With 20 million unique visitors a month — and more than 40 billion page views since its inception— 4chan is one of the most-trafficked websites ever. All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery.
The only child of divorced parents, Poole would routinely stay awake until the wee hours as an adolescent, due to a dysfunction of his circadian rhythms. At 12, he built his own computer, and three years later he launched 4chan. His model was 2chan, an image board that was huge in Japan. Anyone could upload and comment on random art and photos on 2chan, from anime to cars to gore and porn. This means every 4channer gets broadcast at full volume.
The stupid stuff came anyway. Poole created more than 60 message boards, on everything from video games to LGBT. Racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes pervaded the forums. Poole excelled at making 4chan look like the Wild West, but he had no problem playing sheriff.
Whenever the FBI traced bomb threats to 4chan, Poole complied with authorities, which sometimes meant turning over the IP address of the suspected user. Violators were banned. Poole has never had any employees. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news.
Jillian D'Onfro. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Users organized to spread pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages around the web. Due to the anonymity provided by the site, not all the content is so innocent. There have been at least two arrests in cases where users downloaded child pornography from the site.
In one case, it was 4chan moderators who tipped off law enforcement. In November of , a suspected murderer uploaded photos of his victim to 4chan. The anonymity and lax rules of the site have also given rise to some actions that have been controversial or even dangerous.
One user livestreamed a suicide attempt, while others on the message board egged him on. Another user served six months in prison for posting bomb threats to the site. In , Poole announced his retirement from running 4chan and sold the site to Japanese internet entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura for an undisclosed amount.
Poole revealed in that he'd joined Google as a continuation of his work, and in a now-removed post , stated he'd use his "experience from a dozen years of building online communities" and "grow in ways one simply cannot on their own. That sparked speculation that the company hired him to help it revamp its social media ambitions, some of which aimed to compete with Facebook.
Poole jumped between several different roles during his five years. At one point, he reportedly became a partner at Google's in-house start-up incubator, Area , which was just getting off the ground in He then became a product manager in Google's Maps division, according to Crunchbase.
0コメント