
Biography of Christopher “moot” Poole: The Hacker Known as “4chan” - its_y0ur_boy
https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/4319/biography-of-christopher-moot-poole-who-is-this-4chan
======
planktonite
It’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
I'd put the first couple of weeks of pokemon go in that category.

~~~
planktonite
I would disagree. 4chan was the nucleation point from which our modern lives
sprung. It was the start of a very fundamental shift in the way people live.
4chan was the place where regular people and high bandwidth internet became
married, and where the consequences of that union first materialized. I
remember people would find online obituaries and organize raids on the family
of the deceased, in one instance tormenting the parents of a deceased child
with prank phone calls. People would live stream their suicides and other
people would watch them and actually egg them on in the chat. The consequences
of total anonyminity was a completely new concept back then, completely new
territory. It’s something we have become accustomed to now. Meme culture was
totally new, seemingly silly but underpinned by a fundamental arbitrage in
communication that proved to be very important. You were not only experiencing
these new things, but experiencing them as a part of a relatively small and
exclusive group of people. 4chan was a microcosm of the future, and that is
what made 4chan so amazingly potent. Pokémon go doesn’t even hold a candle to
that in my view.

~~~
xenihn
Something Awful did all of that before 4chan did (well, sans the suicide
livestream). 4chan was to SA what Reddit and Imgur are to 4chan.

~~~
pessimizer
Not quite; reddit and Imgur are normie-4chan. 4chan was definitely not normie-
SA, it attracted the sleaziest of SA from the start; it was more an anonymous
refugee camp.

~~~
xenihn
It's not really about normie or not, but amplification (through number of
users) and ease of access. Not just as a reader, but also as a contributor.

SA had a paywall. It had an elitist community that was unwelcoming towards new
users, with strict etiquettes shaped by moderators and users alike, and users
that were predisposed to forming cliques, along with strictly enforced rules
that made it easy to get banned and forced to pay money. One ban was enough
for most people to not return, even if they were able to pay. All of these
combined to form a significant barrier for new users.

4chan dealt with all of these issues. It was free. It was anonymous, so no one
could tell if you were a new user or not, and cliques weren't an issue. There
was almost no moderation outside of illegal stuff. The SA community was also
very anti-anime, which meant you weren't welcome to be a weeb anywhere other
than the dedicated subforum (ADTRW).

So then 4chan gets huge. It's overwhelming for the average person. There's
just too much content to sift through. Some of that content is too shocking
for the average person. Posting/contributing can be harder for some people who
don't want to risk being insulted when they think they are following the
informal rules.

Early-mid Reddit ends up being a sort of middle-ground between SA and 4chan.
It's free. It's somewhat moderated. It's curated by users through the
upvote/downvote system. You need to register an account to post, but you can
make new accounts whenever you want (old Reddit didn't require an e-mail), so
you can basically be anonymous if you want to. You can further curate and
filter content with subreddits. The shocking content is still there for those
who want it.

Then Imgur ends up becoming Reddit for people who primarily use mobile devices
and don't like Reddit's UI. But the communities exist alongside each other.

A bunch of old SA posters go to Twitter, because it turns out the average
Western internet user finds SA posting and humor funny, and the biggest
motivation for FYAD shitposting was always attention and building up your
"brand". They inadvertently start what becomes known as "weird twitter". SA-
style shitposting has now become the standard posting style for people who
"get" Twitter.

Between Reddit, Twitter, and Imgur, there's now enough ease of access for your
average internet-savvy person to be exposed to a unified Western internet
culture, with the flow being 4chan -> Reddit/Imgur -> Twitter, and then
Twitter leading to exposure through media like TV, online "journalism", etc..

------
starpilot
> 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/)

~~~
x15
This 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
Some 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+"_.

~~~
Grue3
When 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
Why 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
Putting 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).

------
have_faith
There 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.

~~~
pessimizer
> 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.

~~~
huffmsa
May 2012 is when it was added. So last Thursday.

