4chan and the Image-Required Post

OCT 01 2003 · 12:00

Trollface, born on 4chan's /b/ board in the second half of the decade, became the canonical reaction-face the image-required-post rule made possible. The /b/ era's signature export. Place: Christopher Poole's bedroom, Westchester County, New York Figures: Christopher Poole (moot), 15 · the early /b/ regulars Christopher Poole, 15, launches 4chan from his bedroom on 1 October 2003. The software is a hacked-together English port of Futaba Channel's open-source code; the cultural model is 2channel, the Japanese text-board that had been running since 1999. The defining technical choice is the one Poole inherits from Futaba without much thought: every post on every board requires an image attachment. Text-only replies are allowed, but threads start with a picture. On /b/ (random) the constraint becomes the cultural lab. If every post needs an image, every poster builds an image library; if every poster has a library, the library becomes vocabulary; if it is vocabulary it gets reused, captioned, re-cut, looped. The grammar of the modern image macro and the reaction-GIF arsenal gets industrialized here over the next four years.