In April 2009, Poole was voted the most influential person of 2008 with 16,794,368 votes by an open Internet poll conducted by Time, beating out the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Oprah Winfrey. Poole established 4chan on October 1, 2003, using translated source code from 2chan, and sought to combine the anime culture on 2chan with the community on Something Awful.

In 2009, The Washington Post reported that Poole had attended Virginia Commonwealth University for a few semesters before dropping out, and that he was living with his mother while trying to figure out how to monetize 4chan. In a MIT Technology Review piece entitled 'Radical Opacity', Poole was described as being the antithesis of Mark Zuckerberg while Zuckerberg is outspoken towards his advocacy for a transparent Internet, Poole advocates for a more opaque Internet. Poole believes in anonymity on the Internet, and spoke at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California, about the value of the concept.

Several journalists noted that the name 'Christopher Poole' could be a pseudonym itself, including Lev Grossman of Time and Monica Hesse of The Washington Post. Until 2008, when his name was revealed in The Wall Street Journal, Poole took great lengths to protect his identity, going under the pseudonym of Robert 'Bob' Bopkins in real life and as moot online. As a teenager, he was a member of the Something Awful forum, and frequented the anonymous Japanese textboard 2channel and its offshoot 2chan. Poole was born in 1988 and grew up in New York City. Poole was hired by Google in 2016 to work on the Google+ social network and as a product manager. He also founded the online community Canvas, active from 2011 to 2014. He founded the anonymous English-language imageboard 4chan in October 2003, when he was still a teenager he served as the site's head administrator until January 2015. 1988 ), also known online as moot, is an American internet entrepreneur and developer. Virginia Commonwealth University (no degree)įounder and former head administrator of 4chanĬhristopher Poole (born c.

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