Do not listen to attention whoring hacks and read this:
>Why now? Is it just that you'd lined up a worthy successor?
>Yeah, that's really what it comes down to. Hiroyuki Nishimura is truly one of the only people in the world with as much if not more experience managing an online community with millions of members for longer than a decade.
>In January, I had announced my retirement, which has been in the works for almost two years. I had begun thinking about that prior to 4chan's 10th birthday, so I had spent the better part of two years announcing that I would be taking that step back. [With Nishimura,] things just fell into place. I almost wish we had been able to drag it out an extra 10 days, because in 10 days is the 12th birthday of 4chan, so that would have been sort of cute to have the announcement on the birthday.
>[…]was this a long time coming?
>It's definitely been a long time coming. My march toward making the site independent really began in late 2012, early 2013, in the run-up to the 10th anniversary. Every year up until 10, I had been thinking one year out. Then when you hit 10 years, your scale changes. You think, shit, if I made [it to] 10, then it's not inconceivable that you might hit 15 or 20. And in my case, I started to really evaluate what needed to change in order to do that.
>I will also say that September of last year was exhausting. I won't dispute that. And it wasn't so much Gamergate as it was a lot of different things coming together in a short period of time. You had the Fappening, you had the Emma Watson hoax, you had Gamergate, you had the Ebola-chan thing. It was just so much so quickly. And I think any one of those controversies alone wouldn't have been that bad. But it was just like — wham bam — week after week, it was something new. I was 11 years in at that point and just exhausted. It was an exhausting month.
Moot was planning his retirement practically from the beginning of the logs. The largest administrative duty he fulfilled behind the scenes is overlooking the upgrade of 4chan's software to Yotsuba as we know it today. After this, he was already effectively checking out. The rest of the interview is not that relevant but more cutely naive. He definitely doesn't know what Hiro has done to 2ch. There is no chance that 4chan will return to its roots. Too much additional shit and more attractive sources of porn available. Besides, people on other boards wish for different developments that would have been impossible on 2004 4chan.