Chris Poole visited the Facebook campus in 2011, while he was still running 4chan, for an hour-long talk and some questions. About thirty engineers attended. The Anonymous hacks had been all over the news for the last year or so, so a couple of jokers showed up in Guy Fawkes masks, and kept them on for the whole thing.
During the Q&A, Poole answered a question from one of the masked employees. After his answer, he asked, "Did that help, Steve?" Shocked, and no doubt a bit intimidated, the employee asked how Poole knew his name. His answer: "Well, I read your name on the badge clipped to your belt."
Poole was smart and thoughtful and I was quite impressed (not just with his eye for detail). Not surprised he lasted so long at Google.
Long time HN lurker here -- I find the mention that he was a PM with Google Maps to be particularly interesting. In case it has gone unnoticed, "Google Maps" and Google's associated business product "Google My Business" appear to be silently being developed into Google's successor product for Google+. Google My Business now allows business owners to "post" updates to their Google Business listing which appear on Google Maps as posts "From the owner," and, once posted, users with Google Accounts can interact with and "share" these posts. Google My Business also appears to be replacing Google Beacon, a physical device once needed for location-based ad-targeting, now deprecated in favor of directing businesses to connect their Google My Business listing to their Google Ads (AdWords) account.
I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/ for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the site for it. I don't think Google would have hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality.
I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. It's anonymous so people around the world can express themselves - even in a way I might find horrifying - and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society.
It's anonymous but your national flag is automatically assigned, and if you hide this or use a "meme flag'
like a pirate flag, you will be criticized and ignored as a likely troll, trying a "false flag" operation.
4chan/pol/ is interesting, I don't know about the other boards since I don't visit them.
In order list of threads from browsing /pol/ for people who want to know how 'diverse' it is without visiting:
- Anti-vax
- Anti-gay parents
- Goose
- Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die"
- Praising George Floyd mural vandalism
- Anti-transgender
- Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate
- Praising 'national rape day'
- Anti-Islam
- Anti-race mixing
- Illuminati
- Celebrating police shooting blacks
- British royals news
- Anti-mask, anti-Biden
- Silver
- Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race
Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me.
And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons.
Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population.
It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions.
I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).
I have been on 4chan since at least '05, according to my files. The way people write about it is just ... such a Rorschach blot. Just as an example, that "redeeming" word you used, I would have said "damning." I watched the spin machine rev up like a centrifuge before that really hit the press, I read the ZoePost early on and thought Depression Quest was just awful before I knew word one about who wrote it.
There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.
Started as a /b/tard circa '08 and now read mostly /pol/ and /lit/ because their threads most often follow an argument to its completion. This makes for good reading IMO.
Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists.
I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
I have found I can spend hours on 4chins reading some of the most interesting stuff on the Internet. It takes some work and time but there is gold there. There are some scary smart/genius anons posting.
I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/
for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a
decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign
in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the
site for it. I don't think Google would have
hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality.
This is my personal impression of moot as well.
Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit.
Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.
4chan is obviously not repræsentative for the public at large, no forum is, and that different subboards have very different overall views there highlights this.
Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.
> and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society.
That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?
It’s interesting to see how Moot gets the blame for the all the things that happened after he sold off 4chan.
Especially when you consider how anonymous and the occupy movements were all the rage among woke leftists a few years back, and they originated from 4chan.
1- who the hell is "Moot"?
2- Back in the moot-run days of 4chan, it really was a completely different world. All the weird meme-culture we have now started there. /b/ was both the greatest and worst thing simultaneously. You had literal nazis and neckbeards working together to dox pedos. It was just a completely different place from what it's become all these years later.
Meanwhile, I've been at the same company for longer than a couple of my coworkers have been alive (though I've changed jobs twice in that time) so "only five years" sounds comparatively short to me.
It's hilarious after all these years shitty journalists still believe Anonymous is a hacker group rather than just some kids trolling.
I mean imagine if Facebook had the option to be anonymous somehow on their platform and called everyone Unnamed who hadn't finished their registration or didn't want to.
