4 Chan
4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a then 15-year-old student from New York City who used and uses the pseudonym "moot".[4] He intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and television shows, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard.[5][6] Moot purchased the server space for 4chan using his mother's credit card, with her approval.[4][7] Prior to starting 4chan, moot had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums.[8]
The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards.[6][3] The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, physical fitness, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain.[9] The site has one employee, a programmer whom moot met via on-line Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers.[4]
4chan is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth and as a result its financing often becomes problematic. Moot acknowledges that donations alone can not keep the site online, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet.[10] However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content from advertising.[7] 4chan's Alexa rank is generally around 1000,[11] though it has been as high as number 56 at times.[12] 4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to The Los Angeles Times.[13]
Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously.[8][14] Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot".[15] In place of...
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