2004 or 2005... like the gray area... It's on ED somewhere...)
01:28:28 That's when we actually made the "No personal information and no raid rule". That rules is frickin 10 years old, and its always been a very blanket, catch-all rule, against anything that looks remotely like personal information or a raider or invasion.
01:28:38 A lot of people actually still think that 4chan had like, a /i/ (invasion) board. No, we never had that, and we would never ever have that. That's not what 4chan is about, not what it's for. That was from this era of post-Habbo Hotel / pre-Scientology raids. (Maybe that rule came later, like 2008?)
01:28:59 Anyway, 7chan splits off, and has all the things that Moot just banned from /b/. And as it turns out, that's not the healthiest, long-term minded way of managing a website. The second part of that question is, "Do you feel they're making a dent in 4chan's traffic like they believe they are?" No, because they're not. For as many #poolsclosed as I've read, 4chan is actually (in terms of page views) at its largest ever.
01:29:30 619 million trailing 30, which is again the largest. 20 million users? That fluctuates up and down, but it's been about 20 million users for a few years now. People look at things like Alexa. it's incredible how many people believe this and parrot this without doing their own research or fully understanding what they're looking at. One thing that people pointed to is Alexa.
01:29:53 The way Alexa works is it's based on people who use it's toolbar. Maybe they use databrokers.

1:30 - 1:40

01:30:00 Everybody on 4chan, at least those who browse /g/, they all run fricking, Adblock, Greasemonkey, Noscript. Do you think these people are running the Alexa Toolbar? That's reporting to Alexa what websites that you go to? Seriously? Google Analytics isn't even accurate enough for us, because it probably doesn't count a lot of our traffic. A huge percentage of our community blocks ads, which can in turn block the Google Analytics tracking tag, Very few people use these toolbars that report out your traffic. Alexa is not accurate.
01:30:34 You saw it spike and drop off with The Fappening, because The Fappening brought to 4chan a whole demographic of the type of person that does use Alexa Toolbar, or various other things that feed into their numbers. These are the mainstream audience, which is not nearly as savvy and not privacy conscious. So you saw this huge spike in 4chan's traffic, as a result, at least the traffic that is reported to us by Google Analytics.
01:31:01 4chan actually has more traffic, and following The Fappening has maintained the post-September and site is the largest it's ever been. In spite of the fact that some of those graphs say otherwise. So no, none of this has affected 4chan's traffic.
01:31:18 But again, maybe going forward, the fact that other imageboards set up... That's a good thing. Should 4chan be ruined by my successors, or die, or something like that, it's probably better that the imageboard market so to speak is a fragmented one, so there's not only one. 4chan has more or less controlled most of, if not the vast majority of English-speaking imageboard traffic.
01:31:46 Maybe in the future, that won't be the case. Maybe it shouldn't be the case, for the health of the greater imageboard browsing community.
01:32:04 #709, "Anyway, how do you feel about that the development of 4chan in the past six years? Especially in relation to many boards being archived? And sites like Reddit which combined the traditional format "anonymity" Do you think archives are bad for 4chan going forward?"
01:32:18 So this is an interesting question, regarding archives. Especially given some of the changes we've made in the past few weeks and months. See, historically, I've really hated archives. They aren't really keeping with the spirit of 4chan. The beauty of early 4chan. This is a two-part response, because this is like the creative 4chan, /b/'s heyday as a progenitor of internet culture, a meme factory and whatnot.
01:32:58 The beauty of 4chan, and the reason that 4chan was able to become great, is because of the ephermerality of the content, which washed away the shitposts, and allowed that creativity to bubble up. And also anonymity, allowing people to say and do things they wouldn't have otherwise done and to be very creative. So I've always felt that the archives were an impediment, not really keeping with the spirit of the creativity and legacy of the old 4chan, whatever we call that.
01:33:39 But I think the spirit of 4chan has kind of changed over time. It's changed a lot. For a long time, what people thought of 4chan was a kind of zany, fun place to hang out, to be creative and whatnot. Now it really is just pretty strictly an interest based community that incorporates anonymity. So for a lot of people, they don't really use 4chan to make things or to post things that disappear.
01:34:17 So I don't really like indefinite archiving. But that's basically the reason why we recently introduced limited retention/7-day archive on all boards except for /b/. I kind of came to understand that, for most people the experience of threads 404'ing every five minutes would actually suck. It's a pretty inferior experience to them.
01:34:37 And that's part of the reason archives exist and saw a rise in popularity. People would go to work, and when they came back, their threads would be dead, or they want to refer back to a previous thread. Or see what somebody else had posted, or something like that. And you know it was an ideal based on how a discussion based board, or even our pornographic boards basically having all their threads expire all the time.
01:34:55 I think the ephermerality lent itself mostly to the creativity of old /b/, /r9k/ (when it was still original content), and maybe actually, /s4s/ (maybe we should disable it on /s4s/ as well).
01:35:14 So my relationship with the archives... I really don't like permanent archives, I think that's a pretty dramatic change to the old spirit of the site, being that it has no memory. The only things remembered are the things that become memes, things that are reposted, things that resonate with an audience and are re-posted over and over again, and endure the test of time. The only survivors are those things [that have the strength to] swim upstream through the waterfall of content, just like salmon.
01:35:40 We just got to a point where I was like, "You know what? I guess we can have limited retention." Because now, 4chan, at least with the blue worksafe boards (really, every board outside of /b/) are shared interest discussion boards, and the pr0n boards are just content,(not much discussion there! lol). So I just felt that we may as well just take the pain out getting redirected to an archive when they want to catch up on something.
01:36:17 I don't expect that 4chan will ever have a real proper archive. We don't even [have a search feature] for our archived threads. We just have a [catalog] that you go to and Ctrl-F on that page to search threads. I think it's not only just archiving, it's actually search. 4chan has never essentially had search outside of OPs on the catalog. That's something else, it's not the fact that the third party archives make archives, it's that they have very, very powerful search functionalities.
01:36:48 Again, that's kinda against the old spirit of 4chan. But I kind of came to accept that the new new generation of users seem to be pretty much okay with that and there's actually some utility in keeping threads around a little bit longer.
01:37:14 #712 "When this place eventually becomes the new reddit and you realize that made a mistake by leaving, are you can come back and fix it, or make a new *Chan? No, again I think this is it for me. This is goodbye. I hope that 4chan and sites like it continue to exist for a very long time. I browse the site often, and I have really started browsing the site even more often since be we invested in the that the mobile site as much as we have made,
01:37:45 The mobile site's actually very [useful]. 25% of all our traffic comes from mobile now. I would I would highly suggest using the mobile site if you have a smartphone. I think it's actually a great addition to the site. I use this a lot more these days. But no, I mean if it goes downhill, that will be disappointing, because then I won't have a site that I like to browse, when I'm on the go or waiting for the bus or whatever.
01:38:14 But I think I've already fought my battle for the last 11 and a half years. I am very proud of what the volunteers in the community have built. For me, this represents the end of a long journey and the beginning of new journeys, that very likely do not include starting other imageboards. Although, the community is something that really fascinates me. I expect that whatever I at work on will probably have something to do with communities or images. I really like images too.
01:38:56 "Are you axing boards?" I was actually considering consolidating a few boards, the redundant ones. But I've spared you all rocking the boat. Sorry /3/ and /gd/. But barely anybody uses those boards, and they could really stand to be combined. But I know, we're not doing that, I'm not doing at least. Only time will tell.
01:39:34 #742: "Will you be able to post capcode of key moderation powers?"
01:39:39 Again, in the interim future I will, long-term. Probably not. I do have a cap code. It's ## Admin Emeritus. I haven't used it yet. I'll start using it after this Q&A. But you probably won't see around much anymore. Which isn't to say that I'm not browsing, but... It's probably healthy for both myself and the community for me to actually make a clean break.

