moot on 4chan survey: “It’s total garbage.”

According to a survey, the majority of 4chan users are young (14-23), straight, surburban white guys, many of whom are virgins, who lurk the imageboard at home. A minority of users said they have participated in raids and IRL protests.  For those of you who have been on 4chan, this really should come as no surprise to anyone.

Granted, this is 4chan. One percent of respondents said they discovered 4chan in 2011. So the answers should be taken with a grain of salt, or as Christopher “moot” Poole told TechCrunch “a massive grain of salt.” (The survey results have since been muddled by TechCrunch users taking the survey. I posted the pre-TechCrunch story above, the post-story results are here.)

Of course, when TechCrunch got a hold of the story they immediately emailed Poole to figure out what he thought about it. Poole called it “unscientific” and “total garbage.”

The problem, of course, is that while the mass media has crowned Poole King of the Anons, what Poole really did was start the imageboard using code he ripped from a similar Japanese site. All he did was create the forum, which, if you’ve ever used it, is pretty damn rudimentary. And while it’s fun to get all excited over Canvas, Poole’s new venture that’s kind-of-like-4chan-but-not-really, or pit Poole against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg in a philosophical battle for the internet, the fact of the matter is that 4chan is less Facebook and Twitter – regimented and constructed, and more BitTorrent – an internet world all it’s own.

In an attempt to understand exactly what the fuck 4chan is, people essentially, put moot at the head of the table and the Anons as his followers. In reality 4chan is a disjointed mass of users all bound together by a desire to be on the seedy underbelly of the internet, no real leaders, no real followers, and lots of in-fighting. 4chan didn’t evolve in a world of APIs and iPhone apps. It’s from the fringes, not the mainstream, which is part of the allure I guess – how could an online force evolve with no VCs? No Harvard educated founders? No cross-platform integration?

I guess, too, that’s what Lerer Ventures is trying to find out.