You'd see Unnamed responsible for nation-state sponsored terrorism and manipulating the votes of other countries. What a joke.
They were indeed a hacker group at one point. The "everyone is Anonymous" thing worked as an effective smokescreen for a while, and a pool for recruiting. It's like gaming, or sports: tons of people do it casually on the edges, and a handful at the top do it at a very high level for high stakes.
Eventually they moved beyond fun, simple little social causes to more seriously disruptive and economically/politically dangerous stuff, and at that point, not surprisingly, the alphabet agencies slipped in and broke up the party.
Curious definition of 'kids trolling', I have to say.
DDoS attacks as well as actual hacks were performed in the name of 'Anonymous', and at the time of the Stratfor hack, various LulzSec members were already in their late twenties...
> Poole's 4chan is an anonymous, ephemeral imageboard that is often given the title "cesspool of the Internet." The site is broken up into boards of various topics, and some of the more lawless boards are home to all of the worst characters on the Internet, like school shooters, child pornographers, and racists. It's also the birthplace of a lot of Internet culture, like Rickrolling, lolcats, and, more recently, Pepe the frog memes and the alt-right. The site gave rise to the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous and is often used as a dumping ground for various hacks like the Nintendo Gigaleak. Poole sold 4chan back in 2015, a year before joining Google.
I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).
It's worth noting that the Pepe meme has continued to evolve, and is no longer associated solely or primarily with 4chan. The streamer community in particular has adopted, rehabiliated, and popularized Pepe as a mascot and chat emote. For example, here's Pepe and the "poggers" meme in a recent stream from Pokimane, a streamer with over 7 million followers who made Forbes' 2021 30 under 30 list:
you'd think this would be common knowledge given 4chan is literally an open website, but I always hear these mythologised recountings of it like it's some kind of mysterious inaccessible cult. It's just reddit for people who hate reddit.
Media reporting on anything involving 4chan has always been terrible. I remember a story about, I think, Emma Watson that turned out to be literally fake news - as in, it came from an already documented fake news site run by a known serial hoaxer, was laundered into legitimacy by increasingly reputable publications, and eventually ended up being reported as true everywhere including places like the BBC.
I think it's also worth adding that the memes didn't even really start on 4chan. They mostly started on ytmnd and then 4chans beta site started on servers that belonged to ytmnd/max. 4chan did however lower the bar to entry for sharing memes. Making gifs/mp3's for ytmnd was a put-off to many.
Why do you think this is not relevant? Everything that came out of 4chan is not a surprise, it was accepted there from the very beginning. It just took proportions that nobody would expect.
Him becoming a PM for Google Maps seems surprising to me considering his entrepreneurial background, but I can’t deny I’ve also considered making the jump now and then from The dev life
canv.as always seemed like a great idea, ahead of its time, as far as letting people make memes easier... but now, flash forward to today, and original content on 4chan is at a proportional all-time low. users there always say things like "someone take this image and shop [x] in" instead of doing it themselves in mspaint.
Same. Managed to capture the creative aspects of 4chan meme culture without the toxicity. I loved creating memes there. I had a little following too. Then it died and it all went up in smoke and there's nowhere else like it.
On the one hand, no one would blame him for just continuing to drift off into obscurity. On the other, he's a smart guy, and smart guys tend to be restless. Add to this that the hurricane of anti-trust lawsuits happening right now may result in a re-shuffling of the deck when it comes to the landscape of the web in a few years, and there's some real potential for new projects on the world-wide information superhighway, in a way there hasn't been in some time.
"Google hired Poole in 2016 to work on the company's doomed social media project, Google+... After Google+, Poole apparently joined Google's experimental "Area 120" group and eventually moved on to be a product manager for Google Maps."
“ Poole lasted just five years at Google, which CNBC notes is usually just long enough for any employee's shares attached to hiring to vest. It sounds like Poole never found a solid landing spot at Google, as he had three different positions during his five years.”
Lol such a dishonest representation of FANG employment. Well above average (2 years) a year past the vesting cliff, and about average in terms of team switches
5 years at Google is forever, and it's not uncommon at all for people to jump around projects at the company. It's also a full year beyond what's necessary to vest. Really silly way to write that.