1:40 - 1:50

01:40:00 isn't to say that I'm not browsing but I think it's probably healthy for both myself and the community for me to actually make a clean break.
01:40:23 "What happened the "Quick Save Image" button?" That is number 767. That was removed because of the browser, essentially, compatibility. It only worked in Chrome, because Firefox... It has to do with basically the fact that the images are hosted on a different subdomain and now actually an entirely different domain once we switched to the 4cdn domain.
01:40:46 Basically JavaScript that's running off of 4chan.org cannot access a resource that's on 4cdn.org, and there's not really a way to specify with like a CORS (editor's note: stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) header, or some- I mean it's really a long way to explain why basically it's not supported anymore by the browser. And so it was Chrome *indecipherable* features available in one browser but once Chrome basically removed that support going forward, just took it out, it wasn't gonna work anymore.
01:41:17 I think if you have 4chanX or something like that, like a browser add-on, it gets around that, because it has essentially much higher privileges than what we can do in the browser, you know what's being served from the web, so if that feature's really important you could use a third-party extension or just an extension that specifically
01:41:34 does that.
01:41:55 IP: "I will miss giving you head in the server room. So many sex."
01:41:59 Never had sex in the server closet, so maybe that can be something I aspire to going forward. Accepting applications by email.
01:42:08 "What's your favorite color?" I think red is actually my favorite color, everybody says blue, but... In fact red looks terrible on me too because I have very like naturally rosy skin. I have blue eyes, but like pretty rosy skin, so red just makes me look like I'm fucking sunburnt. So red looks terrible but I really quite like this color for some reason. Then it'd be... green, I don't know.
01:42:38 "Did you fuck Boxxy?", number 795. No, I meet her - so that's Catie Wayne - I met her, we hung out for like, it was 30 minutes or less, it was in California and I tweeted that I was in SoMa which is downtown San Francisco, and I had time to kill, and somebody basically tweeted at both of us and said "Oh my god, Boxxy is there, you should meet her". So we met up for coffee over Oak Street or something.
01:43:09 She's actually super nice, and I felt very old, because she was memeing me, and I didn't know all the memes she was saying. But she's actually super nice, we took that photo and broke the Internet, or at least broke the 4channernets for a day.
01:43:24 That was funny, closing that loop, meeting a "meme legend".
01:43:44 "Why do you allow the /sp/ CP spammer running rampant on /sp/?", number 809.
01:43:47 You know a lot of spam on /sp/ is done by an individual on a mobile network in Chicago and this is really one of the only form of spam that we still have trouble blocking.
01:44:03 Again, like it or hate it, but captcha really does prevent most of the automated spam that we encounter, and so this person, obviously they're having to solve captchas, but what they also do is that they're basically just flipping, they're using a mobile network,
01:44:20 I don't know if it's a phone or a little MiFi hotspot, but... You know, you can move five feet and you get a new IP with your mobile phone usually, so they're basically exploiting that to spam. So you know again, there are a few dozen moderators and a handful more janitors and not everybody can be awake all hours of the day...
01:44:44 Again, just report it. You know, part of the reason that people are so upset about moderation all the time is that even if we kind of clamp down, 4chan... Then again I think our moderation really is truly is as lax as it's been, in terms of both the kind of punishment that is meted out, but it's more, there's definitely more enforcement, in terms of just the total number of moderator actions being performed today because...
01:45:12 I think I wrote about this in one of my old newspost, but our old system was a piece of shit. It was great when we introduced it, which was like eight or nine years ago, but it didn't scale well, and certainly not with the volume of posts that we get, the volume of rule-breaking posts that we get, the volume of reports that we get, and also just the number of moderators and whatnot, people with access these tools, and so, for a long time we were using these tools that were just is completely outed and antiquated and not really up to the task, and those were completely rewritten like two or three years- or, it was like, a year and a half-two years ago, and now it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
01:45:49 I mean that's why you see a lot more posts deleted, a lot more users banned, it's not because of a conscious effort to step up moderation, it's just that, the tool… In a minute you could take care of like three or four posts. It just took forever, it took you like 15 to 20 or more seconds to do anything.
01:46:11 Now you can moderate almost like a post per second. It's really just night and day. Or at least every three to five seconds. So you do see a lot, depending on who's active and how many people are online, you see a lot more… a lot more moderation these days in that sense. It's just because people are able to cover more ground with less.
01:46:38 But again, I do truly believe in- most bans now are 1 or 3 days in length, we've actually decreased a lot- We added the ability for janitors to submit warn requests and so...
01:46:49 Really 4chan's... When we first got that system the bans used to be like permabans, like global permabans, now rarely are you globally banned, very rarely are you permanently banned, really most of the bans are 1 or 3 days.
01:47:02 Short bans aren't appealable, I know, but again, most of them are local, so you're not blocked from the entire site, and if you go back even further, being banned from 4chan used to block you from browsing; you couldn't even browse the damn site. So now again, it's like night and day.
01:47:16 And it's only got a lot more lenient in some respects, and a lot of people either haven't been using the site that long or just chosen to conveniently forget how bad it once was, and actually how subjective moderation used to be, it's very...
01:47:32 With the ban templates were very strict about what can be banned for because it has to correspond.
01:47:38 They open up the Ban panel now, and there's a dropdown list like "these are things you can ban for, because these correspond to the board's specific rules, it's on the database, and the global rules." So if it's not there then you probably shouldn't be banning for it.
01:47:51 And obviously there's some a certain of interpretation for some of the more kinda catch-all rules. But we've really stressed for people to be as objective and lenient as possible. And when you're banned too, you can view the post, the rule you broke, and all that.
01:48:06 [Back then], that wasn’t the case, you'd get banned from [lurking] the site, and you'd have like a cryptic, inane ban reason that was like five words long, without an example...
01:48:17 Again it's really night and day. For people who say it's worse, they really don't know how bad it used to be. So I am actually happy with how that's changed.
01:48:24 Here's a wonderful /pol/ post, #812 : "Why did you sell your own people?". I don't believe that I did.
01:48:32 "Why did you get literally in bed, literally, in bed with SJWs?" I didn't.
01:48:39 "Why did you hand /b/ over to the feds?" Again, not a thing. Probably illegal in the United States.
01:48:46 "Why did you nuke /pol/?" I Already explained that.
01:48:50 "Are you or are you not jewish?" I'm not Jewish, but, again, this is the kind of thing where it just doesn't make any sense to [answer]. If I say I'm not Jewish, they go "Ohh he's lying", or "Ohh he's this or that" so...
01:48:58 This is why I normally don't respond to things like this because *indecipherable* all of the questions I just read and responded to, there's no way to give a satisfactory answer to anybody who asks that kind of question, because they're just so far in their own head, and are essentially, “I'm going to accept any answer that is not the one that they're looking for.”
01:49:15 Which again, is a large part of why I stopped posting as often. Both kind of seeking to not derail threads, but also because you know that the funny questions that I do get, it is completely impossible to actually give an answer that people will accept if it's not the one they're looking for.
01:49:34 "What was the most intense moment you remember having on 4chan?", number 820, with a picture "Morgan Freeman" with a new motorcycle... Which... That is not Morgan Freeman.
01:49:45 Most intense moment… It's hard to single out any one moment I’d say again September was a kinda of a collection of pretty intense moments so I guess my answer would be September.

1:50 - 2:00

01:50:11 'Will the new admin adopt the moot name?' #823. I was actually thinking about that for a while. I really thought I’d we funny to satisfy all the Bane posters and have the new admin/s become The moot, kinda like The Batman. Which is funny because when I, part of the reason we, -I'm sure nobody will believe me now- but part of the reason of why I'm the only named person of my team is because way back then, say 8 or 9 years ago, the name of the moderators used to known and they would just catch shit for everything and people would -although this didn't happen nearly as much back then as it does now, which is really unfortunate- but people would jump on things and I decided, well, everything was up to me so I can be the punching bag, be the Batman. Like everybody would be mad at me over things because ultimately all the responsibility falls on me, it's my website, I'm the original owner, so if people wanted to pick on someone then they could do it on me and not on some poor ol' moderator who has no ability to affect anything and so I kinda adopted this thing of being the only administrator. I'm a named person and you can all yell at me.
01:51:36 For the most part I think that it's kinda working, because it isolated a lot of volunteers from all the hatred and whatnot, and allowed them to do their work in more peace and have me deal with the flank. I'd say it's working in the sense that I became the boogeyman, like everything is my fault -which again, in some way that's true. Although a lot of things that are outside of my control are thrown at me, so I can function as the ultimate scapegoat.
01:52:18 The real unfortunate thing is that the few times that people actually do this, like with /a/ and redwood right, you all saw this at /v/ on April -which was also a stressful month for them. Some guy who basically was a mod like years ago, which was janitor then moderator years and years ago, and haven't been on this site for 3 years and it was, to be fair, really dumb to post his credential on his LinkedIn and also another credential that he had which was that he was a volunteer on the EA forum and people interpreted that "oh god, 4chan is knowingly-'. But of course, is it some idiot who happened to be a community volunteer for some random EA game forum and had been a 4chan moderator at some point or is it some devilish conspiracy to appoint shills as moderators? Everyone would go with the latter. But that was an example of people that, again, he hadn't been part of the team for years and yet people attributed all of the deletions and bans that they didn't agreed with over the past few month to him, which was not possible. And that's what you see again with redwood and /a/, where he was actually inactive for a number of months. People the second they get a name they get empowered to blame everything they hate on that one person, and I would just tell you again, 99% of the time you're wrong. There are dozens of moderators. Mods haven't been board specific for over 10 years, janitors are boards specific but they can have multiple boards and again, you're wrong. You're just flat out wrong if you think that you know who is doing something. And it's funny, I see names tossed around all the time people who haven't been on the team for months or years, I saw people speculating on /a/ about who the successors would be and they mentioned Shii, he's a good personal friend of mine and I know him, he was one of the first people to help, but hasn’t been involved in like ever. He did the panel with me last year for old times’ sake. I see him regularly because he's a friend but he hasn't helped out in years and years and years and people, for some unknown reason, think he's involved and they start blaming him because they have another name to use. Maybe that's something that's will change under the attempts to add more transparency with the /bans page, and everybody claims we are censoring that. Sure, we don't show the post previews that show advertising, illegal bans but the thing is that it’s not an exhaustive list of all the bans. Again, we don't want to expose users to illegal content on the /bans page and we don't retain that post data, every 30 minutes or so it stamps some recent bans. So we tried to make things more transparent also with the /feedback page, which has an option to contact yourself with a mod to request more information about your issue. You have some healthy ways to express feedback although people sometimes jump up to the worst conclusions and start to harass people that didn't have nothing to do with , more often than not people are absolutely wrong. So that's kinda the result of all the team being anonymous and for the most parts it's worked our for the best because we don't have this cult of personality stuff or blame games that happen the few times some of these names get out, where some persons become a crusader to blame him everything on them and people just without any sort of facts or validation just pick it up on them.
01:56:41 I consider, back to the original question, retiring my nickname and I probably won't use it anymore, as retiring from 4chan is retiring from moot too but I won't be giving it to the next admin, they can choose a name for themselves.
01:57:02 'Why the fuck did you make /s4s/ and /lgbt/? Seriously, fucking why?' #829 /s4s/ was an Aprils fool joke that somehow outlived themselves, it was meant to be a joke about SRS, Shit Reddit Says, which is a subreddit that was the boogeyman of the moment for a while that had people thinking about this ‘outside force’, the SRS people that where invading the site, so every shitpost should be attributed to them. We were poking fun at that and as it turned out a lot people didn't really get the joke because and they didn't know what to do with it so they started to use it as a /b/ 2.0 and it was actually excellent if you looked at it, it's a really fun board. /lgbt/ was a more of a containment- well not containment, but a catch-all board. I considered at one point changing it to a general sexuality board, because I think leaving those topics out is also a little bit silly. We always try to have very, very broad categories on 4chan, as broad as possible without overlapping too much with other boards. /lgbt/ is specific to lgbt, queer I guess, topics but I think it kinda is functioning as a general sexuality board over /r9k/, which is the other side of that coin.
01:58:34 #832, question number 1: 'Is there any guarantee that the priorities of the new administrators will be in line with mot's? I.e., if they receive a buyout offer in a few days will they take it?' Again, I don't know who the long term successor will be; the transition team doesn't really want to rock the boat. So It's hard to say.
01:58:54 'Do wrestling threads belong on /sp/?' Well, /asp/ was added to hold those threads, we never really said they were on /sp/. It seems there's a preference for people to continue to post them on /sp/ because that's where they've always been and that's where the community for that is and people don't want to move boards. I guess this is an example of why we tried not to create boards that cater niche interests. People also became too worried over their home boards and started to hate crossboarders, which is bizarre because ten years ago we used to encourage people to use other boards- to use boards that were appropriate for the topic they wanted to discuss.

2 Hours

2:00 - 2:10

02:00:00 Maybe I've shared this example in public before, (but I can't remember if I did last time). I've thought about it as if, there’s an office building and every floor has a water cooler. [The co-workers on a floor will form a unique culture of] banter. [For example,] /sp/ is the king of banter, where people want to post “power rankings” and all these other [threads, such as] “What cheeto is the best cheeto to eat watching the superbowl?” [That’s just what they want to do.]
02:00:23 And we say, "Oh, that's off topic," or "Can you do that on the cooking board?” There's a more appropriate board for discussing food preferences.
02:00:32 But people obviously don't want to do that. For the most part, [they] want to hang out in their [own] office floor, since that's where their buddies are. We're [telling them], "Hey, can you go use either the communal water cooler downstairs in the lobby and mingle with all these other strangers from our building,” or “Can you go upstairs to this other office where your conversation may be more appropriate."
02:01:00 And people [tell us], "Well no, I want to use the water cooler on my floor, what the fuck? These are where my coworkers are. These are where my friends are. Why would I want to [go elsewhere]? You know, I can't be arsed to go downstairs and fuck around with strangers. [Damn] those crossboarders,” and whatnot.
02:01:14 So we [met] a lot of challenges over the years moving topics, disallowing topics, or moving them to where they'd be more appropriate, because people just simply do not want to move and don't want to be exposed to people that they don't think are “cut from the same cloth” or don't “represent them”. This is unfortunate. 4chan is a large community and we have a bunch of different boards that cater to different interests. We used to encourage people to use the other boards. “There are more boards out there that are more appropriate for some topics you're trying to squeeze into your homeboard.” But alas, as it turns out, people don't agree with that. So we've taken more of a hands-off approach.
02:02:07 For a long time I was basically working on features. I mean, we thought about a categories system. I spent months and months and months thinking about this.
02:02:15 You know, a different thread type or some sort of category thing or 'nesting boards' or 'linking boards' somehow and really trying to kind of… Again, the big challenge that 4chan has had is how do you cram as many people into as small a space as possible where people have very different ideas or opinion about what should and shouldn't be discussed. And, again, how do you accommodate as many of those people as possible and please as many of those people as possible realizing that you can't please everybody, but again, how do we do our best at that? And I spent a long time trying to think of solutions for that, that wouldn't really fundamentally alter the experience of 4chan for most people, but ultimately came up without any sort of silver bullet because there really isn't a silver bullet. It really is just, it's so based on one's preference, and the minority tends to be the most vocal and so we ended up just leaving with the status quo because it was hard to come up with a solution that would solve that problem for most people.
02:03:24 And just for example, 250,000 people browse /sp/ every month, at least in the last 30 days. And actually it's very… sunday is like a friggin shit-show I guess. You know, people like their sports on sundays.
02:03:53 Number 847. If you could've ran any website that wasn't 4chan or Canvas or Drawquest as successfully as you have for these past years, what type of website would it have been or was an imageboard always your first choice?
02:04:03 That assumes that I have run 4chan successfully, which for all the detractors, I challenge you to find an example of one individual managing a website for ten plus years, much less a community. But, um, I digress. You know, I mean, 4chan was a happy accident. People remind me of this all the time and try to rub it in my face, discounting how… You know, the one thing I think has kind of amused me over the years is how people for no reason discount how much work has gone into making 4chan what it is today. Not to discredit the community. The community has made 4chan what it is today, but conveniently forgets the fact that we have put in hundreds to thousands of hours of coding and provisioning servers and setting them up, fixing them and coding them, making features and making the code better. 4chan didn't even have image repl… I mean futaba's original code didn't even have image replies when I first started working on it.
02:05:10 First of all, if you look back at futaba and 2chan.net, it is jank as fuck. 4chan with the inline extension and even just a lot of the conventions. The board directories and stuff like that. People who haven't used this site from day one, I think, don't appreciate how 4chan of today represents the collective efforts of tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of users over the years, but also, again, hundreds of volunteers who've really dedicated a lot of time. Not just me, I mean, more so others than me at this point because there's more of them and they've collectively… and I've put in easily over ten-thousand hours over the past decade, but, you know, they've put in tens of thousands of hours as a group and 4chan does represent the collective efforts of lots of people and its just changed so much and I think is the best imageboard there is in terms of both community and its functionality and all that stuff.
02:06:05 But again, going back, It was a happy accident and so I had no… again, I grew with it over the years. It grew. Everything was gravy to a certain degree but I never expected to, I mean I never intended to run a large website. I mean, it really was just something for a few of my friends and it just kind of grew from there and, you know, I grew with it. Tried to keep it growing as best I could in terms of just scaling the site and the architecture and all of that to account for its increasing usage and for the most part I think that the fact that we're here today is a testament to the fact that, you know, we did it. We all succeeded and despite controversies, despite legal hassles, despite financial… you know, it was dire years ago when I was basically personally bankrupt and in debt, to now where it's not a great business but I still found a way to make it work.
02:07:05 You know, the team, I mean 4chan kind of stands today in spite of itself. Between internal and external forces it's really been quite the uphill battle and I'm very proud that we made it here, this far. And, again, the entire point of the past two years has been to ensure that 4chan can survive another ten years. So I think that I would be very happy to look back 9 more years from now at 4chan at 20 and just go " Wow, that's incredible." Again, how many communities have done that?
02:07:35 So you get a lot of shit from people when the leak happened (The Fappening) and yes, a ton, and that's why I stopped lifting and spent a jillion dollars on lawyers and blah blah blah, so I already answered that.
02:07:48 Number 856. What was your biggest administrative error that you ever made in your time here? I would say it would be, and I've said this in talks, and I've said this in interviews and people point it out and kind of call me out on it but I think communication has been challenging over the years. It's just so hard to communicate with as many users as 4chan has, especially given these days.
02:08:11 In the early days, 4chan users were all sort of cut from the same cloth. I mean they're all from Something Awful or raspberryheaven or this IRC channel. They're all anime nerds basically. And today the 4chan userbase is very diverse and the slate of boards we have are very diverse, so 4channers tend to be very opinionated and also for some reason believe that their opinions are weightier than others and are deserved to sometimes be heard over others.
02:08:48 It's made it really challenging over the years to continue to manage, to kind of keep the ship sailing and keep things kind of copesetic and running smoothly because as the site's grown, its become so diverse and so varied. So it's a challenge to, as it grows, as the absolute number of people gets larger, gets very hard to manage but also again as the demographic broadens, it's even harder to manage.
02:09:19 And so I think allowing myself to kind of fade [away] in terms of communication obviously wasn't a good thing. You know, I've been active for the entire time, I've just opted to be a lot more “behind the scenes”, show my face less, do less of these kind of Q&As, and post less, because after a certain point it wasn't really fruitful.
02:09:40 I mean it would just derail the thread and I'd just have people yelling all sorts of bizarre conspiracies at me, trying to get a rise out of me, trying to get me to ban them, or trying to hurt my feelings. That made it a [poor] use of my time or anybody's time [for me to communicate].

2:10 - 2:20

02:10:24 [Unfortunately], as we've all learned, in the absence of [an explanation], people fill that vacuum with the most hilarious, bizarre shit. 99.99% of the time, it's completely wrong. When other people parrot [that shit], it becomes accepted as a fact. And then people will immediately ignore what I say if it's not exactly what they were looking to hear. I think my lack of communication has allowed that to happen.
02:10:40 But, again, that lack of communication came as a result of this dynamic that exists in the community. And so it's kind of this weird trichromatic problem so I really was less visible probasbly after starting my startup because at the time I was just really busy, and so that kind of, started to y'know kinda snowballed. Um, you know I wrote this newspost in 2012, where I kinda came back, I haven't written a newspost in 4 years, and as I have grown immensely between those time, 2008 and 2012, and I tried to clear the air and kinda reset. I think that works for a while but again I got sucked back into work, and community changes, and rolls over so much over the years. I mean we've had this multiple kind of vintages of users to think about, almost like wine, over the years, and each again with their own ideas about what the site is about, coming into it, how they got introduced to it, in terms of how their friends maybe told them about the site or *indecipherable* and that kinda forms their opinion of what 4chan is, what it stands for, what it's all about, and they kind of internalized that and anything that is contrary to that, that view that they hold, uhm, again they really start to kinda act out against it. So you know I think not being as present, and also again the community's so large - I used to post here everyday when I was younger, 10 years ago, and the site only got like 2 thousand posts per day. And so almost everybody would see me posting, but now even if I posted a hundred times a day, on every- y'know let's just say I posted once a day on every board, or even ten times a day of every board, the vast majority of the people using the site would still not see me post, wouldn't, would just think that I have disappeared because things move so quickly. I guess now with the archives things have kinda changed, but then again, that assumes people are actually browsing the archive for mootposts, so..., which I guess some people do on occasion. But, so I guess the communication is the administrative error I've made, um, although I do, you know when I do communicate I think over the years I've tried to become more, in terms of how I address the community, and how I write, I just tried to be very respectful I think. I used to be, when I was younger I was a little more, I mean again I would have fun, I mean I enjoyed fucking around just as much as the rest of you. So, over the years if anything I think that's kind of, tempered that and tried to be more respectful which is think is basically kind of act more professionally, as I've kind of come to understand how much 4chan means to people, you know, even for people that discriminantly name it, and try to entreat them as I would anybody else.
02:13:19 "What were your proudest moment as an admin?" I think it's hard to single out any one moment. I think it's again just where we stand today is really incredible. Again everybody who's played any part in that, especially the members of the community should be very proud of the fact that they in some small part created a, y'know just this incredible kind of timeless thing. So, people *indecipherable* should be very proud of the fact that they've played a part in that.
02:14:03 *laughs* "Do you ever regret anything you've done/said to the users of 4chan (like pic related)?" (editor's note: a picture highlighting a rule that reads "ONLY MINORS ARE ALLOWED TO BROWSE 4CHAN. IF YOU ARE OVER THE AGE OF 18, YOU MUST DISCONTINUE BROWSING IMMEDIATELY") There's this screenshot of a, this is part of what we've changed the, I think this is a parody of when we've changed the over 18 rule to more specific, to no one under the age of 13, and that was a legal thing - that was just a COPPA compliance thing. And we quickly reworded, but people had this fucking connection and flipped out, and *indecipherable*, and enraged people, but um, you know. I mean, it is what it is. But... "anything you've ever done or said," again, I think it's more of a general kind of, communication and miscommunication thing.
02:14:45 #870: "What do you think about the epic cuckold meme?" It's very epic; it's everywhere. Again it's nice to see that every few months we can choose a new boogeyman or a new insult of the moment that I went from being a faggot, y'know for the better part of ten years, to a cuck. So, I mean, it is what it is. I'm pretty amused by it. I mean again there's the most recent boogeyman of the moment, I'm curious to see what that'll be in the next few months. Because, uh if I've learned anything it's that it'll change with the winds.
02:15:28 #888. Cool post bro, nice trips. "Did you like the site more when it was just a niche imageboard with a small userbase from something awful? How do you feel about the growth of the site, do you think it has changed the overall quality?" I mean obviously yeah, I absolutely miss the old days. You know the site was a lot smaller, you know it was a lot more intimate. Again, people were kind of from the same place, they had the kind of same background and it was, we were all kinda y'know, had this kinda shared history, coming from the *indicipherable* progenitor; Something Aweful, #raspberryheaven chatrooms and stuff like that. And so yeah I mean it had a very different, kind of tenor, I mean the community, the conversations... I mean people used to type complete sentences with proper capitalizations on slash b, the random board, it used to be anime-slash-random, from the beginning. And, yeah it's just so different now. Y'know I think that the nostalgia can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing. Again the site has just rolled over, I mean it has the vintages of kind of users of, have kind of aged out and moved on and new people come in, and again people are always complaining about "newfag, oldfag this," but you know the fact that 4chan, the reason that 4chan still exists today is because it's that dynamism, that dynamic quality to the community. For every ten people that leave, you know, eleven people join, or twelve people. So we've always kind of replenished and you know our numbers are usually growing a little bit and that's kept the community interesting. Again you see that represented in the culture and the topics. Um, you know, I mean, again the obsessional cuckolding. It's hard to imagine people from ten years ago being as obsessed with cuckoldry. But again, that's what has kept the site strong and kind of kept it relevant and intersting is that, it has that ability to kind of rewrite itself. Kind of like any great city. *indecipherable* it has to be like, say, New York, kind of constantly reinvent itself. So I think 4chan is kind of constantly reinventing itself in some sense. And that's what's kept me interested for ten years. So for as much as I kinda think back to the past, and I have a friend that actually reminded me, somebody you all know, Randall Munroe *indecipherable* from xkcd, we were talking about, he spoke at TED last year, and we were just chattting about, and I told him I really miss, and I don't have any internet friends anymore really, outside of all of you, and I don't really talk to people - I don't use IM anymore, I stopped using AIM, g-chat, I don't really use IRC anymore, like I don't really "hang out" on the internet, really, as much outside of 4chan. And I just don't have these relationships in my life anymore. And I remember back to being a teen. Just like how important that was to me, and how, how amazing that felt. Just, you know, again just being excited to go on IRC and IM, and make these friends, or catch up with these friends. And now it feels like it's missing from my life. And his response was again like that: you just have to kind of appreciate that was a time in your life, and that was, you know you can find comfort in that, that kind of nostalgia or warmth that you feel for the past - you know, it's kind of incorrect to continue to try to return to that. It's unhealthy. It's dangerous if you constantly try to like, be stuck in that past, and recreate that past, because you can't! That's again I think 4chan - I've never tried to kinda recreate that past. It's always been about allowing it to stay amorphous and change. And keep an eye on, towards the future. But I do really miss the old days. But again I miss it like a healthy way. I don't miss it like I want to return to those days, but I have certain fondness for the old days.
02:19:23 What is the weirdest thing a 'fan' has ever done to you? Number 897. Ah, nothing actually, again the weirdest thing is that people when they meet me are actually very pleasant and usually are as you can tell from my journeying on for two-and-a-half hours now, surprised to find how kind of boring and dopey I am. laughs You know, "you're just some nerdy twenty-something, uhm, I thought you'd be this kind of maniacal caricature of a human being!" and I'm like, "nope, I'm just a dude from the internet." Again I think a lot of people expect me to be a certain way in person that I'm not *indecipherable* dopey nerd. And again, I think there's a lot of projection that kind of happens on the internet. But um, so if anything, again I've only ever had very positive interactions with y'know kind of quote, unquote 'fans' in person. If anything they were just wholly uneventful. Because y'know people who venture out into the world on a daily basis and choose to say "hi" to some random dude that they barely know from the internet tend to be, y'know, "I just wanna say hi"-average people.

