Poole Wants to Keep Canv.as Separate From 4chan

Founder of 4Chan and Canv.as, Christopher Poole (or Moot, his pseudonym) reveals that 4chan has emerged into one of the largest and most influential communities on the Internet, obtaining 18 million monthly unique users according to numbers from Google, and 8 million according to analytics measuring company Quantcast.

Poole certainly wants to encourage these users to keep contributing content to the huge community and keep it lively. This, as he explains, is the reason why he built Canvas into a separate venture-backed company as opposed to porting over the existing 4chan users onto the new platform and just having them deal with it.

Poole says he wants to re-imagine the image board with his new venture-backed company Canv.as. “It’s less about the product and more about the community,” he describes.

However, he does think that the communities will eventually overlap and millions of 4channers will move over to Canv.as once the site comes out of public beta – which should happen sometime in the next several months. But he doesn’t want to force 4chan members to migrate over and doesn’t plan on technically duct-taping the two sites together at any point.

4chan came out eight years ago and the image-based bulletin board site has since become a source of memes and new content that typically spreads across the Internet like wildfire.