In 2003, while still in high school, Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan. The site includes content that many people find offensive. Nevertheless, or maybe because of it, the site has millions of users and has been responsible for many of the strange memes that have propagated on the Internet, including LOLcats.

The 4chan site is a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language. As Gawker’s Nick Douglas described in 2008, areas of the Web site involve people hoping to “shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other.” One of the largest Web forums in the United States, the site continues to influence mainstream culture. Here is an edited and condensed version of my chat with Mr. Poole:

Nick Bilton: You go by the name “Moot.” Why?
Christopher Poole: As a teenager, I used to use the nickname “Moo” as a moniker online, and then I turned into “Moot” for fun, which I didn’t even realize was a real word at the time, and it just stuck with me.

How old were you when you started 4chan?
I was 15. I’m 22 now.

What were you trying to do when you started the Web site?
On my summer break, I discovered Japanese animation and I started watching a lot of anime on online forums. I soon discovered an image-board Web forum called 2chan, and I had never seen anything like it before. What really struck me about it was how fast it moved. Even back then you could sit and hit refresh on your browser and continue to see new content.

So then what happened?
The code for 2chan was publicly available, and I took it and translated it from Japanese to English using tools online, and I threw it up on the Web and sent it out to 20 people.

And why did you call it 4chan?
I wanted to keep with the 2chan naming and the URL for 3chan was taken at the time, so I just jumped to the next number.

No one knew you had any involvement for a long time, right?
Yes, my parents only found out about it two years ago.

Were you living a double life?
Yes, I was “Moot” online, Chris in school and with my family, and I used other real names with people I met online and told them my name was Robert.

Why did you stay quiet about your involvement for so long?
I didn’t want my parents to know about 4chan at first because of the adult content. By the time I was 18, and could talk about it, the site had become notorious for its exploits and the adult content on there.

How many users does 4chan have?
We started with 20 users. Now we’re the largest active forum in the United States, with 8.2 million unique visitors every month and 600 million page loads per month. People are on the site are on for an average of 19 minutes at a time and look at 30 pages each. On top of that, we’re currently getting 800,000 new posts a day.

So do you make any money from the site?
Technically, yes. Functionally, no. The site is technically profitable. We do a little more than break even, but no-one is taking a paycheck.

You keep saying “we.” How many people work on the site?
The site doesn’t have any employees. I have a part-time developer in Georgia, and I also have 30 volunteer moderators. So, technically, there aren’t any employees receiving a paycheck, including me.

So how do you make money?
The site breaks even, and I do some odd jobs.

Has anyone offered to buy 4chan?
When I was 17, I was approached by an online Japanese toy store and they offered me $15,000 for the Web site. I told them I wasn’t interested in selling, so they bumped the price up to $45,000. I said No. I haven’t received another offer in the past five years.

Would you sell the site today?
It depends. If someone was looking to gut it for traffic, then absolutely not. But if they were committed to the site and its goals, then I’d consider it.

Have the police ever contacted you?
Yes, in late 2006 someone posted a bomb threat on the site that was a competition between some friends to propagate something into the news. He succeeded but was bragging about it at work and was arrested. Then, last year, a user was accused of compromising Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and posting it on 4chan before it ended up on Gawker.

4chan’s community can be very powerful. Can they be controlled?
Well, last year they voted me as Time’s most influential person of the year, but the community can also be very fickle. For example, I didn’t know about the Time magazine stunt until it was well under way. If I asked the community to do this, they would have done everything in their power to make sure that I was at the bottom of that list — that’s just the way they work. I like to leave them to their own devices.

4chan members can be a bit ruthless, too, right?
I get a lot of e-mail messages from people who say thanks for giving them a place to vent, an outlet to say what they can’t say in real life with friends and work colleagues — things that they know are wrong, but they still want to say. Is it right? No, of course not. People say some disgusting, vile things. But just because we are hosting it doesn’t mean we agree with it. I don’t support what they are saying; I just support that there is a site like that to say that.

Do you support anonymity online?
Someone I recently met at the TED conference told me “part of the magic of youth is that people are able to forgive and forget.” As kids, we say stupid things, and because there’s not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we’re sacrificing the ability to be youthful. In 10 years, everything you say and do will be visible online, and I think it’s really unfortunate.

So what’s next?
I’m working on a new project to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.

Can you tell me more about it?
Not really, sorry. But our code is a decade old, the foundation is really rickety and the layout is old. So imagine if you were to start 4chan today, what would it look like, how would it work with a modern browser. It’s kind of like a reboot, but it will be something separate to 4chan.