Oh, how times change. Christopher “moot” Poole, who founded notorious Internet humour imageboard/cesspool 4chan (and recently pawned it off to Japanese entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura), has announced via a blog post that he has joined the team at Google. The hire was based on his “dozen years experience managing online communities.”
4chan was a huge influence on Internet culture throughout the 2000s – and remains so, to a lesser extent – spawning many of the memes and cultural tidbits that we now take for granted LOLcats and Rickrolling, as two heinous examples, found their original home in the hallowed halls of 4chan.
Suffice to say this man has had a fairly substantial cultural influence.
It’s unknown what role Poole will be taking at the Goog, but many are speculating that he’s turning his talent and knack for understanding how people make and share images to Google’s Photos platform, which doesn’t get a whole lot of love at the moment. This is backed up by the fact that Googlers in the Photos team welcomed him on Twitter.
You may have seen the news (https://t.co/jwjOBocqJk) from @moot. Thrilled he’s joining the team! Welcome Chris!
— Bradley Horowitz (@elatable) March 7, 2016
The centre of internet culture might have moved over to Reddit, but Poole is still one of its heavyweights. Let’s see if he can work his magic on Google – and maybe give any human being on Earth a compelling reason to use Google+.
Either way, maybe he can chat with the team over at Google Analytics and get his old bill sorted out, no?
.@Google wants @4chan to pay $150,000 per year to continue to use @GoogleAnalytics. Seriously? pic.twitter.com/vFYTQYLtXD
— moot (@moot) May 28, 2014
Source: The Next Web
Photo: Getty / Johannes Simon
