At fifteen, Christopher Poole started a Web site that has changed into one of the seedier, darker corners of the Internet. You’ll never have heard of 4chan, but possibilities are the Web site has touched your Web browsing experience in one way or another.

The 4chan community of 7,000,000 users, which Poole called a “meme factory,” has been blamed ( or credited ) with beginning the LOLcats and Rickrolling crazes. LOLcats are those nerdy photos of pussies with random phrases pasted on them. Rickrolling makes reference to the practice of sending a Rick Astley song to a buddy, or posting his promo vid for “Never Going to Give You Up” on a Web site in a surprising place. The image-based bulletin board also is famous for spreading porn and for hacking into conventional sites and social networks. Some seven thousand 4chaners rallied to protest Scientology, some wearing masks to save the anonymity they have online, Poole asserted. Poole conversed with CNN after a rare public appearance this month at the TED Meeting in Long Beach, California.

TED, which stands for “technology, entertainment, design,” is a non-profit group that announces it’s devoted to “ideas worth spreading.”. In the interview, Poole expounded anonymity online is beginning to become a declining species. “We’ve just moved more toward insistent user identity,” he revealed. You have got a Twitter, you have a Facebook. Poole asserted he reveals the quantity of info folk post about themselves online nowadays to be scary. All posts on 4chan are incognito, and many are deleted straight after they are posted. Poole recounted that allows for open and truthful conversation, though he admits it is getting a bit explicit at certain times. “With the nameless system, you have a place where folks are ungoverned. And you judge someone by the content of what they are announcing and not their user name, not their registration date,” he revealed. For a long time he went only by “moot” online. Now twenty-two, Poole still guards many details about his life. As an example, he told CNN he’s a university student in NY but would not say where.

his ma and pa did not know about the site until fairly recently either, he revealed, and they only found out because a reports correspondent called them. He claimed they continue to do not get the full reach of 4chan. They know it enough to understand it’s a big score, although not enough to be scared of it, he claimed.