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Uncategorized Monday, January 31st 2011 at 6:28 pm

How Do 4chan Users Feel About canv.as?

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This afternoon, Christopher Poole, a.k.a. moot, announced the closed beta launch of Canvas (canv.as), which aspires to be “the best place to share and play with images.” The site looks pretty enough [though I say this based on screenshots, having not received one of the 4,000 launch invites], but what makes this launch notable is moot’s role as the founder and administrator of 4chan.org [warning: 4chan], the feared and revered imageboard and hub of breathtaking creativity and unspeakable villainy.

Thanks to its founder and its image-centric nature, comparisons to 4chan are inevitable for Canvas, which raised $625,000 in funding. TechCrunch guesses that “more than a few of the 4chan crowd may head over to Canvas to take a gander.” Maybe so, but Canvas, which some in the tech press have referred to as “4chan 2,” has its work cut out for it if it wants to win over the sizable population of 4chan 1.0.

Saying that 4chan users all believe X is just about as silly as saying that Facebook users all believe X — while there’s a prevailing attitude and culture on the site, it is after all a collection of a large number of different people. But the initial reaction has been pretty uniformly negative. Following the announcement of the site’s beta launch, 4chan users [in respect of the site's prevailing rules, we did not look at a board named after the second letter of the alphabet] have expressed skepticism about the concept and accused moot of selling out. “I wonder how the volunteer mods feel about the fact that they ran moots site and now he’s getting rich off of it,” wrote one reader. ”It’s the most horrible thing a human being like m00t could come up with,” wrote another.

One highly critical and apparently 4chan-familiar TechCrunch reader summarized his feelings as such:

I find it disturbing…. that a site well known for trolling and increasing the embarrassment of individuals online via doxing & meming, want you to use Facebook to request an invite “granting access to your real life data to 4chan” is ridiculously stupid.

Just another start up that want’s to suck blood & data out of Facebook.

Sorry guys teh pools closed to real lifers only 4now.

[While it's unclear that the site in its final form will require connection with Facebook, one must currently log in to Facebook to request a beta invite.]

None of this is to say that Canvas is doomed to failure; it’s often difficult to expand without angering early fans, and as the recent $30 million investment into Cheezburger Network illustrates, there’s potentially big money to be made in popularizing Internet culture. But in attempting to paint a more respectable, marketable face on 4channian image-sharing, Canvas will need to work hard to keep the colors from bleeding.

(title pic via TechCrunch)

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  • Anonymous

    4chan started with little to no investment, so any money earned from ads was profit. Canv.as is starting with $650k investment, meaning that just to break even moot’s project has to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short amount of time. This kind of revenue is without precedent for a chan-related site. Members of the *chan community are very sensitive to any attempts of advertising directed at them – try making a thread on 4chan that remotely resembles advertisement and you’ll be ignored at best, saged and banned at worst. I can’t imagine any sort of ad campaign that would allow moot to turn a profit with canv.as. His only option is to completely abandon the community he’s built over the past seven years and create a new one from mainstream Facebook and Twitter users. Can this work? Perhaps, but I certainly won’t have any part in it.

  • Anonymous

    Over the past few months the 4chan community has seen Moot impose newer, stricter policies on racism and anything that the mainstream considers to be bad, going as far as to completely delete entire sections of the site, alienating their communites, he has also added a new section to the site that is geared towards dating, social networking and putting your face up where everyone can see it. He has completely forsaken his vows of free speech and lax moderation in favour of money-making schemes. Moot seems hell-bent on his mainstream utopia, he wants to own a facebook, he wants to create a twitter, the problem is pretty much the entire 4chan community is completely against the idea of social networking.
    4chan created itself, all content is generated by the users. Moot will not succeed if he tries to force or engineer his new site.

  • Guest

    As the article says, “it’s often difficult to expand without angering early fans.” It would be one thing if “Moot” had created his new project and left 4chan to hum along on its own inertia, but I fear Moot is planning to really link the two projects together. I’m sure he and his business associates hope the 4chan userbase will swarm to canv.as, but since a majority of 4chan users despise social networking and refuse to violate the taboo of breaking anonymity, I doubt canv.as will attract many traditional 4chan users.

    On top of that, recent (and often much-derided) actions by Moot, including but not limited to the arbitrary deletion of boards and Moot’s personal appearances on the Facebook-esqu, Daily Booth-like /soc/ board, indicate that he is trying very hard to impose a new vision upon 4chan and make it match the more social-networky, Web 2.0 nature of canv.as. Perhaps he is hoping people will come to 4chan from canv.as and vice versa, setting up a nice, profitable “Moot Network.” But this is one case where cross-pollination could be deadly to both projects: hardcore content from Anonymous on canv.as could ruin the playful atmosphere Moot seems bent on creating there, while increasing individualization and social networking-oriented users from canv.as could destroy the haven of collective, anonymous free speech that 4chan is (or used to be).

  • Pandamasochist

    the deletion of boards wasn’t arbitrary, those boards sucked and weren’t getting any traffic. m00t made /soc/ for cancer fans everywhere.
    your genius is showing.
    newfags

  • Pandamasochist

    the deletion of boards wasn’t arbitrary, those boards sucked and weren’t getting any traffic. m00t made /soc/ for cancer fans everywhere.
    your genius is showing.
    newfags

  • http://www.thechildhealthsite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 Edcedc8

    tl;dr

  • Hector Zeroni

    /new/ got a shit ton of traffic, but the content was too edgy for moot to handle since he is a sell out.

  • The_pinfield

    derp derp herpa derp derp derp

    let’s all rage about 4chan

    /useless whining

  • mr underhill

    its like 4chan but without any sort of moderators. the banishment hammer is non existent, which sounds good at first glance because they are almost self-govern but their system of governance is more less reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies.

    its like all the problems for Chan has but like way worse. its little wonder why moot abandoned it