4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole goes legit with Canvas, his new venture-backed image site.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

AUSTIN, Texas — If anyone knows social networking, it is Christopher Poole. As founder of message board site 4chan, Poole, aka “moot,” maintains a community of 12 million unique visitors every month, who come to swap images, launch memes, talk trash and raise hell.

It’s not exactly a new 4chan, but it’s not a Facebook killer, either.

Wired.com caught up with Poole following Sunday’s keynote here to get his take on why online communities are important, what helps them grow and why not everyone should rush to build platforms.

Wired.com: You basically presented your keynote as four things you learned from 4chan. Are those are things the web in general could learn?

Christopher Poole: Absolutely. For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral and it took me a while but I finally realized that that’s just totally wrong. I don’t have a statistic on this, but I think a friend did this once where he’d been scraping the site for pictures and found that actually like 90 percent of what’s been posted on the Random board had been posted before, so it’s not like that’s what’s fleeting. And that’s part of how meme generation works, is that things are just posted over and over. It’s just something that resonates with the community.

For a lot of people, 4chan is their tree house — they go there to hang out. You can actually see the culture shift with time zone. Seeing how threads unwind and unravel is just a thrill and you can’t really share that magic.

‘For a lot of people, 4chan is their tree house.’

To relate it to a real-world experience, it’s like a drive-in movie theater. There are better ways to experience movies, but the drive-in movie theater is a thing. It’s like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Harry Potter, where you have a richer movie-going experience when you share it with people who are passionate. That’s what we need more of online, not just engagement as addiction, but creating these thrilling experiences that people want to be a part of.

Wired.com: That’s what’s interesting about 4chan. It’s very bare-bones but it created an experience that people were looking for.

Poole: Well, I don’t think it created it, the community did. The software itself is wholly unimpressive. There’s no search, no archive, no tags.

Wired.com: Does that maybe force people to engage, knowing that they can’t pick up a conversation if they miss it?

Poole: Yeah, I think people complain about that sometimes. One of the things that prompted me to start thinking about Canvas was that a lot of people say forums are really stale and stagnant. There aren’t many sites like 4chan where you can pop in every hour and see all new stuff. And this is something I should have mentioned in the presentation. Because there’s no structural barrier to joining 4chan, the community is really dynamic; for every five people that leave, five new people join, bringing their perspective and culture. A lot of other communities get set in their ways.

Wired.com: So, tell us a little bit about Canvas.

Poole: I raised $625,000 to start the company last year. And I recruited this great team. So we’re four people, in New York. I started out thinking that forums are broken, message boards haven’t changed in 10 or more years. I began thinking of what it was that it solves for me and it’s that I get to talk to strangers about stuff.

‘The idea [with Canvas] wasn’t to do 4chan 2.0.’

So we started thinking about how we love images and we love this idea of play. In addition to that, we also started thinking about the topics I covered in the [SXSW keynote], like fluid identity, creative mutation and playing with media and manipulating things. Then we thought of how to put all these things into a product. The idea wasn’t to do 4chan 2.0 but to kind of repackage all the best of that and play around with new ideas.

Wired.com: What are the next steps for Canvas? What’s the business plan?

Poole: The decision to do a venture-backed startup was that I know what it’s like to start a company with no resources, if you can call 4chan a company, so this a new experience. I like learning new things. To learn what it’s like to raise money and hire employees and manage employees and build a real startup is that.

Being strapped with a lack of resources isn’t really something I wanted to do again. But being venture-backed means that people gave me money because they think it will make them money. There are some ideas we’ve been bouncing around as far as monetization. There’s such an emphasis now placed on eyeballs and traction and I think it’s pretty terrible, because when they try to monetize, there’s a backlash.

So, we would be looking to introduce things sooner rather than later. We don’t want to just have display ads. We want to add value, to charge something for a service. We want them to feel like they’re getting something.

Wired.com: Everything here at SXSW this year seems to be apps, apps, apps. Particularly social-networking apps. Is there something that those app designers can learn from the web’s experience with community?

Poole: I don’t know of any examples where people have built interesting communities in apps. I think it’s much easier to build a community on the web and then make the app an extension of that. Even Foursquare has a massive website, but it’s more of a platform. We’re not building a platform — we’re building a community. The way you experience Canvas is entirely dependent on who’s on Canvas and what’s being posted, whereas with Foursquare and Twitter it’s a much more closed, silo experience — you follow your friends and they follow you.

Wired.com: Are you a fan of apps? Do you have a lot?

Poole: No, I have like 10. [Holds up iPhone.] The appification of the web has not happened on my phone.

Wired.com: Anything we forgot to ask?

Poole: At conferences like this, and this kind of feeds into the app thing, but now everyone is focusing on scaling and APIs and building platforms. I think people have gotten carried away with this. People credit the success of Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare; well, Foursquare still has a long way to go, but with this idea that they became content-agnostic, that they became platforms.

I think that people forget that it was a long time in their history before they got there. For a long time, Facebook was totally closed. Instagram is a great example of an app that blew up and only recently released an API. They built this great product but they have this great community using it. I think they’re one good example of an app that has cultivated a culture. You should focus on building a product worth scaling. So few companies get to that point. People don’t properly prioritize those things. Nail the user experience first.