4chan Creator Moot Hands Leadership To Team Of Three

This afternoon 4chan creator and sole administrator Chris "moot" Poole spoke (and continues to speak, depending on when you're reading this article) on the whys and wherefores of his departure from the site. He's the creator of 4chan and has been the one and only non-volunteer owner and administrator of the site since it came into being. Today he spoke up a bit on who will be "taking his place" – or how that's not actually something that will happen, as it turns out.

In his own words, moot suggested the following to more than 40-thousand listeners in his goodbye forum chat: "There is no head admin, per say, replacing me. I've more or less been the only decision maker, leader, kind of manager and whatnot 4chan has ever had. So that's not a role that will be filled immediately. In the interim, there are three people that I named in that post."

Poole went on to list the three – without giving their names out as such. It would appear that these leaders can be found with a bit of digging, but that at this point, their true identities are not particularly important.

"One is the lead developer – actually most people know this person already if you dig around for it, but – he's been helping out now for about 2 years now."

"He wrote the native extension, the javascript extension, and he's more or less been doing all the development for the better part of a year and a half to 2-years now."

"The other one is the "server admin" that's been helping for over 10-years. He's probably the longest serving volunteer that we've had – not ever, but – well, maybe now ever, but – he's the oldest volunteer that's still serving."

"The last is the managing moderator, who is the person I've more or less delegated the, kind of like, HR roles to in the past year, in terms of going through the apps, and going through orientation. Believe it or not, there is a very real orientation process – and doing rule clarification, and being present on the team channel and the general channel #4chan, bla bla bla bla bla. And so he's taken a very active role in terms of the day-to-day management of the team of volunteers that we have, and surfaces the problems that've needed my attention."

Poole then suggested that the changing of the guard wasn't so much a hard-and-fast turning over of the password, so to speak. Instead, it'll be a gradual move.

"So again, long term there will be somebody or some group of persons that are going to be the end-all be-all "administrators", I guess. But as of today, I haven't named those people yet, I haven't decided what to do about that."

"But in the short term, again, really nothing should change from a user's perspective, because the three core team members – which isn't fair to the other team members, but again – the three kind of, minimum number of people I needed to ensure a smooth transition, are all set to pitch in."

Have a peek at the 4chan retirement livestream now and, if you're lucky, moot will still be speaking, hours and hours after he'd first begun to speak at 1PM Central Time, January 23rd, 2015.