The real story is not the influence of 4chan, but rather it's business model. I read kind of the same article in Time. It seems, the 4chan founder is on a PR tour (PG's Submarine PR- http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) because of problems making money.

At the end of the story, he talks about the uphill battle to get ad revenue and in Time he mentioned wanting to sell to Rupert Murdoch. I think he's finding himself more like p0rn than digg, what's an obscene site to do?