Infamous Web Forum 4chan Has A New Owner

Both 4chan and 8chan announced their ownership arrangements had shifted-and that their ties to Japanese site 2channel had drawn them into a tangled web. “None of us would be using 4chan today-or potentially any anonymous image board-if it weren’t for him”.

This seems to be a mixed move.

In a statement, Poole said that “Hiroyuki is a pioneer in the world of anonymous communities, and can be thought of as the great-grandfather of 4chan”. That textboard gave rise to the internet’s era of anonymous message boards and the webpage Futaba Channel, the predecessor of 4chan. So too does his work defending free speech, including hate speech, on the anonymous site.

Poole stated that Nishimura, “is one of few individuals with a deep understanding of what it means to provide a digital home for tens of millions of people for more than a decade”.

Nishimura having a background in running a similar board may be a boon for the site given he may be more tolerant of posts that Poole himself had cracked down on in recent years. Since then he has been very quiet, even failing to follow through on his promise to write about the experience of running 4chan on his personal blog. “A hobby doesn’t really scale or survive”.

Poole considered 4chan as more of a hobby than a business.

With the sale, the question of monetization methods arises and whether 4chan will also lose out on its spirit as Reddit in pleasing advertisers by cleaning up the site. The site had already been run on American servers to bypass more restrictive Japanese content laws, and imageboard users have alleged that this change of ownership occurred, in part, due to how Nishimura handled-and possibly sold-users’ private data.

Nishimura founded 2channel in 1999, and made his bones with a brash disregard for anybody’s feelings or expensive lawsuits before selling the site in 2009.

4chan has a great deal of traffic coming to its site but does not track its users to offer targeted ads like Facebook and Google do.