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Comment by ank_the_elder | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide if this is a stroke of genius or one of the stupidest things Google has ever done.

The title is misleading, there hasn't been any statement about what he's going to be working on.

The way I see it Poole is just a good programmer who has experience working with a large user base. I think if you ignore the controversy over his user base, he's a good addition to any engineering team.

I put my money on the former. 4chan is... itself. But it is definitely a vibrant community. And Poole himself has some thoughtful, unique insight into what makes a community vibrant and what kills it.

Maybe. Creating successful online communities has a huge luck element to it. I don't think there's anyone who can reliably create new online communities out of nothing.

Indeed. That, and timing. It seems like Google with all its money and talent and unbeatable built in audience, pushed so hard and still couldn't get it done with Google+, it'll be interesting if they can get it done now.

It's a bit hard to 'lurk' into a theme related community in Google+.

Everything is too personal, too related to a particular individual and in that sense there are no communities, only egos.

Would you mind elaborating on his insight into online communities? I'd love to read his perspective in depth

That's an impressively on-topic username you've got there.

His TED talk, for one: http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...

Can't be worse than when they hired Kevin Rose.

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