Imageboard sites 4chan, 8chan announce new ownership arrangements

2channel founder takes over 4chan; 8chan's Brennan becomes paid administrator.

Sam Machkovech – Sep 21, 2015 4:08 pm | 44

4chan and 8chan's logos. No, the imageboard sites haven't merged into a single, super-chan—but their combined history only grew more tangled this week thanks to ownership shakeups.

It should be no surprise that "imageboard" websites like 4chan, 8chan, and 2channel—which all host anonymous, provocative content from users around the world, often without charging any fees—have their share of fuzzy-sounding, behind-closed-door stories. How exactly do the sites operate, and who runs them?

That question became both clearer and more confusing in the past week. Both 4chan and 8chan announced their ownership arrangements had shifted—and that their ties to Japanese site 2channel had drawn them into a tangled web.

In January, Chris "moot" Poole announced he would no longer run the "imageboard" site 4chan that he founded in 2003, but that announcement came with only vague hints as to how the site would continue to operate. Monday saw Poole briefly return to the site to provide an answer: the reins have been handed to Hiroyuki Nishimura, best known as the founder of 4chan's own predecessor, the Japanese imageboard site 2channel. (4chan’s announcement didn’t confirm any financial terms for the ownership transfer, and neither site’s announcement included indications that their respective content or moderation policies would receive updates.)

4chan has long enjoyed notoriety regarding the content posted by its largely anonymous users. In more recent years, once administrators such as Poole began employing moderation practices beyond complying with legal takedown requests, some of the site's userbase flocked to similar sites like 8chan, which proudly operated with looser moderation standards.

After 8chan received a surge of new users, founder Fredrick "hotwheels" Brennan worked out a deal to have its content hosted by the same folks who hosted 2channel's imageboards. Last week, Brennan confirmed that he is no longer 8chan's owner but instead a paid administrator, which he claimed was due to domain-name transfers and the fact that the financial and technical support offered by the site's current owner, Jim Watkins, is the reason the site has not yet shut down.

Watkins' name figures into the story for another reason: he wrested administrative control of 2channel away from Nishimura in 2014. The site had already been run on American servers to bypass more restrictive Japanese content laws, and imageboard users have alleged that this change of ownership occurred, in part, due to how Nishimura handled—and possibly sold—users' private data. Nishimura has yet to speak on the record about such allegations, though we imagine he'll receive questions about those and his 2channel breakup during an official 4chan Q&A on Tuesday, September 22, at 8pm EST.