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Biography of Christopher “moot” Poole: The Hacker Known as “4chan”
- starpilot 8y ago> Notably, it was never publicly revealed what sort of position he was offered at Google. Given Poole's natural inclination toward privacy, and in wake of the negative attention that 4chan brought to him in more recent years, it's likely that he's living contentedly as a Google employee and will be out of the public eye for good. Chris Poole's LinkedIn says he's a PM in Google Maps: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-poole/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-poole/
- August-Garcia 8y agoGood find. Forwarded your note to the article's author.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- c0nducktr 8y agoAaaaaaaaaaand its gone.
- x15 8y agoThis is also my biggest curiosity related to Poole. I've read on /g/ that he's been working on Google Plus. In the thread I read that, people were joking that he is going to get fired now that the project is sun-setting, but there was no real evidence to back that up.
- darkpuma 8y agoSome people got the idea that Google hired him to make an "internal employee's only imageboard" but as far as I can tell there was never any truth to that, or at least any evidence of it. Because Google+ is/was an internal social media of sorts, that apocryphal story of an "internal 4chan" morphed into "moot runs G+".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Grue3 8y agoWhen I worked at Yandex (aka Russian Google) there were two internal social networks. The official one, where work-related content was posted, and a secret anonymous imageboard known as "yachan". It was used to anonymously complain about various things or people at Yandex, but there were also some sexist, racist and other -ist posts as well. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has a secret chan-style imageboard too, hopefully it's less toxic though.
- krapp 8y agoWhy would anyone trust the anonymity of a site on an internal corporate network? I just assume every keystroke I make and everything I do is being logged and reviewed by someone while at work. I don't even log into any of my accounts at work because I don't want my employer stealing my passwords and covertly monitoring my email and social media communication. To say nothing of actual camera surveillance.
- tenpies 8y agoPutting a lot of faith on the organization's leadership: it would befit them to treat it as anonymous, even if they have the capability of identifying posters. It would be an incredibly valuable window to honest feedback, although harder to pin down. It's similar to how every employee understands that their manager has the capability of getting their corporate chat logs. It's one thing to have the capability and another to act on it. If a manager acts on it, it will almost always destroy any trust between the manager and his/her team. Within the organization, they will almost certainly be branded "that psychopath manager that reads chat logs" unless there was an exceptionally good reason to justify it (e.g. a legal reason).
- tylerl 8y agoIf you check the profile page someone else screenshotted below, it says he started as a "founding partner and co-lead of Area 120", which is a an internal startup incubator. Whatever he worked on while there is anyone's guess, could have been a dozen things, but mostly I'd guess he was probably working on getting the general program off the ground and self sufficient. Then he worked on Hangouts Chat (replacement for Hangouts) for a REALLY short time (7mo it says) before moving to Geo. I wouldn't read too much into the brevity of his time in chat because the move to the Maps team also moved him to Tokyo. If you really want to live somewhere in particular it's not uncommon to decide what office you want to work in and find a team there to move to. My understanding is is that Poole really likes Japan, so this doesn't seem crazy. Altogether his career progress looks... normal. Perhaps a bit of trouble finding a niche, but that happens. Just another guy trying to figure out where he fits in, what he wants to do. So, no real story here; nothing of particular note.
- codetrotter 8y ago> My understanding is is that Poole really likes Japan I think that is true. I heard he started some kind of message board like a decade and a half ago. Some kind of place for people interested in anime to talk with one another. :^)
- vichu 8y agoAny Google employees willing to check his LDAP? :)
- ASinclair 8y agoI can't find anything specifically about sharing job role, but in general it's against company policy to share employee data. So I don't think anyone can answer you.
- unethical_ban 8y agoAny Google employees willing to divulge non-public information about someone without their consent? :)
- alkibiades 8y agowell since you asked nicely... (jk, just feels wrong to share personal info)
- AllegedAlec 8y agoThey are working for google....
- simlevesque 8y agosays profile not found
- starpilot 8y agoShows up fine for me. You might not be close enough to his network or not logged in.
- felipemnoa 8y agoInteresting. I didn't know that. This seems similar to the shadow banning that HN does.
- sushid 8y agoIt's just degrees of separation. Looks like you're 4th degrees or farther away from him.
- August-Garcia 8y agoScreenshot: https://i.imgur.com/KNbn6Yz.png https://i.imgur.com/KNbn6Yz.png
- MS_Buys_Upvotes 8y agoDid he ever explain why he was banned from Something Awful? Surprised it never came up. The Old Internet remembers.