2:20 - 2:30

02:20:37 Number 901: "Moot will you consider going to school for an engineering degree so you can build Skynet (with the implication that 4chan will rule the planet someday, obviously)". Uh- no, I mean, I'd definitely love to go back to school at some point, I actually- I'm taking a leave of absence right now from my second college, and I- but I wouldn't go to an engineering school. Again my lovely /g/ detractors point out I'm not a terribly good programmer, um, I'm happy that I learned that early on in my, quote unquote, 'career', I mean I- I would hate to be like that guy who's playng college ball and thinks he's gonna make it pro and spends his entire life dedicated to a dreram he never gets to achieve. Some way he never gets to go pro at the NFL, and I had somewhat of a revelation where y'know I programmed when I was in my early to mid teens, and I was not particularly good at it, and instead of, which I guess *indecipherable* I gave up, but I realized it wasn't a strength, and there were other people out there a lot more talented at programming than I am, *indecipherable* or probably would be, or at least I would have to work very very hard to be OK at it, where there are people who *indecipherable* comes very, very naturally to them, and they were just excellent at it with very minimal effort. And, so I realized that. I wanna work with those people and, uhm, be, y'know be a support of their efforts, and work with them as a product, slash, y'know, designer, slash, whatever, *indecipherable* and again engineering is not a strength of mine. So I highly doubt I'd go to an engineering school. I'd sooner get a drgree, in soft science, like anthropology which I'm sure is gonna have /pol/ freaking out, or /lit/ or /sci/ but uh.. I think anthropology and sociology and stuff like that and history have always been more interesting to me than computer science. Because- I am actually 4chan's primary server administrator along with one of the person. So... and the architecture we have is the one that I've designed. So if anything that's- I am a lot stronger as a sysadmin than I am as a programmer. So that's always been fun. And again that's a thing that I pursued as a hobby, in step of 4chan, and I don't feel the need to go to school for it.
02:23:37 Just getting through these... Here's an excellent photo. Number 936. "Do you collect anything? What do you plan to purse after you have stepped down from 4chan?" Ah- I don't really collect. I mean I have a lot of trinkets from my travels, I don't buy anything when I travel anymore because I made this mistake when I was much younger; buying junk and planning to give it away to friends and never getting around to it. Or just, coming back with like a second bag of *indecipherable* and it was not a good idea, not a great use of my money, so whenever I travel I really try to bring back like one very small thing. For example the last time I was in Japan, I brought back some incense and like a little- like a little charm from like a buddhist temple. So no, I mean I don't really collect much. The thing I do collet is teacups, actually, and that's pretty much the one thing I collect. I usually buy like mugs, I mean they're really mugs more than teacups, but um, yeah I like tea a lot, and I just- I am actually just drinking a very cold latte right now. I only started drinking coffee a few months ago. And I like collecting cups from my travels because cups are really useful, I expect I'll have cups in my life forever, you can drink outta them, they look neat, and, yeah, I mean I- try to get one that's kind of representative of the place I was visiting. So um..
02:25:23 "Why do you have such shit taste in EVA girls?" 953. Fucking Asuka. Usuka is the best girl. Fuck you. Fuck Rei. Rei fucking sucks! Like empirically, empirically, just objectively sucks. So if you don't like based Usuka then you have poor taste.
02:26:02 "Who do we have to blame now?" 964. "Will you put your shoe on your head one last time for us?" I guess I should do a shoe-on-head later today or tweet it or something at some point. Who do we have to blame now, thought, now that's again a good- I don't know I mean it's funny, I've thought about this over the years a little bit in terms of again all this kind of me functioning as the punching bag, a place where all the axe-trimming ends up. People get- y'know if anything breaks or anything blablabla, "fuck moot, fuck moot! he's a-" y'know, "cuck, faggot, piece of shit" blah blah blah, "we hate him!" And it's actually kind of strange because it's hard to find that, I wouldn't even call that a collective personality, but, most other websites have them in a sense that I imagine if you were mad at Reddit, for example, you're mad at Reddit. You're not mad at their- their CEO left *indecipherable* sculpted his own community, but for the most part, I mean people- I guess people get mad at Mark Zuckerberg, but for the most part the populus is mad at Facebook, mad at Reddit, mad at- you know, the entity or the organization, so it's pretty uncommon to have *indecipherable*, but it's not so common with internet platforms. Like Twitter *indecipherable*, people don't really get mad at Dick Costolo who's their CEO, nearly as much because Twitter's a company of like thousands of people. And 4chan is a company of none. And I was the face of them for the longest time. And so people kind of chose me as the embodiment of the site, for the lack of alternative. So who do you blame now? I don't know, I guess you just have to blame quote unquote, '4chan'. Whatever that is. Kinda of, fan out the hate over this entity, this amorphous entity.
02:28:17 Number 975. "Are you afraid 4chan will turn into something you don't want it to be?" Uh, yeah, sure. I mean I use 4chan; daily. I really hope that it stays similar, I think it's pretty great the way it is now. I hope that it- if it were to change it would change for the better. I kinda left some ideas behind I mean I did an interview at least. I would've love to see a native app, like a mobile app. Really I use 4chan a lot on my phone now, the mobile website's way better than it used to be, but it still has a long way to improve. I sure wish that we'd been able to do that. But again, people fail to account for the fact that mobile app can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours of time, if you get somebody to do it for free, then sure, but it's a big time investment, if you pay somebody to do it, it costs a lot. When I was running my startup we paid for the V1 of our app, it was almost 250 thousand dollars to contractors to make that app. The going rate for mobile developers is insane. They're paid, they're worth *indecipherable* than platinum. So it's very expensive and it's a huge investment of time and energy and again for as much as I wanted to do a mobile app, I just, I kinda wish I'd put out a public call, I planned to do that but for various reasons, that didn't happen. So I'd love to see somebody do that at some point. Do an official app for both the iOS App Store and the Android App Store.

2:30 - 2:40

02:30:01 I think again like doing more international stuff will be interesting, kind of expand the reach beyond the english speaking community, and maybe we can make an Australian 4chan. Australian English. Mates. Based Aussie will finally get his way. Maybe he can be the admin of Australian 4chan. Which I guess was 4chon. But another thing is I've thought a lot about, before kinda really deciding that I was gonna step away in this fashion and yield and concede things the way they were, I thought a lot more about user governance. Could users have more direct impact on the site, and I know other sits have experimented with that.

