It's just the latest example in a series of increasingly enigmatic moves by Christopher Poole (better known by his web-handle "moot"), 4chan's reclusive founder, whose increased interaction with his own creation of late has grown both more playful and more, well, trollish.
His creation -- 4chan, and more specifically /b/, its "random" board -- is of course one of the most notorious sites on the entire internets, because of its status as the unofficial home to the "anon" community, a non-organized hive of random geeks and provocateurs who, collectively, have been responsible for countless pranks (like the time they sent "Justin Bieber syphalis" to the top of Google searches, or the time they shut down Gene Simmons' website with DOS attacks) and pretty much every internet meme ever created. And if there's one thing anon is known for, it's trolling -- basically getting a rise out of someone else. They troll websites. They troll strangers. They constantly, relentlessly troll each other.
For trolls, 4chan is an ideal home for a number of reasons -- it stores no data, for example, making it one of the few authentically anonymous sites out there -- but one of the chief among them is its bare-bones platform, essentially unchanged since its inception in 2003 -- all text and photos, no links, no embed capability. Until, apparently, this week.
Just the fact of embedded video on 4chan would be enough to blow the collective hive-mind of anon, and suddenly, it is everywhere -- every time you enter a thread, every time you get out of a thread, every time you change pages, every time you post, the "Giga Pudding" video starts over again. And by about the 400th time you hear the phrase "Giga Pudding," it gets downright demonic.
So there's every reason to assume that the video is a bona-fide troll, courtesy of moot. Which is funny, because up until very recently, moot was not known for, well, really getting involved at all. Last week, he took a step toward changing that with a parody of Jimmy Wale's recent Wikipedia banners urging people to give that site money, putting a similar banner of his own up on 4chan whose link led to a picture of his cat -- a fake-out troll not unlike the practice of Rickrolling, which anon also invented, by the way.
This time, he's stepped up THE GAME a notch with a troll that is both unavoidable and massive. Still, whether he's trying to engage the community he helped to foster and continues to host, trying to disenfranchise it (because man, is that video ever annoying) or just trying to fuck with anon for the same reason anon fucks with anon remains unclear. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: It is one epic fucking troll.
Touche again, moot. 10/10.