- xenihn 8y agoI was very surprised to see no mention of Something Awful or Raspberry Heaven in this writeup.
- justtopostthis3 8y agoWould be fun to see logs from RH back then. [2003-10-14 02:51] <rizzou> hey moot - there's this cool website at http://www.4chan.net/ http://www.4chan.net/ you should check it out. it's really looking like the next big thing, you know?
- Mirioron 8y agoI find it sad that a project with as much cultural influence as 4chan didn't make the owners sufficient money. It's sad, because the whole idea behind 4chan is that people can be unfiltered and say what they want to say. But sadly, this means that the site can't make much money, because advertisers aren't willing to risk advertising on the site.
- ipnon 8y agoIt makes enough money to remain.
- icelancer 8y agoAll rewards need not be financial. Poole will be remembered forever and has used - and can continue to use - his fame for various benefits.
- VectorLock 8y agoHe tried to leverage his notoriety in another startup but apparently that wasn't enough.
- xfitm3 8y agoYoutube used to be like this - now it is advertiser driven. It's a net negative for humanity.
- komali2 8y agoHow is Youtube a net negative for humanity? It generates value, it teaches skills, it provides entertainment, it provides careers, and youtube kids is keeping an entire generation of parents sane.
- haimez 8y agoI think the parent comment is calling Advertising a net negative for humanity.
- 8y ago
- throwaway724 8y agoMoot is a candy-ass roody-poo cuck. POOL'S CLOSED, DESU
- vortico 8y agoI'd love to have a beer with him someday. I wonder how he's doing now.
- grenoire 8y agoAn HN comment the other day mentioned how most Americans, no matter how high reddit was up the Alexa rankings was, rejected knowing what the website was. I just feel like 4chan was much more influential in individuals' lives, no matter how large its userbase was at the peak; yet people reject it in the same exact manner...
- Pfhreak 8y agoAre you saying that 4chan was much more influential than reddit? Because I'm not sure that I'd buy that without some serious data. 4chan isn't small potatoes. It's reasonably big potatoes. But intuitively it isn't reddit scale potatoes.
- malvosenior 8y agoI think most memes originated on 4chan and spread to Reddit. That's probably what's meant by influential.
- kbenson 8y ago4chan is to Reddit as Xerox PARC was to Apple. It's the baked potato to Reddit's buttery mashed potatoes. It takes a little more work to get what you want out of it, but sometimes that's part of the draw.
- ryukoposting 8y agoDoes that make geocities Bell Labs?
- sotojuan 8y agoWith regards to internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful are definitely way more influential than reddit.
- komali2 8y agoMaybe were, but not are.
- aokiji 8y agoThese days, 4chan is used as a front for psy-ops run by CIA and the FBI. The amount of propaganda and system analysis built into the monitoring tools of those trying to shape discussion there is astounding.
- malvosenior 8y agoThe timeline is off re: his departure. He had already banned Gamergate discussion prior to Wu injecting herself into the story. There's also no mention of XOXO Fest which is where he actually made the decision to enact the ban and Sarkeesian was a keynote speaker. There are other inaccuracies but those are the big ones.
- jdlyga 8y ago4chan was the best. It was meme culture before meme culture. In fact, I believe that's where the modern usage of the word comes from (ytmnd used "fad" for the same concept). I spent so much time on there 15 years ago when I first entered college.
- phowon 8y agoYes! I needed someone to confirm that people used to call it "fads" before memes.
- malvosenior 8y agoMemes are older than that. Joshua Schacter has a site called memepool before starting del.icio.us.
- cududa 8y agoMemetics is a general concept that date backs before the internet
- rongenre 8y ago'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins in 'The Selfish Gene' in the 70's.
- phowon 8y agoThat's not what's being discussed here. We're talking about when the word 'meme' was repurposed to refer to "Internet trend".
- verbatim 8y agoBut it is. Dawkins' meme was an idea that spreads person to person. So are the modern internet-spread image macro memes. The catching on and spreading is what makes it a meme and not just an image. The confusion is that the latter meaning of "meme" has started drifting from "an image macro that spreads" to "an image macro".
- walrus01 8y agoPeople try to over analyze the appeal of 4chan, but I really think it's quite simple: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoAnonymity has its good points and bad points. In my imagination, there are people who can't speak truth to power, and anonymity gives them a place to do that. But in reality, what we get is 99% Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Not sure how you can get one without the other.