2:40 - 2:50

2:50 - 3:00

3 Hours

3:00 - 3:10

03:00:00 ...see how things goes. drinks
03:00:08 Now >>1097 asked, "So what are you going to do with /jp/ now? Who is even in charge of it? It's in a mess and they have no idea how to blahblahblah."
03:00:16 I mean people have been angry about /jp/ for, since day one, so I don't really know, what to do about that, uh, if you have concrete, again, specific suggestions, they're not quote unquote 'Fix it!', which really doesn't help anybody, feel free to submit them on /feedback or email them to me and I can pass them along but uh, /jp/ as far as I understand, I get far fewer complaints by email now about it or have in the past few months and so to my knowledge it's, y'know, it's fine and I do apologize to you /jp/ for the hordes, the *indecipherable* people that invaded the former 10th anniversary post but uh, it'll all clear out within, in a few hours, so I apologize for that though. I hope we can all have a good sense of humor about stuff like that.
03:01:36 'When the inevitable 4chan book gets written, how do you want to be remembered as an administrator? laughs When the inevitable 4chan movie gets greenlit, what haircut do you want your portrayer Jesse Eisenberg to wear?" number >>1121.
03:01:50 Uh, y'know I kinda pushed *indecipherable* a book for at least, like, 5, 6, 7 years now. I've always said no. If you actually look at it I haven't really given that many talks for the past few years, and uh, if you look at our press page, I haven't really done much press over the past 3-and-a-half to 4 years now. The last stuff there I think is from 2011. I've essentially ignored I mean every press inquiry I've gone about 4chan, I did do press that kinda included 4chan when I was promoting Canvas and DrawQuest because I mean, y'know, that's what journalists were interested in *indecipherable* '4chan founder does X', uh and so, I used that as a, to help, y'know, promote the new things I was working on, but um, I haven't done any true 4chan specific press up until Wednesday when I made the announcement, and, y'know, I figured, and the reason for that is, I hate, I actually never done an on-camera, I mean it's not entirely true, I mean I've never done like an on-camera, like on-air interview. I did a half-post live thing for DrawQuest and uh I did, I was kinda duped into doing something for CNN after my TED Talk, but generally, like, I fucking hate being uh, recorded, y'know, audio, I mean, this is like, painful for me to do this, just I hate being recorded, y'know, video, I hate being photographed, like I just don't have any interest in seeing my face in places or on the television, that's why I did really, again I've never done an on-air, y'know, an TV interview, I've declined, I mean, more than one or two hundred opportunities to do so, uh, and, y'know for the most part I haven't really done any interviews because, I just ignore them, because again I think that I've said more or less everything I've had to say about 4chan except for now I guess kinda looking back, but in the past years like, I've talked about it, I've said everything I had to say, there's nothing new to say, 4chan hasn't changed that much and so, there's no point in doing press and so, same thing for a book. I've always just said that I don't have anything to say. And if I did write something it would be something more I think, academic, more kind of a sociological, kind of a y'know this kind of introspective, kind of look back and using y'know social sciences to kind of think back on the evolution of this gray internet community rather than like a lolcats book or something stupid. Uh, and the movie, I don't think that 4chan movies would be even get written, and again I don't think it's the nearly compelling a story as Facebook's founding and so I don't think there's gonna be The Anti-Social Network anytime soon and uh, I would be terrified to see what that movie was like, get it, it's not that interesting- it's kind of a bore, y'know it's just a derpy 15-year-old kid made a website and managed to hang out for 11 years so I don't really see that as the most compelling movie, again if you believe all the crackpot conspiracy theories about 4chan and maybe you'd have an interesting movie but the actual honest you got behind-the-scenes management of the site and all that is not been that gripping, it's just been a long, kind of slow slog.
03:04:45 "Have you thought about selling the site to Kim Dotcom?" >>1130.
03:04:49 He'd probably make a great owner. You should all petition him to take over the site. I think MEGA plus 4chan would actually be pretty awesome. I like MEGA alot and I'm sure you all do, so feel free to petition him to become your new overlord. He'd certainly make a very flamboyant, I mean that in like the best possible way. He is way more of a person now than I am, so maybe he's the hero that you all need. Based Kim Dotcom. He can deliver you from DDOSes against Xbox LIVE and Playstation Network. Maybe he can deliver 4chan.
03:05:33 "Do you see yourself getting married in the next 5 years?" >>1136.
03:05:36 I've had the worst luck dating. That's not true, I mean, I've dated some really great people but I've never been in a relationship for longer than maybe like 9 months? And I very very very very rarely date, so I think I'm destined to be a, and I'm very actually, very happy, well and again I have a lot of really close friends in my life. But, you know, maybe it will all be again, we'll all be *indecipherable* and I'll be posting on /r9-, I'm not a wizard, but I'll probably be posting on /r9k/ 10 years from now, bemoaning the fact that I'm not married and blahdyblahblahblah. So, we will be fo- together alone. I've always really enjoyed that meme because I identify with it. It'll probably more likely that, a platonic life partner at this point than I meet a, a wife. drinks
03:07:01 laughs >>1156, "I'm the one who has been posting massive amounts of interracial porn on /pol/ and /new/. I'm the reason for the cuckolding meme. I'm so sorry moot."
03:07:09 Don't worry about it anon, it's been uh, it's been fun. Again, I learned a whole lot about a fetish that I once knew nothing about. So, thank you for educating us all about the virtues of cuckoldry.
03:07:27 "Moot, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?" >>1160.
03:07:30 No, but I've seen the movie 'Airplane'.
03:07:53 "Moot, have you ever gotten dubs naturally? No admin hacks," number >>1183.
03:07:56 Yeah, I mean, we actually, there's no way for a moderator to... There's no way for a moderator to get a get. Uh, actually no, maybe with like one of the /b/ gets, one of the million gets a long time ago we did something so we could kind of like fa- Ah y'know actually, I don't we did. I know a moderator did get one of the earliest gets, but natura- before he's a moderator, naturally, but um I mean, it's not worth it, the coding resources, to do that so we've never done that, and I mean all of my dubs and trips and quints- I got quints once for real, or maybe it was ah, quads. I got quads or quints on like, /lit/. I think it was a like /lit/ sticky or something, and I left it up for- it was excellent, I was so proud of myself. Dubs is another thing where I mean, reaction faces and all that stuff and dubs and we kinda, it's just became such a pain in the ass for a long time, we tried to squash it but clearly again the community prevailed. But I've gotta say I'm a huge dubs fan, so thank you based /s4s/.
03:09:06 "Where will you go now moot? Do you have enough money to live a comfortable life? Good luck my friend," >>1196
03:09:11 Thank you, George. Again, I really look forward to writing about the finances, I just hate writing and so I have to get up my butt to do this, but 4chan has not by any means made me wealthy. It really is represented pretty shoddy business for the longest time and again took, it really wasn't breaking even reliably until about 2009, 2010, kinda after the great, before and after the Econopocalypse, so 4chan has definitely not made me wealthy by any means and again it's usually kinda teetering, I mean it's doing better than teetering on the brink but it is a, it's very rarely had much profit and all of that profit, for the most part, just stays in the business and for good reason because again in September last year(...)

3:10 - 3:20

3:20 - 3:30

3:30 - 3:40

3:40 - 3:50

3:50 - 4:00

4 Hours

4:00 - 4:10

04:00:00 Again, I read this and I get a lot of projection.
04:00:03 I mean, it's true - 4chan was, in a lot of ways, a freak accident, as most successes are.
04:00:12 Again I think that people who say this and kind of try to discredit the accomplishments of the site are kind of doing a disservice to the community, and also, the dozens to hundreds of volunteers who have pitched in over the years, myself included.
04:00:28 For whatever reason, their genesis story of 4chan tends to be "it just got shat out overnight in its existing form and was just magically popular and has all the features and all that" and don't appreciate, again, that obviously it took people and took community, but it also took, for me personally, over ten thousand hours and, I mean, probably like a hundred thousand plus hours of volunteering and really hard work to get to where it is today.
04:00:54 And that's the case for any business, so, I mean, sure, let's call it a happy accident, but I think you're kind of deluding yourself, kind of misguiding yourself to believe that a lot of people, especially the community, including volunteers, didn't work very hard to get the site to where it is today and maintain it where it is today. 04:01:24
04:01:41 "What if they make Asuka a lesbian? - 1796". I would be so sad - Asuka is my 2D waifu.
04:01:46 Asuka is best girl.
04:01:49 I guess Usaka is best girl.
04:02:23 Hold on one second guys, I need to...
04:02:29 [transformers sound effect]
04:02:42 Heh.
04:02:46 "4chan won't stop straight after this stream, will it? - 1843". Uh, I don't think so. I don't see why it would. I guess I haven't been posting so I don't know how the servers are running right now. But hopefully everything's fine.
04:03:00 1844 said "Is 4chan still growing? I remember during the 2010 4chan panel--" You're mistaken, you're probably referring to the 2013 one. "-- you showed a ridiculous growth during the whole decade it was alive - will it ever end? Do you think it'll get even faster while you're gone?"
04:03:13 You know, 4chan is growing very slightly. I mean, it's grown mostly in terms of its pageviews.
04:03:26 My lips are chapped. Ow. I'm just gonna be drinking, Mark.
04:03:30 So it's not growing -- I mean, it's actually incredible that it's gotten to where it is today and it's actually maintained a similar level of traffic -- actually, it's grown...
04:03:45 We changed the tracking tag a little bit - where we displayed it - so we don't display it on 404 pages anymore, so we saw kind of a dip in traffic and kind of a rebalancing of traffic - kind of this new floor as a result of where we put the Google Analytics tag.
04:03:59 Again, more or less, the site has not really declined nor grown dramatically over the years, but really just maintained a respectable amount of traffic, so who knows?
04:04:17 And also, I don't know which graph you're referring to - I think it might've just been the year-to-date - sorry, the history-to-date graph of the traffic, but 4chan, I think, spiked in about 2010 - it kind of accelerated, then kind of slowed down and levelled out, but 4chan has never really had a hockey stick or any sort of...
04:04:42 Really, the one time that stands out - sorry, now two times - the one time that stands out as sort of a big drive of traffic was when we were featured on the front page of Wikipedia.
04:04:52 No other press really sent a meaningful amount of traffic, no other event really sent a meaningful amount of traffic before last September, outside of the Wikipedia "Featured Page of the Day".
04:05:06 And then, last September obviously. I mean, it was a gigantic surge in traffic as a result of The Fappening. Funny thing is, we have lost money on that because our hosting costs went up and, you know, we barely make money and people didn't really purchase more ads and so we didn't benefit from all that traffic.
04:05:24 Some of that traffic, I think, stuck on a little bit, but again we've never seen ridiculous growth.
04:05:29 It really has been kind of "The Tortoise and the Hare" and we've definitely been the tortoise.
04:05:35 Which I think in the case of the community is actually very healthy.
04:05:37 I think it's... if we had seen sudden growth like that, kind of a spike...
04:05:46 That would be... it's very hard for a community to adjust to a sudden influx in traffic.
04:05:53 Both kind of architecturally, in terms of scaling, and socially, like the social dynamics and the culture to kind of keep up with rapid growth like that and more often than not I think you see a lot of problems being attributed to this.
04:06:04 And so the fact that 4chan has grown slowly over time is a good thing, so hopefully it will continue to grow, but kind of slowly.
04:06:31 "Hey moot, you mentioned last panel that we were working on a solution to the /v/ problem - too much (sic) boards for one topic - what was your solution and will we ever see it? - 1863"
04:06:39 I kind of alluded to that earlier... we're thinking about, you know, categories, or sub-boards or tags or *indecipherable* and we'd played with so many different kinds of thread types and we'd played with so many ideas there and fleshed them out and I would go to our developer and say "can we do this?" and we'd poke holes in it.
04:07:03 So we never really got there. I mean, I played around with a lot of things and got to a point where I was just like "it's not worth shaking the uh... rocking the boat here".
04:07:22 And sure, the current system isn't ideal, but I think that making a major change to the way the site is structured is probably going to do more harm than good at this point.
04:07:34 And so I don't have any plans outside of the brainstorming over the past year or two, but that's not to say that it's not going to change in the future going forward - it's out of my hands at that point...
04:07:51 So I don't know, unfortunately the stuff that I alluded to a year and a half ago at that panel are kind of no longer in the works.
04:08:03 "Why is Bella Thorne so perfect?" That's an Asuka... cosplayer. 1883.
04:08:09 She is pretty perfect. Based Asuka and 3DPD. Maybe we can set us up on a McDonald's date.
04:08:32 "Are you a virgin?" *indecipherable*
04:08:35 I am not a wizard, I'm very sorry. I've never posted on Wizardchan, I don't think they would accept me.
04:08:59 Alright, so 48000 people listening. Geez. And I'm still at the point in the thread before this even begun (sic). I guess I haven't seen all the wonderful replies screaming about my responses. Now, let's see...
04:09:20 "Are you gonna take a retirement vacation? 2034". Honestly, I haven't planned anything yet. I really should go to Mootxico. I was going to make that joke in that post. Hopefully if I do I'll get a good picture and I'll upload it somewhere so you all can see it and I'll be sipping a Corona - which is a terrible beer.
04:09:38 Sipping hopefully a craft beer of some kind on the beach in glorious Mootxico, but I don't have any vacation plan. In fact, I joked to a reporter on Wednesday that I spend most of the morning after I post my posts lounging around unshowered in my pajamas on my couch, and I...
04:09:58 I don't know if I've showered at that point. I guess I've showered at that point. I donned pants and I went outside and I ate a dollar slice - ate a $4 lunch at - I guess it was a $2 slice and a can of seltzer - I guess $2.50, damn, pizza's getting expensive.
04:10:15 Yeah, two hundred... two dollar fifty slice of pizza, one dollar fifty can of seltzer. Times are a'changing. So that was my retirement lunch. And I actually, also, had a slice of pizza today.
04:10:25 Although it was a fancier slice of pizza - it was three fifty. Because it wasn't just a plain slice, so no, I have not spent lavishly on my retirement, nor do I expect to.
04:10:37 I did have a really good ice cream sundae, though, on Wednesday night, and I'm still paying the price for it because I still feel sick from eating it. That was my retirement, I guess. Celebratory meal.

