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Christopher Poole, the 22-year old behind the freewheeling image board 4chan, doesn't intervene very often on the boards he created. He prefers to offer his site's users complete freedom to post whatever they please within the law.

But every once in a while he screws with his users in hilarious ways. Yesterday he posted an autoplaying video of a Japanese pudding commercial on every page of 4chan's famous /b/ board. He also instituted a comprehensive "wordfilter," a bit of code that turns everything anyone posts into "PUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDI...", the weirdly catchy chant from the advertisement.

The video's fun to watch – once.



Moot might be the only person in the world who is able to consistently create "forced memes" (rather than organic ones that spread without any official decree). A forced meme is like when your childhood friend came back from summer vacation and suddenly wanted all your friends to call her "Missy" instead of "Melissa" when you'd all been calling her Melissa your whole lives. Even talk shows like Conan and Kimmel can only hope their funny characters and sketches go viral.

But Moot can plan on it. He has the true power of the heart of the internet. He's like a giggling ancient god who occasionally intervenes in his creation for the lulz (chanspeak for "laughs"). The users of his board affectionately refer to him as Mootykins or Mootles; they don't mind. At least the cool ones don't.



Even though he's stripped away their power to post, they've begun to converse with each other via images, since all their words will convert to "PUDDIPUDDIPUDDI" upon posting. In the above image message, OC = Original Content, as opposed to copy-pasting the same images over and over.



Moot recently posted this Thanksgiving to ask his followers what they were thankful for. The thread received thousands of replies. This summer he embedded an audio file of a vuvuzela blowing incessantly on every page of the board.

He only seems to intervene in an innocuously annoying or jokey way. And his community finds him lovable for it. "He's one of us," they seem to say while they play along with the joke and further entrench the "PUDDIPUDDIPUDDI" meme.