- ghiculescu 8y agoThis is a blast from the past! It inspired me to check out the 4chan article on Wikipedia, which I rewrote over 10 years ago (omg). It was a fun topic to research and to try and write formally about. Very impressed to see it’s still at featured article status (the highest an article can go)! I got tired of WP not too long after writing that, so if any anyone reading this has helped maintain/improve it since - thanks, anon. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=4chan https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=4chan
- thisisweirdok 8y agoSeems like a waste to be a middle manager at Google, but maybe he just wants to be a normal dude.
- CGamesPlay 8y ago> Seems like a waste to be a middle manager at Google Ouch, harsh!
- ehavener 8y ago> middle management at google > normal why am I even trying
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thisisweirdok 8y agoWell you're kind of insulated from actually pushing anything interesting out from within Google. You've got shareholders and constant growth to deal with after all. It's just that by contrast 4chan was this wildly weird often terrible thing. It was a cornerstone of the weird internet for some time. Google is not even remotely weird, if anything Google is responsible for making the internet _less_ weird.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoCongrats on that 1997 palette and design. Does anyone know the name of that aesthetic?
- smadge 8y agoSome people have called it brutalist web design[1]. Sites with minimalistic design whose functionality is transparent to the user. It is similar to how the brutalist architectural style doesn’t hide the underlying materials behind a facade (the word “brutalist” comes from the French translation of “raw concrete”), and emphasizes making the purpose of the building visible. Another good example would be craigslist. [1] https://brutalist-web.design https://brutalist-web.design
- k__ 8y agoI looked up to him once, because I really liked 4chan, but what did he really do? He copied 2ch to make 4chan and also raised some donation money to buy a bigger server when it grew in popularity. He got lucky with 4chan but never turned any profit with it, which is kinda okay, I think. But even after he got known for being a owner of a big site, all the opportunity that comes with he turned into basically nothing... it's like he didn't learn anything from creating 4chan... so much wasted potential
- arketyp 8y agoNot having "turned" it into anything may be his greatest achievement, and no little one either.
- smadge 8y agoWhy can’t something just be what it is? Does everything have to be a temporary stop along the way to something bigger?
- xenihn 8y agoHey, he ended up way better off than Lowtax did.
- k__ 8y agoProbably also better than WTSnacks :/
- WTSnacks 8y agoidk what would make you say that, but I'm doin' pretty okay!!
- Lammy 8y ago4chan lead me to Midnight Snacks in 2005 and if anything it's been more influential on me than 4chan itself. Thanks for exposing teenage me to artists like Boris, MONO, world's end girlfriend, Guitar Wolf, POLYSICS, The Gerogerigegege, satanicpornocultshop, Melt-Banana, etc. It really was the jumping off point that lead to my adult taste in music. It was a little embarrassing a few years ago at Y*'s apartment when someone mentioned Midnight Snacks and I blurted out how much I liked it not realizing the person sitting next to me was you (´･ᴗ･ ` )
- planktonite 8y agoIt’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning. I remember when I first visited 4chan sometime in 2006. It was totally unlike anything I had seen before. I remember feeling as though I had found an entirely new universe to explore and exist in. Back then, when you refreshed b, no matter how frequently, there was essentially no recycling of threads. The volume back then was so high that browsing b was like swimming in a vibrant ocean of the future — a relentless torrent of human thought and memes. Back then, memes were exclusive to 4chan. Nobody knew what a meme was and you could only find them on 4chan. I remember when memes starting appearing on clothing and mainstream places it felt very weird. B is now a shell of what it used to be. In life, every once in a while you get to experience something like early b. I hope I get to do it one more time before I die.
- echohack5 8y agoI'd put the first couple of weeks of pokemon go in that category.
- ctrl-j 8y agoOh god. The second weekend after it launched I had to go to the local mall. That was the most infuriating walking experience of my life. Nobody was looking where they were going and would stop randomly. Looking back, it was pretty cool how that went down - but entirely pissed me off at the time.
- porphyrogene 8y agoI would classify Pokemon Go as a fad that was just big enough to get the media’s attention, something more like fidget spinners or Furbies. 4chan was a long-running part of the internet that would never have been mentioned on the evening news. It was somewhere between being taboo and under quarantine.
- PurpleRamen 8y agoMore like the strange uncle nobody dared to talk about... And Pokemon Go seems to be still going strong, unlike spinners or furbies.
