Christopher "moot" Poole, Founder of 4chan doing an AMA on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Christopher "moot" Poole, Founder of 4chan doing an AMA on Reddit

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58 pointspathik26 comments

Wow, he's had a reddit account for 5 years. That's pretty insane, especially since reddit wasn't big at all in those days. It's funny that people keep commenting that reddit's becoming 4chan, when in fact moot was probably one of the first redditors.

He doesn't confirm it anywhere, it's possible (and likely maybe?) that the admins noticed the account "moot" was inactive and gave it to him, they were the ones who co-ordinated this, so it makes sense they would give it to him.

If you were really going to do that, you almost certainly would clear the metadata for the username first (or like, attach the username to a different underlying "account").

His first post/comment was that thread though (unless he deleted everything previous to it).

Probably best to wait a few hours, right now he has answered only a few questions.

Unless you have a question of your own.

Interesting. His responses are far more down-to-earth than I would have expected them to be. One funny comment:

   > I'm not sure where else people meet women
   Spoken like a true /b/tard.

Q: How many people does 4chan employ?

A: None. It's just me, a volunteer part-time developer, and a handful of volunteer moderators and janitors. The volunteers all do an incredible job, and don't get nearly enough credit for their hard work. Hats off to them!

That reminded me of several extended IM logs between moot and a server admin/scripter. Suffice it to say that they both come out sounding like total douchebags and it's difficult to tell who you'd dread working with more. The moral of the story is that he'd be way better off paying his volunteers and acting like a boss.

It's quite long and gets somewhat tedious, once you get the jist it's not really worth stick with. But it is interesting to get a peek inside the mind of a new founder:

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Talk:Moot#thoughts_on_image...

(note that page is SFW, but I wouldn't go to the main moot page unless 'shopped gay porn is cool with you)

> The moral of the story is that he'd be way better off paying his volunteers and acting like a boss.

How do you define "better off"? Do you run a site as popular as 4chan? moot isn't trying to make money or be a kickass, cool, boss. He's just having fun. I think it's a bit presumptuous of you to say you know what's best for moot. 4chan has been running smoothly for years and is extremely popular.

I guess I should have said my takeaway is, instead of the moral of the story. I struggled for what I wanted to write there. If bickering for hours with your dev staff is doing what he wants and having fun then more power to him, but something tells me he'll be managing things differently at canv.as.

Worth noting the conversation you're referencing was from six years ago when I was 17. A lot has changed since then!

Point taken. I know I'm sure glad things from when I was 17 aren't still on the Internet. I had no idea it was that old, I first read it a month ago. Good luck with your new endeavors.

Thank you!

I'm sure Chris has matured a lot in the past few years, and I'm sure he's treating canvas in a very different manner. Does it do good to rehash this old drama?

canv.as --> facebook connect --> skip

Some of his answers cover this concern (http://www.reddit.com/user/moot):

"We're using it during the beta period to handle invites and authenticate users (make sure they're real people)."

"As we've said before, Facebook Connect on Canvas is temporary. We're only planning to use it for the private beta period, and hope to see you on the site once we're out of beta. Thanks for bearing with us!"

+1. Thanks Britta!

I didn't want to be one to pester in his AMA but I still have no clue about what he's up to with canv.as. Aside from providing a meeting place to internet vigilantes and meme spammers, his track record isn't that stellar in either technology or monetizations. I'm also unable to overlook the recent developments in the image-sharing space with Path and Color valued into the tens of millions with anywhere from $11M to $41M cash on hand, making his $625K investment seem more like a pittance than a serious attempt at making a run at the current front-runner.

The pussy-footing surrounding his handling of this canv.as thing is unbecoming.

As far as I'm aware 4chan has not needed $40M to provide a more useful and socially relevant service than Color or whatever Path is. Don't people just use Twitpic anyway? Or Instagram if their photos are too boring without being colored brown.

My pictures aren't boring. I use the Gotham filter. Also, nobody needs $41M to provide anything more useful or socially relevant if one is to believe that investors were taking a stake in the future potential of the Color team vs. its current offering.

The fact remains that Mr. Poole has been unable to monetize his current user base on the seven-year old 4chan, build a medium-term scalable solution, attract talent or serious investment nor can he be arsed to explain just what exactly canv.as is and why we should take him seriously. Moot aside, I think I'll adopt the position stated in his AMA/recruitment pitch:

"Yes, instead of treating him like the creator of 4chan, let's treat him like the developer of a new website in closed beta that none of us have used. That will be fascinating."

It might sound old school, but we're waiting until we can show success with a seed round before raising an A or B round!

To be honest, I hope you're able to monetize soon so you won't have to go looking for an A round, never mind a B because if you're serious you won't be there any more at that point. Also tired of ichc-type people making money of 4chan OC, so anyways, good luck.

SACRILEGE

I can't believe people still think his name is Christopher Poole. This has got to be the longest-running joke turned gospel on the Internet. Either that, or that thing about Glen Beck killing and raping a young girl in 1990, except people actually _know_/tounge-in-cheek that one.

Is he trolling the courts as well? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/08/11/prose...

I've seen his driver's licence.

I also have a picture of him walking my dog.

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