4:10 - 4:20

4:11:05 - Did you finally see Cracky again - 2081. I've never met her. I got to meet ... umm ... I got to meet Boxxy but I never met Cracky, so I hope she's well.
4:11:20 - Or ... I found a, what's her name, Creepy-chan, I think used to be here, based here in New York. And so it would be nice to meet her one day. Oh, I guess we have nothing really to talk about outside of, "Oh you were famous on a website that I had something to do with." So, which is essentially the conversation
4:11:35 - that I had with Boxxy. It was like, "You're a person of the Internet, we have nothing to really talk about other than the fact that you were popular on 4chan." But it was nice to meet her and we chatted for like 30 minutes. But, yeah it turns out meeting memes is
4:11:50 - only so interesting when you just have that to link yourselves together. To put it for rest once and for all, does your mom have Jewish ancestry? Regardless of your religious beliefs, not that it should matter, but people think you've been misleading about it. 2082.
4:12:05 - Nope. But again I'll say that and I'm sure in the next, I don't know, whenever I get to that part of this thread in 4 hours from now I'll see a thousand people claiming bullshit. So I don't even know why I read that nor why I responded but ...
4:12:20 - 2083. Why not delete /r9k/ considering the board no longer serves its original purpose, only causes further emotional damage to those who frequent it. It does, and you're right. It doesn't serve its original purpose but
4:12:35 - a lot of people still use it and again find ... take comfort in it. And I made the mistake of deleting it, when was that, 3 years ago? Or ... about 3 years ago when I removed /r9k/ and I realized after
4:12:50 - I had that conversation with Sherrod the ... girlvinyl, the founder of ED, at ROFL ... what was it called, ROFL thing at Portland ... ROFLcon center, rather. I realized the error of my ways and I decided that it was inconsiderate of me to remove
4:13:05 - that board and ... I mean ... yeah. So I don't think there's any reason to remove it. I mean, people obviously still enjoy it and are free to enjoy it. I mean, even if it doesn't
4:13:20 - serve its original purpose. And I wish that there was kind of a board that, within the spirit of the original /r9k/, which was kind of a gentlemen's /b/ and original content and all that. But when we have that kind of a format
4:13:35 - [s4s] as far as original content but ... It is what it is, it doesn't make really any sense to remove it at this point. And to the extent that it's emotionally damaging to people who use it then ... I mean I hope it'll be more supportive than I think. But I just looked at the stats
4:13:50 - 360,000 people visit /r9k/ in a given month and so, again, they find utility from it then. Who am I to say otherwise. 2087.
4:14:05 - Last night 4chan was clunky, posting was difficult to the point of making blah blah blah. That, yeah. I mean we had some issues last night with one of the servers and I think did our best to debug it.
4:14:20 - And hopefully it'll be fixed now. Again, the servers were upgraded a few weeks ago and the site should be about as fast as it's ever been. But we've had some specific issue that kind of popped up recently that we've been trying to diagnose and fix.
4:14:41 - Er, "apart from the anonymity I’ve always liked how the various chans have lightweight bullshit free layouts, do you prefer the old school spartan aesthetics to the overly shiny web 2.0 fuckery, is 4chan staying largely similar throughout the years layout-wise just a case of the user base not liking change?"
4:14:55 - That’s post number 2090.. Um yeah I love the aesthetic of the site, it really does go back to the, kind of harkens back to the web 1.0 kind of era, um you know again it’s really fucking fast, it’s just a lot of HTML and we’ve tried to be precautious with the features that we’ve added with the inline extension and I really do believe that the inline extension and extensions in general have made the site kind of usable in the year 2015.
4:15:27 - They’ve made them usable and palatable to people and y’know, now that people's expectations have changed since the web 1.0 era but I still think we’ve been able to keep the site true to itself and its original functionality without bloating it up and making it shitty again, the sites really fast for the most part and again, if you haven’t checked out the inline extension just click setting in the upper right and there’s a lot of features now but they’re all very lightweight and I think are in keeping with the spirit of the 4chan 11 years ago and the web 1.0 era.
4:16:02 - And also again obviously part of that is, I mean.. users scream bloody murder about everything we do, I mean we added the.. we changed the titles, we changed the the URLs from /res/ to /thread/ and we renamed the order of the page numbers to start from 1 instead of 0. I just makes more sense to most people, and we have been pretty careful about that stuff, um, over the years but with stuff like that it’s kjust like, y’know just deal with it, it’s such a small change that, um, we changed ‘Submit’ to ‘Post’ so yeah.. some people are very passionate about small changes like that but we’ve largely tried to keep the site true to its original roots.
4:17:18 - "What happened to your Balkan gf, can I be your Balkan classic lolita gf now", Uh 2143, I’ve never had a Balkans gf, I posted I think when I was in Croatia for a conference when I posted some joke about that. I think it was about some story I read about some couple who went on this really hip round the world, not round the world but they went to what I guess was the Balkans and kind of travelled around together and I was kind of like "That sounds really cool" but I guess as it turns out finding strangers to travel with is easier said than done so if you want to throw your name in the hat we can go together.
4:17:58 - "Have you ever got into a heated argument with someone while posting as anonymous?" 2144, no, again I really just truly (even though people don’t seem to want to believe this), sort of like, so not argue with people, I don’t have arguments with my friends, I don’t argue with my family. Not to say I never did when I was younger, but as an adult I’ve really mellowed out and uh, just don’t really invest the energy into arguing, especially not with strangers on the internet about topics that are not really life and death. So no I really don’t, I mean when I post anonymously, I mean people are always posting constant "put your trip on moot" but um, I never post anonymously when it is something regarding 4chan, it’s just I don’t want to draw attention.
4:18:40 - I talk about my waifu, which I guess is kind of controversial but I’ve essentially never commented on a 4chan specific topic or moderation or moot specific topic as an anonymous because it’s the same reason we told moderators not to post on /q/ anonymously because it’s kind of not right, well I mean again it’s utilizing the whole point of the website but in this case that kind of represents conflict of interest so I haven’t really done that.
4:19:05 - And in general I just have no interest in arguing with strangers on 4chan it’s just really not uh, and again, the "stop liking what I don’t like" thing is just agai, people have opinions that I may not share and that’s totally fine and I’m glad that people don’t share all of my opinions because that’s what makes 4chan and the world and interesting place.
4:19:38 - "/o/ wants to know what your favourite car is, also Corvette or GTR" Um, fucking, well Mustangs can’t turn, Corvettes can’t really turn, um, so I’d definitely go with the GTR. Sorry /o/. Based JDM for life. I don’t drive, driving and I have a license which is weird for someone who grew up in New York but uh, I really like the Volkswagen, the GTI, a lot.

