Replying to A little 4chan history

Worth a read. Since all of this shit happening with 4chan.

4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a 15-year old student from New York City who posts as "moot".[6] He intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard.[7][8] Prior to starting 4chan, moot had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums.[9]


The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards.[3][8] The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, physical fitness, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain.[10] The site has had at least one employee, a programmer whom moot met via on-line Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers.[6]


4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times.[11] 4chan's Alexa rank is generally around 700,[12] though it has been as high as number 56 at times.[13] It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. moot acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site on-line, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet.[14] However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content.[15] In January 2009, moot signed a new deal with an advertising company; as of February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money.[16]


Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously.[9][17] Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot".[18] In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity.[19] As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users.[20] Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode.[21] 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.[22]