Biography of Christopher “moot” Poole: The Hacker Known as “4chan” (opens in new tab)

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.

It's a disgusting place full of pretty much the worse the internet has to offer, but it was for a while a haven for people who simply weren't accepted by any other social group in the world, to no "fault" of their own. Be it a shitty situation at home (tons of foster kids on there in the old days), broke ass young adults, suicidally depressed, autistic, whatever, whoever just could not fit in, they had humans they could interact with, which is demonstrably imperative to human health.

Bad actors would do bad shit there due to the very nature of the site. Probably, the misfits could have found some other, healthier, place to congregate. But they didn't, and so 4chan was important, to many people.

It's a shame it got weaponized by bad actors. There was once a day when such attempts would be met with "4chan is not your personal army." Unfortunately, the bad actors got smart enough to figure out how to turn them into an army anyway.

Beyond that, I believe it's important for social / cultural / political structures I disagree with to exist in small "gardens," left to their own devices - both as a living example of "yup, x or y doesn't work, go to 4chan to see what it results in," but also because sometimes it does work, and it's important to keep those traditions alive.

The romanticism comes from the fact that 4chan has been incredibly influential in internet history.

Chaos is a ladder, as they say in GOT, and some of the best content out there has come from 4chan.

The lack of identity and point system also brings out some of the most interesting conversation. I recommend checking out /mu or /lit (/b, /pol/, and /r9k are all containment boards). If you contrast the conversation on /mu and /lit with similar reddit boards (r/music - or even spin offs like r/hiphopheads - and r/books) you will find much more interesting and original content. I find the point system on reddit lends itself much closer to a 'hivemind' where everyone ends up conforming to the same opinion, which makes things boring

I think you're just noticing the more egregious examples which garner a lot of attention. Quite a lot of original content that didn't have any other common place used to originate on 4chan. Eventually a lot of it shifted to Reddit as Reddit came into being and gained in popularity, but there's a reason that some content (such as very short science fiction stories, or humorous explanations of DND sessions in "greentext") is archived in the form of screen capture images, and that's because one of the few places you could find this with a wide audience was on 4chan.

I've only ever been on 4chan a handful of times, and yes, the boards that people expect to be a clusterfuck are indeed a clusterfuck, but if you pay attention it's hard to discount the influence 4chan had on internet culture in benign ways as well.

From the outside, looking in, people tend to mistake 4chan for /b/, (and more recently /pol/). It’s similar to if someone decided to write off reddit, just because of the content on /r/funny.

For one, I think /a/ - 4chan’s anime board is still the largest, English speaking, Japanese culture board out there. There have been animators, authors and directors on /a/, albeit answering questions in broken English. And /a/, unlike /b/, or /pol/, tends to not put up shock crap and humor. Many of the smaller boards are also like this (with the exception of probably /tv/ and more recently /fit/)

The format itself, when not overrun edgy teenagers, is like nothing else. Every post is given equal representation. It's designed to be ephemeral and there's tends to be a lot less community politics. I won't argue that the format lends itself to a bastion of quality - it's a lot of wading through waste to find something good. It's the double edge sword of not having a "karma" system. But when its good - it's good, and when it's weird it _weird_.

I think the problem with 4chan has had recently was moderation. moot made all the rules and was the final arbiter in all things 4chan. What that meant was only moot could really ban a discussion topic without it being overreach by mods. moot coming out and saying “naruto is allowed on /a/“ or “gamer gate doesn’t belong on /v/“ was the only real mediating force that could transform the community. If an anonymous mod did it, it would always be met with a meme mocking mods (“he does it for free”)

When moot was more active, defending everything you said with “free speech” wasn’t really a thing either. Mods could ban you whenever they wanted for mostly whatever they wanted and bans tended to be more public. This mod power had a special hidden power - it was harder to take over the community around some singular meme. Eventually a mod would ban because he was tired of seeing X, and that was the end of that (similar to what happened to gamer gate - even during gamer gate people of people complained that games journalism didn’t belong on 8 of the 10 threads on /v/)

I secretly wish for moot to come back and roll heads just to make things interesting. Currently I think a lot of threads get derailed because bait-politics gets injected into almost everything. Threads get derailed because of "someone who is tangentially related to the subject being discussed is a woman and/or minority and if you support X that means you hate America" type of posts. And I also just wish he'd pop by and tell us how he's doing. I hope he's happy now.

4chan was the punk rock of websites in an era of increasing corporatization of the internet. It was an incubator for internet culture before other websites took that mantle and ran with it (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and even Facebook now fill a similar role).

I feel like you just haven't spent much time there. Lots of interesting discussions are to be had on a vast number of topics. Much of Internet culture originated there as well.

I feel like 4chan has shown just how needed an anonymous forum is to experimentation and community.

It shows people want the worst kind of discourse. You might not like it but if such a sizable community does its a shame it can't live on its own.

Not everyone gets online to peruse HN or even learn anything at all and there isn't anything wrong with that.

I find it weird how many people are ok with 4chan but freak out about Gab.

That's exactly what it is / was. But like with startup investing, banging enough turds together eventually produces a few diamonds.

Most memes on Reddit originated on 4chan.

I disagree. Anonymous environments bring out the best kind of discourse with the occasional annoyances. There is a reason why most people agree that reddit's golden age was around the 2008-2012is period. Before all the censorship and propaganda. In my opinion, censored environments bring out the worst kind of discourse. Look at social media of today.

How 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.

He tried to leverage his notoriety in another startup but apparently that wasn't enough.

I mean, even ytmnd predates 4chan. Maybe things like that were tame in terms of content, but the memes were still there. Memes been around since the web busted out of cern.

A person of a certain age might think 4chan is the beginning sure, but SA was basically where 4chan came from. At least how I remember. Again, less extreme maybe.

Not that my memories of those days is that great, I guess.

Not the same at all.

I find it fascinating how the word meme came to be so specific and yet so vague. Now you have 'memes' as in image macros, 'memes' as in 'funny images,' sometimes 'memes' as in snowclones, 'memeing' as essentially a synonym of 'shitposting,' and occasionally, 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.)

On 4chan, it started with image macros, reaction images/gifs, demotivational posters, etc. and at some point, all of those just became what 'meme' has come to mean, and if you say the word meme without context people just assume image macros, a la meme generators.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, since all of those things do indeed tend to be memetic, but it made so much more sense early on than it does now.

There was a miniature Eternal September moment in 2010-2011 when image macros hit mainstream sites like Facebook. Months of "haha look at this funny meme! It's called a 'bad luck Brian'!" used out of context.

It pushed thr chans/SA deeper and darker. Honestly I'm surprised it isn't more recognized as an inflection point.

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.

I 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.

Oh 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.

You mean when that massive corporation slapped that massive international brand skin on that already extremely successful mobile game that they then furiously spent tens of millions marketing and press releasing months before release and months after?

That's more in the line of waiting in line for days for Return of the Jedi to come out than the early days of 4chan.

If 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.

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+".

Screenshot:

https://i.imgur.com/KNbn6Yz.png

Shows up fine for me. You might not be close enough to his network or not logged in.

The duckroll?

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

I think 4chan extensions were doing that for a while though.

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

Probably also better than WTSnacks :/

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

Memes are older than that. Joshua Schacter has a site called memepool before starting del.icio.us.

4chan 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.

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

I think most memes originated on 4chan and spread to Reddit. That's probably what's meant by influential.

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.

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.

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?

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/ you should check it out. it's really looking like the next big thing, you know?