> Well above average (2 years) a year past the vesting cliff
This is sort of misleading. The 2 year quote often thrown around is a measure of the average tenure of current employees at the company, not a measure of the average tenure of people leaving.
I like to note that a company with exponential growth (and all of the major tech firms, excepting perhaps microsoft since it's been around longer count here) can have a seemingly low tenure by that first metric even if no one has ever left the company.
I imagine Moot wasn't hired for technical skill exactly, but for his years of experience trying to shape a difficult community. I'd be interested in a breakdown of how Moot "fostered" the toxic aspects of 4chan. One could say that any anonymous community will be toxic and harmful to the general world, but that feels like a conclusion that is drawn after watching 4chan metastasize.
What does qualified mean to you? If he received "formal education".
Moot for better or for worse held together one of the larger sites on the internet while managing a team of mods and the simple fact that 4chsn was never shut down is in itself an achievement. I have a hard trouble not seeing him as having serious management chops. He frankly is probably more qualified than many people who got into Google for little reason other than excellence at math puzzles and formal education which are hilariously mediocre qualifiers.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
ericbarrett|4 years ago
During the Q&A, Poole answered a question from one of the masked employees. After his answer, he asked, "Did that help, Steve?" Shocked, and no doubt a bit intimidated, the employee asked how Poole knew his name. His answer: "Well, I read your name on the badge clipped to your belt."
Poole was smart and thoughtful and I was quite impressed (not just with his eye for detail). Not surprised he lasted so long at Google.
yreg|4 years ago
https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_moot_poole_the_case_fo...
zumu|4 years ago
Is it hard to 'last' at google? I have never gotten that impression.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Graffur|4 years ago
tomcam|4 years ago
johngehrig|4 years ago
WanderPanda|4 years ago
okareaman|4 years ago
I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. It's anonymous so people around the world can express themselves - even in a way I might find horrifying - and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society.
It's anonymous but your national flag is automatically assigned, and if you hide this or use a "meme flag' like a pirate flag, you will be criticized and ignored as a likely troll, trying a "false flag" operation.
4chan/pol/ is interesting, I don't know about the other boards since I don't visit them.
pcbro141|4 years ago
- Anti-vax
- Anti-gay parents
- Goose
- Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die"
- Praising George Floyd mural vandalism
- Anti-transgender
- Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate
- Praising 'national rape day'
- Anti-Islam
- Anti-race mixing
- Illuminati
- Celebrating police shooting blacks
- British royals news
- Anti-mask, anti-Biden
- Silver
- Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race
Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
pcbro141|4 years ago
Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me.
And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons.
Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population.
It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions.
I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).
bumblelad|4 years ago
Always fascinating how they refer to themselves.
You have n-words.
Then potato n-words for the irish (and lithuatians)
Pasta n-words for italians
Bongs for the british
Leafs for canadians
Burgers and Amerimutts
Toothpaste for the netherlands
Gypsy for hungarians and romanians (who are at a perpetual shitposting war against each other)
Hohols for the ukranians
Finngolians
The usual suspects for anyone of any asian country, extra special hate towards the chinese and Xi's internet army.
and on and on
No matter what nation of the world you are from, they will find an insult for you. It's endearing in a way really.
Oh and also there's someone shitposting from a research facility in Antarctica.
at_a_remove|4 years ago
There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.
bruiseralmighty|4 years ago
Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists.
I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
hourislate|4 years ago
JohnBooty|4 years ago
Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit.
Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.
Blikkentrekker|4 years ago
Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.
tqi|4 years ago
That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?
superflit|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
moksly|4 years ago
Especially when you consider how anonymous and the occupy movements were all the rage among woke leftists a few years back, and they originated from 4chan.
moate|4 years ago
blissofbeing|4 years ago
carabiner|4 years ago
techsupporter|4 years ago
kingsuper20|4 years ago
I've never worked anywhere where people were much use before 2-3 years in harness. Too much domain knowledge maybe.
