| Man. If there was ever a guy I feel awful for, it's moot. Maybe awful isn't the right word, but sympathetic for. Short of doing something incredibly brilliant in the future (which I wouldn't put beyond him), his life will be summed up as "the creator of 4chan" for quite some time to come. He's a fairly well-known guy with a decent amount of celebrity to him, but it sounds like 4chan was overall a net negative for him monetarily. Further, 4chan is summed up as an incredibly hateful place to many people, basically "the worst part of the internet." His name is synonymous with that for likely the rest of his days. Sure, it's earned him some credibility in the tech community and he can likely leverage that into something great if he really wants to - though it sounds like he wants to take a break from that for awhile. I live in NYC and I've seen moot a couple of times in the past couple years. Both times he was doing something mundane like waiting for the train, and every time he was surrounded by what were clearly a group of anons asking him questions. Every time he seemed a little uncomfortable, like he was too polite to admit that he had grown out of 4chan and its community. I imagine his personal life is a semi-constant reminder that he'll never be able to escape from 4chan, even by resigning. Lots of people will continue to associate him with the severe outbursts of hatred that stemmed from 4chan occasionally. Lots of anons will continue to encircle him while he's waiting for the 1 train. I don't know, maybe I read too much into it. Or maybe I didn't and that's why he wants to go do something far removed from the internet. |
4chan has provided and continues to provide a raw visage of how people behave given total anonymity. It has a wide ecosystem of boards and interests, and in the last six years has certainly left everyone who's lurked there a changed person.
Remember: near all of the bullshit memery, the image macros, the open discussion, the invasions, all started with 4chan.
If anybody else is successful, it's probably because they can point to the awesome parts of 4chan and say "We want to build that, but friendlier, better moderated, and less anonymous". It was a proof-of-concept, and a brilliant one.
It'll probably die off in the next five years, but it's done some amazing things and brought a lot of people together.