4:20 - 4:30

4:30 - 4:40

4:40 - 4:50

4:50 - 5:00

5 Hours

5:00 - 5:10

5:10 - 5:20

5:20 - 5:30

5:30 - 5:40

5:40 - 5:50

5:50 - 6:00

6 Hours

6:00 - 6:10

06:00:00 If you remember 10 years ago, servers and hosting were a lot more expensive than they are now, uh, even though 4chan was much smaller everything was a lot more expensive.
06:00:10 I mean - back then it was about 10 dollar a Mbit and that was a good deal at the time, um now you can get away wit like 2-3 dollars a Mbit depending on who you’re hosting with.
06:00:20 Uh so we took donations and we raised 14 thousand dollars and I delivered the goods, y’know I bought servers and within a few months I colocated them and it’s been 10 years since I’ve asked for another cent and so I delivered that one year and then gave you an extra 9 on the house.
06:00:35 So I am very proud that we were able to do that, and the reason I was okay with doing that and the reason I am not okay with doing donations now (because I don’t really believe in them in general), is that, y’know, that was very explicit because there was clear expectation as far as what was expected. Here’s the ask, here is what I want to do and what I need and have done the math, and yeah I think I can make good on this, very much like a Kickstarter model this is the project I want to do.
06:01:05 And we did it, and I fulfilled and I satisfied my backers, I fulfilled that problem and again, I gave 9 years on the house. And I think that again there was a very explicit and social contract that existed between myself and the users who donated and I fulfilled my side of that bargain and whereas I feel that with ongoing donations the challenge that you have is that there’s kind of more this implicit expectation how that money will be used and what should be expected in return for the donation.
06:01:36 It’s very hard to find consensus amongst the administration y’know, me in this case and the users and how that money should be spent and what they should expect in response. You end up seeing this really unhealthy, uh, disconnect or dynamic where uh, even when we took donations years and years ago I got emails for years from people saying “I donated so you should unban me” or “I donated so you’re a fucker for doing this” or “I donated and you should make me a mod”
06:02:02 It’s like people would kind of have these kind of demands or these really out of whack expectations in terms of what they should receive and in response for the donation and it was kind of like a future favour that they had bought and if they got unhappy over time they would regret the donation and so I really do believe the Kickstarter model works a lot better because I really think you need to be really explicit about what the money will go to or how to satisfy.
06:02:31 You need some way of meeting those expectations and satisfying a kind of contract that exists and when it’s this kind of implicit amorphous thing, over time it uh, it just doesn’t work and again I think uh, at 4chans scale now it just doesn’t work for sites past a certain scale so it worked for us for a time, and it really doesn’t work going forwards and I really just don’t like that social dynamic that exists so I decided that we were going to sell the 4chan passes.
06:03:05 And some people kind of treat them as a donation, they want to support the site, um, but this is a product that we’re offering, it’s a service that we offer, same thing with advertising. We offer good and a service in exchange and as long as we give you your 4chan pass you got what you paid for, as long as we give you your 20 dollars worth of advertising, you hundred thousand impressions or whatever, you got what you paid for.
06:03:28 And so, uhm, it’s a lot easier to satisfy those expectations when it’s a good service being offered instead of this “Noo you’re gonna donate” and 5 years from now you’re going to tell me I’m bullshit and you want your money back or tell me you should be a moderation. And you know it’s funny, that’s kind of died out now but for years I would get this, and after a certain point it was easy to call bullshit on people because they would say “oh I’ve donated last year” or “I’ve donated 2 years ago” and I’d just be like “we haven’t taken donations for 8 years so fuck you, you’re full of shit” y’know, like there’s no way, I mean I never said that I just never responded.
06:03:59 But uhm, y’know people would try to uh, y’know, kind of hold that over me so, let’s see… Uhh let’s see… 37 thousand viewers, I’m boring some of you to tears, thank god. Uhh “Do you appreciate repeating digits?”, Yes I do I am reformed, I love dubs now, in fact you should be sure to thank people and appreciate their dubs when they… Oh my god this is wow, somebody said “Did you see the Habbo Hotel raid we did last night when you announced your retirement, Pooles closed 2015”, Uh I had not seen that, that is uh, that’s funny, that really takes me back, thank you that’s very sweet of you.
06:06:00 I’m trying to figure out, how long have I been streaming right now? It’s gonna kick me off at some point, I guess I’ve been on here for hours but when is it going to kick me off… let’s see. “I think it’s good you decided to move on from 4chan, I think you should start movements, build them up then let them go like Notch when he sold Minecraft, don’t put yourself in a box, don’t limit yourself from what you could be, my question is what projects are you thinking about pursuing post 4chan, will you keep on advocating for anonymity?”
06:06:54 Yeah again, I consider myself an advocate, not an activist, um, yeah again I really believe in anonymity, uh, I’m still waiting for somebody to quote me on the free speech stuff I think again, as I pointed out in that sticky have kind of chosen to conflate or willingly misinterpret being an advocate for anonymity as being an advocate for free speech, um, and highlighting how anonymity enables you to share things that you might not otherwise be comfortable sharing and that it enables raw unfiltered speech, and kind of again conflating that with a different concept.
06:07:30 But y’know I have always considered myself an advocate for anonymity and… or really y’know people try to paint this in black and white, but if you look at my um, I did a talk Web 2.0 summit 2011 and I talked about identity and this concept of prismatic identity, and my point was that people often paint the world in this kind of duality, and uhm, and so they paint it in terms of anonymity and facebook identity, real identity, first and last name identity, and I think that really oversimplifies, and identity is a spectrum.
06:08:20 There’s a lot of options, you can be anonymous, you can be anonymous on the front end like you are on 4chan, you can be anonymous on the back end say like using TOR or TORchat or something like that, you can use a pseudonym that changes from place to place, you can have one that’s fixed, you can have first name, first name last name, first name profile picture.
06:08:42 So, there are all of these different options that exist and what I’ve tried to do is kind of highlight that, yes there’s options, we should continue to use those options and not limit ourselves to just the one, the type of identity that in vogue right now which is, y’know, for a long time it has been Facebook identity and I think we’re seeing things kind of pull away from that a bit, so again, anonymity or anonymous contribution as an alternative to that and uh, is a valid and also desirable alternative and people should build products that incorporate the flexibility and identity rather than this one concept of it.
06:09:20 So that’s what I’ve tried to be an advocate for over the years, just having options and highlighting what some of those options are, and my feelings there haven’t changed. But you know if you look at it I haven’t really given any talks for the last year or two, I really stopped doing press for 4chan a while ago, because I’ve already said all this, I’ve already put it out there and think that it’s.. There’s nothing new that I really have to contribute on this subject, at least not now. I mean last year people reached out for comment on all of these anonymous apps but I don’t really use them or really care about them so I didn’t have a lot to say.

6:10 - 6:20

6:20 - 6:30

6:30 - 6:40

6:40 - 6:50

6:50 - 7:00

7 Hours

7:00 - 7:10

07:00:17 Let's see. 'Will you continue shitposting about Usuka' (#4298) Yes, but as anon.
07:00:32 beep One second, I'm about to eat food, hold on. -07:00:45-
07:01:27 Okay so my friend brought me food to eat now! As it turns out, it's 9 o' clock. Looks delicious.
07:02:06 I'm so excited to eat this, to eat in peace with you guys, and you could criticize my chewing technique. -07:02:20-
07:02:53 It's amazing, I was so hungry. I wish you guys could critique my chewing technique, I don't know if that's a thing.
07:03:26 I’ve always wanted /tv/ to critique my bane voice. Haha-
07:03:44 THE FIRE RISES! WHY WOULD YOU SHOOT A MAN BEFORE THROWING HIM OUT OF A PLANE? Let's see.
07:04:26 HA. 'So Moot, Why did you wait until everyone calls you "luggage Lad" and laughs at you for being a cuck for you to retire?' #4380 I fucking love the luggage lad meme, I really, really enjoy that meme, that's why I changed the word filter from "the C.E.O. Troll Inc" to "luggage lad", because I actually love that meme. So I'm glad that I stickied out for as long as I did because that's one of the better things to come out of 4chan about- Oh I almost throw my food. I'm going to mute again, sorry. I'm going to eat my food.-07:05-10-
07:07:20 SPEAK OF THE DEVIL AND HE SHALL APEAR! That wasn't very good. YOU THINK SHITPOSTING IS YOUR ALLY? BUT YOU MERELY ADOPTED THE SHITPOSTING. I WAS BORN INTO IT, MOLDED BY IT. I DIDN'T SEE THE LIGHT UNTIL I WAS ALREADY A MAN, AND BY THEN IT WAS NOTHING TO ME BUT BLINDING!
07:07:53 Bane posting can be my legacy.
07:08:17 I made it to the thread number 2! That thread was 2671 posts long. It took me seven and a half hours to read that! But alright, thread number 2.
07:08:56 (reading #4521)'WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP OF YOUR MASTERPLAN?' CRASHING THIS, BOARD WITH NO SURVIVORS.
07:09:19 We're all gonna make it, /qa/, we're all gonna make it. 'How did you found out about 2chan?' (#4545) I found out about Futaba in 2003.

7:10 - 7:20

07:10:58 Alright, so… I found the Futaba Channel in 2003 from Something Awful and 4chan came to being this a few months later when I decided to register the domain 4chan.net. And actually there are these two softwares on it. Futaba, which is based on another piece of software called Gazau BBS. I basically took the Gazau BBS software that I found online. It was all in Japanese so I sort of translated that. And I was later informed after all that work that the imageboard Futaba php script was available on their website, so I wasted a few days sewing that and then I implemented that on 4chan.net and the rest is history.
07:12:17 A lot of people seem to be reposting their questions.
07:12:38 'moot! Treat yourself to a bubble tea!' (#4619) I'm drinking regular tea right now and I do love tea. Thank you for remembering that I do love bubble tea though.
07:13:06 HA. Somebody posted, #4660, a screenshot of a tweet that says 'Chris Poole, or as he is known "moop", is the head of a racist website known as "anonymous pol". Just learning of this anti-Semite.' There isn't even a date on it but that's a wonderful tweet.
07:13:29 #4467, 'What do you think of people who hide behind "board culture" to post off topic shit?' I wrote a whole News post about this a year and a half ago, so you can go back to the News page, go to the bottom, click View All News and it's called "FULL HOUSE"
07:13:57 Haha, is /tg/- /tv/ on fire right now? Hopefully the fire rises.
07:14:36 Here's one, #4716: 'Why haven't you used the infamy of 4chan to your advantage? It felt like in all of your start ups you attempted to distance yourself from this site rather than use it as a spring board. There is most certainly a market for the 'anonymous' sort of service/product in a post NSA age.' I didn't really distance myself from 4chan, like I have my persona. But I was in fact very deliberate about not crossing those streams, sort of speak. People ran rampant with their speculation and conjectures, like when canv.as was still around people said fuck you for using 4chan's money to host canv.as or why can't you use that investment to host 4chan-4chan is running slow thanks to canv.as and that sort of shit. A lot of people asked me back then 'why didn't you just turn 4chan into something else or why aren't you using 4chan as a springboard?' and the reason is, from my knowledge, that 99% of those things failed. So that would have exposed 4chan, putting it in danger of going under business. So I was very deliberate about 'I can't miss when I take that investment'. I mean, it was a separate entity, it was legally completely separate for both liability and tax purposes, it was a separate company. That took an investment also with the later Drawquest, which was a drawing app for iOS. And again none of those people, financials and servers, nothing, were related to 4chan. I mean it would have been illegal, a violation to the canv.as corporation policies. I have been very deliberate the one time I did start a company to not cross those streams with 4chan, even then again most people would have, as it would have made sense in terms of promoting it and whatnot, all the different sorts of benefits to that but the biggest downside was that it could have potentially compromised 4chan. If the other company were to fall, 4chan would probably fall too. So 4chan doesn't have anything to do with this company, they were not tied up in any way. As it turned out, that was the right thing to do, because canv.as and drawquest failed in these last years. Again I didn't really promote either. I mean I ran some ads for Drawquest at one point on 4chan but, although it could have been use as a springboard, I never thought that was something I should do. 4chan is in now way someone's personal army, so I shouldn't use it as such. It's not for activism, and it isn't for promoting my own projects.
07:19:22 Hahaha, I like this image. It contains moot's final Q&A quotes.

