Christopher Poole, the founder of internet imageboard 4chan, has sold the company to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of Japanese site 2channel, itself a direct inspiration for 4chan’s creation in the first place.
The NY Times reports that Poole “declined to disclose the terms of the acquisition”, and also “does not expect to serve an active role in 4chan’s future development”.
Speaking of the decision, Poole — who has long struggled to turn the site’s popularity into something profitable — told the paper “Hiroyuki is literally the only person in the world with as much if not more experience than myself in running an anonymous, large destination community that serves tens of millions of people. He’s the great-grandfather of all of this.”
You can read the rest of the Times’ interview with Poole here. Note that Nishimura, while 2ch’s founder, left that company in 2009; he was most recently made EIC of Variety Japan. Here’s a fun profile Wired ran on him in 2008.
Comments
6 responses to “4chan Has Been Sold…To The Creator Of 2Channel”
So Nishimura is not the owner of 2chan? Despite the heading? I guess 4chan sold to Jim Watkins doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
For anyone interested, information on the paid service to delete posts on 2chan can be found here: http://www.anonymous-japan.org/fake2ch/
I think they are saying that 4chan was sold to Nishimura who used to be with 2chan, not that it was sold to 2chan…
Thus ‘4chan sold to Jim Watkins’ would be completely incorrect.
It sold for over 9000
To explain 234etc’s comment up there a little:
there’s some concerns going around the imageboards about this new owner.
As I remember it: This Nishimura chap and the aforementioned Jim Watkins owned 2chan, and after some hacking released 30,000 users information a few years ago, it was revealed that the owners were giving/selling information to the parties who are interested in that sort of data (advertisers and etc).
Recently it’s been revealed or made known or whatever that Jim Watkins gained ownership of one of the largest western alternative imageboards to 4chan, 8chan last year, and now Nishimura has gained ownership of 4chan.
The concern here, if it isn’t obvious, is that these Anonymous imageboards aren’t going to be so Anonymous with these owners who have a history of selling users’ information.
That’s my understanding of the situation, at least.
So what is the ‘thing’ about 4chan? I hear about it all the time, but never what it is or why it is a thing.
Basically a bunch of anonymous forums where you can talk about different stuff like games or whatever. Most threads/responses are images.
It’s where most meme’s started or came from.
There is no archive so as new stuff is posted the older stuff constantly disappears. It’s always changing.
The most notorious board /b/ is where the Anonymous hacktivist thing started and also where CP is posted from time to time. It’s sort of an anything goes place.