Andrex|4 years ago
A lot of the time it may be warranted. But just as often, like in this article, it definitely is not.
theandrewbailey|4 years ago
andrewmcwatters|4 years ago
I mean imagine if Facebook had the option to be anonymous somehow on their platform and called everyone Unnamed who hadn't finished their registration or didn't want to.
You'd see Unnamed responsible for nation-state sponsored terrorism and manipulating the votes of other countries. What a joke.
ergot_vacation|4 years ago
Eventually they moved beyond fun, simple little social causes to more seriously disruptive and economically/politically dangerous stuff, and at that point, not surprisingly, the alphabet agencies slipped in and broke up the party.
cl0ne|4 years ago
cygx|4 years ago
DDoS attacks as well as actual hacks were performed in the name of 'Anonymous', and at the time of the Stratfor hack, various LulzSec members were already in their late twenties...
_lffv|4 years ago
I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).
_etyf|4 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETBUJkVMnpc&t=70s
beaconstudios|4 years ago
pavel_lishin|4 years ago
To you and I, maybe! But even arstechnica's readership may not be aware of all this stuff.
makomk|4 years ago
bigth|4 years ago
LinuxBender|4 years ago
throwaway823882|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
base698|4 years ago
Propaganda to teach that anything free is dirty/salacious to keep people in their walled gardens.
coliveira|4 years ago
ibn-python|4 years ago
rodolphoarruda|4 years ago
Yes. This is an extraordinary business case for strategic HCM discussions.
khazhoux|4 years ago
rubyist5eva|4 years ago
adamrezich|4 years ago
AzzieElbab|4 years ago
newsclues|4 years ago
adamrezich|4 years ago
koboll|4 years ago
ergot_vacation|4 years ago
On the one hand, no one would blame him for just continuing to drift off into obscurity. On the other, he's a smart guy, and smart guys tend to be restless. Add to this that the hurricane of anti-trust lawsuits happening right now may result in a re-shuffling of the deck when it comes to the landscape of the web in a few years, and there's some real potential for new projects on the world-wide information superhighway, in a way there hasn't been in some time.
Balgair|4 years ago
Just want to say you did a good job, thanks for being you and doing your thing. I know it's been tough and all, so thanks for the hard work.
Dunno about google maps though, that seemed to have taken a dive since ~2013. Maybe look into biotech and that jazz, it needs people like you.
Still, be good to see what you're doing next. Keep up that hard work and effort, it shows.
vmception|4 years ago
like literally what is the point of this to lead people to talk about unrelated aspects of 4chan and maybe how that influenced his time at Google
but the article describes an extremely normal and extremely extended time at Google
what...?
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
fudged71|4 years ago
Apocryphon|4 years ago
zamadatix|4 years ago
hatsunearu|4 years ago
adamrezich|4 years ago
ramosu|4 years ago
cavisne|4 years ago
Lol such a dishonest representation of FANG employment. Well above average (2 years) a year past the vesting cliff, and about average in terms of team switches
staticassertion|4 years ago
dang|4 years ago
That spin had so much torque I'm surprised the article stayed motionless.
joshuamorton|4 years ago
This is sort of misleading. The 2 year quote often thrown around is a measure of the average tenure of current employees at the company, not a measure of the average tenure of people leaving.
I like to note that a company with exponential growth (and all of the major tech firms, excepting perhaps microsoft since it's been around longer count here) can have a seemingly low tenure by that first metric even if no one has ever left the company.
russdpale|4 years ago
[deleted]
dang|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
aeturnum|4 years ago
faeriechangling|4 years ago
Moot for better or for worse held together one of the larger sites on the internet while managing a team of mods and the simple fact that 4chsn was never shut down is in itself an achievement. I have a hard trouble not seeing him as having serious management chops. He frankly is probably more qualified than many people who got into Google for little reason other than excellence at math puzzles and formal education which are hilariously mediocre qualifiers.
AllegedAlec|4 years ago
slackfan|4 years ago
chad_strategic|4 years ago
Get the impression you work at google?
RobRivera|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Graffur|4 years ago
How he avoid cancel culture is beyond me