7:20 - 7:30

7:30 - 7:40

7:40 - 7:50

07:39:45 'In the end, did you have fun moot?' 5357. I had so much fun, again I mean it's funny when people are having an 'kiss me and have me' attention mode or being BTFO or whatever. I think people just don't understand having an easy way about themselves and a good sense of humor, because I was fucking laughing hysterically all the times we played around the boards like /a/, /jp/, /sp/, and all, /b/, and I mean it's been a lot of fun. So I mean again I've really enjoyed these past 10 years and playing around with the community and whatnot it's been- it's been a lot of fun. I mean so much fun. So I definitely had fun, I really enjoyed playing around with people, specially people who kinda had a good sense of humor about themselves although sometimes you don't have a good sense about that.
07:40:58 So yes, 'Has anyone ever offered to buy the website in the past out of curiosity?' #5381.
07:41:02 I've wrote about this on my blog a while ago and again people have a lot of troubles with reading comprehension sometimes and they thought it was about Google trying to buy this site for a million dollars, as I tell on 'My Google moment’ but it was a reference how the Google founders were approached by -who was it?- AltaVista I think or Excite or one of these companies like 15 years ago or 16 years ago and how they offered to buy Google for one million dollars. And then and I think Google somehow kinda offended them that the board directors of the other companies said ‘you know actually we aren't buying anymore’ and the deal fell through.
07:41:36 And how again I have to see how Google wouldn't be today if that alliance happened so I kinda thought about my own experience which was a Japanese toy company back in like 2004 or 2005; not J-list, actually now it's defunct, they went out of business but it was kinda like just a junkie toy store -who would later advertise with us-, who tried to buy the website and they’ve offered me 50 thousand dollars as in 2004/2005, and I've said ‘you know, no thank you’ and they later opted to go. I posted my response of that e-mail, it's on my oldest blog entry on chrishateswriting.com. In my response I basically just said that I’m not really looking to sell it I think it has a lot of opportunities to grow and to have fun with it and so no thank you. Ever since then we have never really honestly received a credible- I mean every now and on people over the years emailed me and said 'I wanna buy 4chan’ and I usually responded them “$TACOS” (dollar sign tacos) and that kind of bullshit or I ignored it; for the most parts I ignored it- I think we have never received that one kind of credible offer over the years that bared that one. It's incredible as it turned over the years, you think people would wanna buy a site with so many lovely people with high disposable income and have a very understanding and loving towards- Hah, no, as it turns out, people don't wanna own a website like 4chan so we don't really get to get inbound interest. So yeah I don't really think that- yeah, I think that was only time that I ever got something like that and that was a long time ago.
07:44:09 'Do you realize people killed themselves when you pulled the Fappening shit? When everything went and got deleted and banned? When you sold the place out the media? People actually killed themselves!" 5413. I think you're full of shit. I've already explained why we made the changes we did which was really interrelating our policies that already existed and policies that legally must exist to afford the site's protection under the very laws that serve both to punish and protect, so we did what we should have done and I have no doubts about that, and the communities are understanding and kinda doing the research themselves. Actually a lot of torrent sites pointed out that we were in a kind of a bad place liability wise with that- with that matter, they kinda picked up on that to see why we did that. But again some users immediately kinda chose the wrong conclusion there as it happens by your comment, but we did the right thing there.
07:45:12 Never answered this, #5418. 'What now? How has your somewhat "pop culture icon" status felt thus far in life, and how do you think it will affect you in the future?' I avoid p1aces in New York, there are certain streets in where people might recognize me, and I actually wouldn't walk on those streets because I would be recognized on a regular basis if I do. Again I never asked for this, having really taking to much over the years, so I really truly look for to retiring innawoods.
07:45:48 "How is gonna 4chan be financed?" #5427. I have no idea! I expect that people will, huh..., will continue what we've done: to do ads, even thought they don't do that much money. We offer them through direct sales, with larger orders, and we offer them also by a self serve system where people spend I think between 15 and 100 dollars, but most of them spend 20 bucks to get a message up, but actually if you have something to advertise on 4chan the self serve ads do extremely well, 20 dollars for the leaderboards are the better ones. I think they perform really, without making any promissory statements that I can't guarantee, but they do, depending on the product. Some of them had very good click rates so the self serve ads do pretty well. And then there are the passes along with advertising so I expect that, during the transition, the long term successors will continue to offer both because actually if you lose the passes you lose some easy money, actual tens of thousands of dollars a year, and then the advertising system that helps this site to be alive.
07:48:05 I might cut this video into two, just curious. I don't have that much time left, I've been warned that I have about 3 or 6 minutes to continue talking so you’re about to be delivered from my brief journey to the second thread. 'Last question moots, two minutes left', maybe you should have given me that warning 30 minutes ago.
07:48:37 (#5481) 'No wonder his last QA took forever. Holy shit can you just answer a question without talking for 30 minutes about EVERYTHING.' Even if you wanted shitty short answers I wouldn't do that because this is my last time to actually give you guys real, honest, long winded responses because this is the last we will have this. If you want stupid meme responses then you have the wrong guy. Or you know, not like those streamers that have the ability to pace and talk for a long time and say nothing of value, I try to be honest and complete with my answer so I apologize if anybody is offended by that.
07:49:27 Somebody asked, "'Why do you forbid any mentions to other imageboard websites' ('Why do you forbid any mention of 4+4chan?' #5507)." Well, it's because our advertising rule. That is an age old rule and an age old response to this and we have it since a long time so it's not a new policy despite the fact a lot of people like to believe that it is. It basically removes anything that remotely looks like advertising, specially spamming links to other websites.

7:50 - 8:00

07:50:22 Let's see...
07:51:23 I'll look for a good final question.
07:51:42 That's a kinda... and, uh, this one, 5618. Hey Moot; considering how much the internet has changed in the past few years, how long do you think the internet or at least the mainstream internet will last or is 4chan a relic of a past era?
07:51:57 Uh... In my Ted Talk in 2010, so what is that, that's about exactly five years ago, it was February 2010, I refer to 4chan as kind of a dinosaur, and so, uh, a relic of that past era, and I think it's more or less continued to be the case, and I can't think of that many kinda high profile, uh, you know, websites that have kind of popped up in the anonymity space, with the exception of, you know, we saw some of these anonymous apps like Whisper, Secret and Yik Yak and stuff like that on mobile devices. So I think that, um...
07:52:40 I think people see an opportunity on mobile devices right now to kind of play around with identity. Uh, but I think on the internet, on the web, we haven't seen that much in the way of interesting, uh, apps that kinda begin to play with identity and kinda appreciate a, uh, um, kind of a spectrum that goes beyond, um, uh, you know, just this one form of identity. So, uh, I think 4chan is a relic of the past. I think, I wouldn't discount, or, uh, you know, say that we won't see more kind of interesting attempts in those spaces but I think they're going to end up being a mobile. So maybe I'll work on one of those apps at some point although mobile's not super interesting to me, but in the one idea I had for a kind of open source project is kind of involving anonymity and community and stuff so, um.
07:53:30 - Anyway, so, uh, this is where I say goodbye. Truly, finally say goodbye. I've got a few minutes before I cut out here. Uh, if you've made it through all 8 hours of this, then, congratulations. Um, but, uh, yeah, thanks for listening to me drone on. I hope this was as kind of therapeutic and cathartic for you as it was for me. It was nice to kinda, uh, you know, answer a few questions and kinda say goodbye in an, uh, 8-hour-streaming fashion, but, um, again, I hope and I really wish the community the best, and I hope that, uh, in my 11 and a half years I was able to do more right than wrong. I certainly feel 4chan has done far more right than wrong again, but, I hope that in my kind of 10 years as the, you know, founder, the kind of first administrator, that I was able to please, uh, you know, the majority of you, and I think in fact I did; again, it tends to be a very vocal minority that, uh, tends to say otherwise, but, uh, you know, I really do see a bright future for 4chan, and, um, you know, really, again, I don't know how things can change long term, again, I've tried to do my best to ensure kind of a smooth transition, and I will do my best to find a long term successor that is kind of, you know, keeping with the spirit of the community, you know, has the community's interests in hand. But, uh, it's hard to predict the future, but again I really see this as an opportunity for both the community and my eventual successor to kind of reset, and to kind of be unburdened by myself and my relationship with the site and my history, um, and so that means things might change a little bit, but, uh, again, I think, uh, for the most part I expect things to change for the better. Uh, I mean, I do see a lot of opportunities for the site to grow and continue to be a really important piece of the web and be an important part of the lives of the people who use it. So, um, yeah, it was really truly a great honour and, uh, a great privilege.
07:55:26 So... hahaha, I'm just reading some of the chat right now. Um, trying to figure out what I'm going to say, but um, yeah. Thanks for allowing me to be a part of this, and I really appreciate you all being apart of it; again, don't be strangers, you know, follow me on my blog, chrishateswriting dot com, you know, my Twitter account, @moot, or send me an email, send me a goodbye, [email protected] Uh, you know, even the not-so-kind words are appreciated. Um, but, uh, yeah. I, you know, I really wish you all the best, I hope that something positive came from this livestream, or, uh, you guys take away something from it, or I answered a question that you had, or you got a better sense of the kind of person I am. So, um, keep on trucking, and, uh, again, enjoy life, take it easy. Enjoy 4chan, I think it's going to be around for a really long time. So, uh, thanks for, uh, thanks for making it really special and thanks for making the past 11 and a half years of my life, uh, you know, really special, so. Hah, I'm so tempted to say “Ayy lmao” as my last words. Uh, but I'll just say, “See you later, Space Cowboy”.