American online entrepreneur and prodigy Christopher Poole is currently employed by Google. He is most known for founding Canvas Networks and serving as the website’s first administrator of the English-language imageboard website “4chan.” He created his account on “4chan” under the screen name “moot,” an alias. The site known as the “meme factory,” which is currently operated by Hiroyuki Nishimura, was referred to as “the ground zero of Western web culture.” The now-defunct imageboard enabled sharing and public and private commentary on media. It also permitted image remixing and the addition of music to animated GIFs. In addition to testifying as a government witness in the Sarah Palin email hacking prosecution, he delivered keynote addresses at conferences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. In 2016, he began working at Google.
Early Childhood & Life
Christopher Poole was born in the United States in New York City in 1988. His early years, family history, and educational background are all unknown.
After enrolling for a few semesters, according to a source in “The Washington Post,” Poole left Virginia Commonwealth University. The article also stated that he lived with his mother and was looking for a means to leave “4chan” and start making money.
Career of Christopher Poole
He frequently participated in the “Something Awful” forums before creating “4chan.” He planned to create an American version of the popular Japanese imageboard known as “Futaba Channel” (also known as “2chan”), which would also serve as a forum for discussing anime and manga. When he was only 15 years old, he started the imageboard website “4chan” on October 1, 2003.
He translated the English content of the Futaba Channel website’s source code from Japanese while developing “4chan” using AltaVista’s Babel Fish online translator.
‘4chan’ initially only featured two boards, ‘/a/ – Anime/General’ and ‘/b/ – Anime/Random’ (later renamed as ‘/b/ – Random’), the Random board having been established first. Other message boards with their own distinct content and rules eventually emerged. Leopoldo Godoy of Brazilian TV Globo referred to the website as “the ground zero of Western web culture” in 2008.
He was chosen as the most important person in the world in 2008 in an online survey conducted by “Time” magazine. However, because voting was impacted by manual ballot stuffing and automatic voting systems, the outcome of the poll aroused concerns even before it was over. When it was discovered that the first letters of the first 21 candidates in the poll, when put together, create the phrase “mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME,” which contains two 4chan memes, intervention by 4chan appeared to be a possibility.
The real identity of Poole, who was well-known under the pen name “moot,” was made public in “The Wall Street Journal” on July 9, 2008. On the same day, Lev Grossman, a book critic and chief technology writer for “Time,” also released an interview explaining the power of the invisible administrator “moot,” whom he claimed to identify as Christopher Poole. He was referred to be the most significant web entrepreneur ever in an article in “The Observer.”
Prior to his interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Time, Poole purposefully kept his true identity apart from “4chan.”
On September 12, 2009, in Vienna, Austria, during the Paraflows Symposium’s ‘Urban Hacking’ panel, Poole discussed 4chan’s reputation as a “Meme Factory.” Later, the discussion was published in the academic reading “Mind and Matter: Comparative Approaches towards Complexity.”
On February 10, 2010, he delivered a speech at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California. He testified for the government in the United States of America v. David Kernell email hacking trial in April of that year.
His user name on 4chan is “moot.” The website, where users can often write practically anything anonymously, quickly gained popularity. It has message boards for a variety of interests, including sports, politics, literature, music, and anime/manga. As of 2011, the boards with the most users include the Random, Explicit Images, Anime and Manga, and Video Games boards.
He apparently raised $625,000 in 2010 to launch the website “Canvas Networks” during this time. The website launched on January 31, 2011. Joshua Schachter, Founder Collective, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel provided financial support for the imageboard, which allowed sharing and commenting on media both anonymously and openly. Remixing of uploaded photos and the insertion of music to animated GIFs were also permitted.
In November 2012, he delivered a cease-and-desist letter to an online firm called “Moot.It.”
Although Canvas permitted anonymous or pseudonymous posting, its initial policy of using Facebook Connect as the only signup method was met with some criticism, especially from users of the 4chan forum, which ultimately led to a change in this policy.
On January 14, 2015, Poole published a statement stating that Canvas had been dissolved and the leftover cash had been given to charity. The website’s security flaws are blamed in part for its termination.
On January 21, 2015, Poole announced his resignation as the administrator of “4chan,” citing stress from controversies as the cause. On January 23 of that year, moot organised a last Q&A for visitors to the website who were using the /qa/ board and YouTube to broadcast.
In order to progressively hand over leadership of the website to three of its anonymous moderators, he first started looking for a buyer for “4chan.” He declared on September 21, 2015, that he had sold “4chan” to Japanese internet tycoon Hiroyuki Nishimura, while the financial details of the deal were not made public.
On March 7, 2016, he declared that Google had hired him for an unnamed post. In that year, he began working for Google.
Individual Life of Christopher Poole
Poole prefers to keep his personal life quiet, though. He is reportedly married to television weather woman Marysol Castro and the proud father of twin kids named Liam and Gavin.
Estimated Net Worth of Christopher Poole
The estimated net worth of Christopher Poole is around $1 million.