------
Mirioron
I 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.

~~~
fossuser
I don't really understand the romanticization of 4chan - it seems mostly like
people yelling at each other, trying to be offensive/shocking, and memes. It's
like if reddit was entirely its lowest quality content.

If anything it seems to support the idea that anonymous environments bring out
the worst kind of discourse. I get the draw of a place where people can be
unfiltered without having to worry about their reputation, but in practice it
doesn't seem to create a great environment for any interesting discussion.

~~~
typon
People are so enamoured by 4chan precisely because it isn't like reddit.
Reddit, Facebook or any social media platform that rewards users with up
votes, karma, reputation, likes or whatever creates a system in which people
want to please others and develop reputations they have to uphold. 4chan is
free from those chains and people are able to freely throw ideas into the mix.
This is why 4chan has been so instrumental in coming up thousands of memes
that define internet culture today. Reddit, Facebook and others are usually
consumers of those memes rather than generators.

I know this is a massive generalization, but that's been my impression being
on digg, reddit, Twitter and 4chan for 10 years now.

The problem is that a lot of the original 4chan users either moved on or just
grew up and at the same time 4chan got over taken by alt-light type folks. I
still think the basic idea of 4chan has a lot to offer that maybe could be
replicated on an other platform, with a fresh set of people.

~~~
misterdoubt
Funny images and phrases, yes.

Anything more substantive than that... quite rarely.

~~~
dcbadacd
Pretty sure there was a math proof posted on 4chan originally.

~~~
lewilewilewi
Yep - someone posted an original proof of the lower bound for the Haruhi
problem
[http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem](http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem)

------
ghiculescu
This 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)

------
jdlyga
4chan 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.

~~~
rongenre
'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins in 'The Selfish Gene' in the 70's.

~~~
phowon
That's not what's being discussed here. We're talking about when the word
'meme' was repurposed to refer to "Internet trend".

~~~
verbatim
But 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".

~~~
phowon
I am aware of the origin of the word. I am distinguishing between the generic
notion of a meme (which as you pointed out simply means "transmittable idea",
which is an incredibly general concept) and the specific notion of an Internet
Meme (and, as in OP, 'meme culture', which surely refers to Internet meme
culture, and not the culture of transmittable ideas in general).

The later misuse of the word meme to refer only to image macros is also a
separate shift.

------
grenoire
An 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
Are 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.

~~~
sotojuan
With regards to internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful are definitely way
more influential than reddit.

~~~
komali2
Maybe _were_ , but not _are_.

~~~
pessimizer
You don't say that a scientist lacks influence based on his/her current
papers, or even based on whether they're currently alive.

What we do _now_ is based on SA, 4chan _then._ Reddit _is_ the influence of
those sites, it didn't eclipse them, it amplified them. The part of reddit
that isn't SA and 4chan is pretty much Digg, which is why censorship of even
the most horrific speech represents an existential threat to the company.

------
malvosenior
The 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.

------
Digit-Al
Does 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
moot 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
From 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.

------
vortico
I'd love to have a beer with him someday. I wonder how he's doing now.

------
rolph
>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_Proj...](http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Sonic_Projection.html)

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
/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
what 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?

------
k__
I 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

~~~
Anon1096
He fostered a beloved website in and managed his power in a way that many
cannot. A leader to be looked up to like none other for me.

~~~
k__
Did he? As far as I know he wasn't really a pleasant leader, at least
accoroding to the people working with him

------
valtism
It'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.

------
honkycat
There is an interesting book on the radicalization of 4chan titled "Kill all
Normies"

It's not perfect, but it is a fun read.

------
thisisweirdok
Seems like a waste to be a middle manager at Google, but maybe he just wants
to be a normal dude.

~~~
ehavener
> middle management at google

> normal

why am I even trying

~~~
thisisweirdok
Well 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.

------
MS_Buys_Upvotes
Did he ever explain why he was banned from Something Awful? Surprised it never
came up.

The Old Internet remembers.

~~~
xenihn
I was very surprised to see no mention of Something Awful or Raspberry Heaven
in this writeup.

~~~
justtopostthis3
Would 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?

------
sonnyblarney
Congrats on that 1997 palette and design. Does anyone know the name of that
aesthetic?

~~~
smadge
Some 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)

------
walrus01
People 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
Anonymity 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.

