>>131362474chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a then-15-year-old student from New York City named Christopher Poole, who posts as "moot".[6] Prior to starting 4chan, Poole had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums.[7] He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel ("2chan") imageboard.[8][9] Poole originally used the Futaba Channel to obtain anime-related images, and liked the concept of a message board where people anonymously shared images, which eventually led to his idea of creating a similar English-based website. During the creation of 4chan, he obtained the source code for the Futaba Channel website, and translated the Japanese text into English using Altavista's Babelfish online translator.[10][11] When he first created the website, it had only two boards: "/a/ – Anime/General" and "/b/ – Anime/Random"; over time more boards were created, and /b/ was eventually renamed to simply "/b/ – Random".[10][11]
The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards.[3][9] 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.[12] The site has had at least one employee, a programmer whom Poole met via online Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers.[6] The boards that attract the largest amount of traffic, from greatest to least, are /b/ (Random), /v/ (Video games), /a/ (Anime and Manga), and /s/ (board intended for sharing explicit images).[10].
