Wonderful.

It’s from SomethingAwful, an even older and possibly an even more wretched hive of scum and villainy than 4chan.

This is just more netlore at this point, but:

m00t made 4chan after either convincing a bunch of users of SA’s hentai forum to come join his new cooler and better site without censorship on loli…

… or he just actually got banned from SA for posting too much loli, and thus was 4chan.

I can’t actually source that last claim definitively, but I swear I’ve seen a video with LowTax stating such.

Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

The site was launched as 4chan.net on October 1, 2003, by Christopher Poole, a then-15-year-old student from New York City using the online handle “moot”.[25] Poole had been a regular participant on Something Awful’s subforum “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse” (ADTRW), where many users were familiar with the Japanese imageboard format and Futaba Channel (“2chan.net”).

Encyclopedia Dramatica:

edramatica.com/4chan

4chan got it’s start from Something Awful moot a poster on ADTRW (The Anime Forum) and some other faggots needed a site that they could host their Child Porn Anime. Moot also had an obsession with 2Channel so he decided to download Futabally and translate it to English, then host it on a webserver. He originally sent it to 20 of his goon friends and eventually everyone in ADTRW and every other Something Awful board full of closet anime pedophiles (all of them) started to use 4chan and the Internet Hate Machine began.