There’s a saying that pretty much every funny thing on the internet can be traced back to 4Chan, an online photo sharing message board created by Christopher Poole when he was just 15 years old. LOLcats, the Rickroll, Chocolate Rain, you name it, all spilled over from the messageboards on 4Chan. The site has over 12 million unique monthly visitors making it one of the most trafficked communities on the web.
It’s probably one of the seediest places on the internet as well. Anything goes there, so you’ll oftentimes find pornographic (or worse) images there, along with some of the most blunt, uncompromising opinions ever published. But there’s no denying that the passionate community fostered there is nearly unrivaled on the internet and that there’s something to the framework of the site that Poole has created.
People from 4Chan have the power to influence the real world as well, with stunts like voting up Poole in Time Magazine’s poll for 2009′s Most Influential Person and launching attacks against Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard for pulling donation support to Wikileaks. Poole has become well respected in the tech world as well, being invited to speak at TED in 2010 and also becoming an advisor at investment fund, Lerer Ventures.
Now, Poole is using the lessons that he’s learned from fostering the 4Chan community to create a startup that is basically a “legit, internet-friendly” version of 4Chan called Canvas. The site’s been in closed beta for a short time and will focus on being an image and short-chat based message board. Anonymity will be an option, but each user will have to sign in using Facebook Connect just as a “troll barrier.” It’s a neat little trick to tell users that, “yes you can post anonymously, but know that we know who you really are.”
After Poole’s South By Southwest keynote talk, Wired spoke with Poole on what he had learned about online community from his 8 years at 4Chan:
For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral and it took me a while but I finally realized that that’s just totally wrong. I don’t have a statistic on this, but I think a friend did this once where he’d been scraping the site for pictures and found that actually like 90 percent of what’s been posted on the Random board had been posted before, so it’s not like that’s what’s fleeting. And that’s part of how meme generation works, is that things are just posted over and over. It’s just something that resonates with the community.
For a lot of people, 4chan is their tree house — they go there to hang out. You can actually see the culture shift with time zone. Seeing how threads unwind and unravel is just a thrill and you can’t really share that magic.
Canvas will also incorporate some basic image editing tools to “put everyone on an even playing field” in terms of creating or iterating on funny internet memes. It’s a smart move, given that using Photoshop or other image editing tools can be a barrier for many people in participating in “creating lulz.” Frankly, we’re a bit giddy to see Canvas take off and start churning out the internet funny. The idea of a 4Chan type place to visit without fear of depraved imagery sounds like the perfect internet site to procrastinate our workdays away with.
The most important takeaway from Poole’s keynote, though, was his advice to other startup companies regarding platform building.
Again, from the Wired interview:
At conferences like this, and this kind of feeds into the app thing, but now everyone is focusing on scaling and APIs and building platforms. I think people have gotten carried away with this. People credit the success of Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare; well, Foursquare still has a long way to go, but with this idea that they became content-agnostic, that they became platforms.
I think that people forget that it was a long time in their history before they got there. For a long time, Facebook was totally closed. Instagram is a great example of an app that blew up and only recently released an API. They built this great product but they have this great community using it. I think they’re one good example of an app that has cultivated a culture. You should focus on building a product worth scaling. So few companies get to that point. People don’t properly prioritize those things. Nail the user experience first.
Truer words have never been spoken. If you’re in the business of creating an online community, listen to this kid, he knows what he’s talking about. Make a community that’s worth scaling before you start worrying about that point.
Watch some of Poole’s SXSW keynote below, courtesy of FastCompany:
