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Registration is not available, except to staff, and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of whom approximately half are from the United States.
4chan was created as an unofficial English-language counterpart to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan, and its first boards were originally used for posting images and discussions related to anime.
The site has been described as a hub of internet subculture, its community being influential in the formation and popularization of prominent internet memes, such as lolcats, Rickrolling, rage comics, wojaks, Pepe the Frog, as well as hacktivists and political movements, such as Anonymous and alt-right.
4chan has often been the subject of media attention as a source of controversies, including the coordination of pranks and harassment against websites and internet users, and the posting of illegal and offensive content as a result of its lax censorship and moderation policies. In 2008, The Guardian summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile [...] brilliant, ridiculous and alarming".
The majority of posting on 4chan takes place on image boards, on which users can share images and create threaded discussions. As of March 2025, the site's homepage lists 75 imageboards and one Flash animation board. Most boards have their own set of rules and are dedicated to a specific topic, including anime and manga, video games, music, literature, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Uniquely, the "Random" board - also known as /b/ - enforces a few rules.
4chan is the internet's most trafficked imageboard, according to the Los Angeles Times. 4chan's Alexa rank was 853 in March 2022, though it has been as high as 56. 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. Poole has acknowledged that donations alone could not keep the site online, and turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses that do not want to be associated with the site's content. In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; in February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt, and the site was continuing to lose money. The 4chan servers were moved from Texas to California in August 2008, which upgraded the maximum bandwidth throughout 4chan from 100 Mbits/s to 1Gbits/s.
Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Posting is ephemeral, as threads receiving recent replies are "bumped" to the top of their respective board and old threads are deleted as new ones are created. Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as Anonymous or Moot. In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity. As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", a general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users.
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. In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan. 4chan 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 cannot post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal. Gianluca Stringhini, an associate professor at Boston University College of Engineering, said in August 2024, "The only moderation on the platform appears to be for clearly illegal content, such as child pornography. Everything else remains untouched.
4chan has been the target of occasional denial-of-service attacks. For instance, on December 28th, 2010, 4chan and other websites went down due to such an attack, following which Poole said on his blog, "We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, etc - an exclusive club!".
The site was launched as 4chan.net on October 1, 2003, by Christopher Poole, a then 15-year-old student from New York City using the online handle "moot". Poole had been a regular participant on "Something Awful's" subforum "Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse (ADTRW)", where many users were familiar with the Japanese imageboard format and Futaba Channel (2chan.net). When creating 4chan, Poole obtained Futaba Channel's open-source code and translated Japanese text into English using AltaVista's Babel Fish online translator.
After the site's creation, Poole invited users from the ADTRW subforum, many of whom were dissatisfied with the site's moderation, to visit 4chan, which he advertised as an English-language counterpart to Fatuba Channel and a place for Western fans to discuss anime and manga. At its founding, the site only hosted one board: /b/ (Anime/Random).
Before the end of 2003, several new anime-related boards were added, including /h/ (Hentai), /c/ (Anime/Cute), /d/ (Hentai/Alternative), /w/ (Wallpapers/Anime), /y/ (Yaoi), and /a/ (Anime). In the early days of the website, Poole hosted meetings from 2005 to 2008 in various locations to promote it, such as Otakon,[30] which popularized some of the first 4chan-related memes.
Additionally, a Lolicon board was created at /l/ (Lolikon), but was disabled following the posting of genuine child pornography and ultimately deleted in October 2004, after threats of legal action. In February 2004, GoDaddy suspended the 4chan.net domain, prompting Poole to move the site to its current domain at 4chan.org. On March 1, 2004, Poole announced that he lacked the funds to pay the month's server bill, but was able to continue operations after receiving a swarm of donations from users. In June 2004, 4chan experienced six weeks of downtime due to PayPal suspending 4chan's donations service after receiving complaints about the site's content.
Following 4chan's return, several non-anime related boards were introduced, including /k/ (Weapons), /o/ (Auto), and /v/ (Video Games). In 2008, nine new boards were created, including the sports board at /sp/, the fashion board at /fa/, and the "Japan/General" (the name later changed to "Otaku Culture") board at /jp/. By this point, 4chan's culture had altered, moving away from the "early, more childish," humor, as evidenced by the likes of Project Chanology; trolling underwent a so-called "golden age" that aimed at American corporate media.
In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd's ROBOT9000 script. During the same year, the /soc/ board was created to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/. /r9k/ was restored on October 23, 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/), and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica and realized that he had done the same.
In 2010, 4chan implemented reCAPTCHA to thwart spam arising from JavaScript worms. By November 2011, 4chan transitioned to utilizing Cloudflare following a series of DDoS attacks. The 4chan imageboards were rewritten in valid HTML5/CSS3 in May 2012 to improve client-side performance. On September 28, 2012, 4chan introduced a "4chan pass" that, when purchased, "allows users to bypass typing a reCAPTCHA verification when posting and reporting posts on the 4chan imageboards". The money raised from the passes will go towards supporting the site.
On January 21, 2015, Poole stepped down as the site's administrator, citing stress from controversies such as "Gamergate" as the reason for his departure. On September 21, 2015, Poole announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura had purchased from him the ownership rights to 4chan, without disclosing the terms of the acquisition. Nishimura was the former administrator of 2channel between 1999 and 2014, the website formed the basis for anonymous posting culture which influenced later websites such as Futaba Channel and 4chan. Nishimura lost 2channel's domain after it was seized by his registrar, Jim Watkins due to the latter's alleged financial difficulties. Wired later reported that Japanese toy manufacturer Good Smile Company, Japanese telecommunication Dwango, and Nishimura's company Future Search Brazil may have helped facilitate Nishimura's purchase, with anonymous sources telling the publication that Good Smile obtained partial ownership in the website as compensation.
In October 2016, it was reported that the site was facing financial difficulties that could lead to its closure or radical changes. In a post titled "Winter is Coming", Hiroyuki Nishimura explained, "We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed. I am sincerely sorry", citing server costs, infrastructure costs, and network fees.
On November 17, 2018, it was announced that the site would be split into two, with the work-safe boards moved to a new domain, 4channel.org, while the NSFW boards would remain on the 4chan.org domain. In a series of posts on the topic, Nishimura explained that the split was due to 4chan being blacklisted by most advertising companies and that the new 4channel domain would allow for the site to receive advertisements from mainstream ad providers. All boards returned to the 4chan.org domain in December 2023 for unknown reasons, and 4channel.org now redirects to 4chan.org.
In a 2020 interview with Vice Media, several current or past moderators spoke about what they perceived as racist intent behind the site's management. They alleged that a managing moderator named RapeApe was attempting to use the site as a recruitment tool for the alt-right and that Nishimura was "hands-off", leaving moderation of the site primarily to RapeApe". Neither Nishimura nor RapeApe responded to these allegations. ar-right extremism has been reported by public authorities, commentators, and civil society groups as connected, in part, to 4chan, an association that arose in 2015. According to 4chan's filings to the New York Attorney General's Office, 4chan signed an agreement to pay RapeApe $3,000 a month for their services in 2015. By May 2022, that fee had risen to $4,400 a month. The submitted documents also revealed RapeApe lamenting that 4chan was "getting the shaft" over the Buffalo terrorist attack and his attempt to persuade the advertising platform Bid. Glass to reverse their exit from the website.
Poole concealed his real-life identity until it was revealed on July 9, 2008, in The Wall Street Journal. Before that, he had used the alias "moot".
In April 2009, an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine voted Poole as the world's most influential person of 2008. The results were questioned even before the poll was completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME."
On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk regarding 4chan's reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this both to the anonymous system and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory.").
In April 2010, Poole testified in the trial of United States of America v. David Kernell as a government witness, explaining the terminology used on 4chan to the prosecutor, ranging from "OP" to "lurker", as well as the nature of the data given to the FBI as part of the search warrant, including how users can be uniquely identified from site audit logs.
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