- rolph 8y ago>Philosoraptor.jpg> https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/philosoraptor/photos https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/philosoraptor/photos >There is a prototypical technology postulated that can read auditory cortex and translate to synthetic speech, E.G https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-thought-to-speech/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-thought-to-speech... there is another tech that involves stimulating otic organs with a laserbeam or phononbeam: E.G. http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Sonic_Projection.html http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Sonic_Proj... so if every thing that every other person thought was available to be heard by any other person in a mutually anonymous manner, what would we have? would it be like 4chan? is there something inherent about human nature, or about the medium itself that promotes the degradation of a hivemind situation to something so negatively primal as 4chan/b/ ? we could conduct this experiment in reality very soon. would the physical consequences be any different, in the 4chan scenario there is a disconnect, victims are given some respite by simply logging off. How would this "evil_skullnet" differ when it is in place 24/7/364.25/ ?
- pessimizer 8y ago/b/ was (never) good, not "negatively primal." The problem with /b/ is that it was conquered by a combined invasion of high schoolers and Stormfront posters, and everybody interesting left. So, if in your hypothetical everyone was linked to this network and there was no way to leave I imagine it would be fine, generally reflecting how people usually talk to each other, but with maybe double the harassment because there would be no punishment for harassment i.e. there would still be Stormfront posters and high schoolers.
- rolph 8y agowhat im trying to bring out is not how every one talks to each other conscienciously, but what everyone thinks and doesnt say. I think /b/ was close to that, it started out good and became similar to "the lord of the flies". hypothetically if noone could leave, and every passing thought was instantly available for anyone else to experience, how might this pan out?
- valtism 8y agoIt's so weird, I was just googling him yesterday after years of not ever thinking about him. It was interesting that he's gone to Google now.
- buttslasher69 8y agoI just wanted to apologise to moot after bullyign him when his startup died~ Sorry boss~~
- Digit-Al 8y agoDoes it strike anyone else as odd that a person who was so passionate about protecting people's privacy would end up joining Google - a company infamous for invading privacy?
- pessimizer 8y agomoot was a child who put up an imageboard to talk about cartoons and make jokes. Just because it was unusually successful due to an anonymity copied from the site he based it on doesn't make him the embodiment of privacy advocacy.
- Digit-Al 8y agoFrom the article: > Though Poole did not immediately make special note of this, he would come to adopt a similar philosophy as the years went on, which included principles of anonymity that would also come to define 4chan. Poole believed that such anonymity would allow users to feel comfortable posting things that they might otherwise not, which in turn would foster creativity. Sounds to me like he matured into a belief that allowing people to use the internet anonymously was very important.
- hex12648430 8y agoI don't think Privacy and Anonymity are the same concept. moot was passionate about Anonymous "social networks" and did value the privacy of 4chan's users and staff but he wasn't a hardcore privacy absolutist like you may find elsewhere on the net. And maybe he joined Google hoping to change things from the inside? Who knows.
- have_faith 8y agoThere are features of 4chan that I don't often see discussed that I think contribute to the communities ease of conversation. Firstly that all conversations are flat and always chronological. This might not sound very interesting but it reduces the cognitive load of moving through a thread, everyting is very predictable. Second is that any post, from any thread, on any board, can be referenced by any other post. The ease at which narrative can be strung together by reference is probably one of 4chan (and other image boards) best features. The fact that you can just hover over a link like >>45646435645 and it shows you what the post said negates the need for nested conversations and produces a narrative of conversation that is both simpler than nested forums because of the 0 nesting, but also more complex because of the expressiveness of referencing anything. I'm not sure if the second feature requires the first to work as a mental model, or it would get very messy.
- huffmsa 8y agoThe inline nature is great. Unlike me having to reply to you directly here, on 4chan I could address both your post and others which touch on the same topic in one shot. And since my post would have direct citations of the posts I'm referring to, you could then better structure your comment. The hover over feature killed the duckroll though.
- cosarara 8y agoThe duckroll?
- have_faith 8y agoThe precursor to Rick-Rolling: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/duckroll https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/duckroll
- pessimizer 8y ago> you can just hover over a link like >>45646435645 and it shows you what the post said This is a very recent, far post-decline feature, though. Not that it wasn't an improvement for imageboards to start implementing it, but it didn't have any role in their rise or peak.
- honkycat 8y agoThere is an interesting book on the radicalization of 4chan titled "Kill all Normies" It's not perfect, but it is a fun read.
- niggerkilla1488 8y agoReddit needs to die along with redditors. Change my mind