It birthed the meme-driven, anonymous-posting internet culture we know and love (or do we?) today, but the story of what happened to moot after he left 4chan is a little bit of a mystery. Christopher Poole founded the messageboard site in 2003 as a 15-year-old under the pseudonym “moot” and it quickly became one of the most influential online communities ever.
4chan allows users to post images and comments anonymously on various boards dedicated to different topics. One of the defining features of the site is its emphasis on anonymity. Users are not required to create accounts or provide any identifying information when posting, which can lead to more candid and unfiltered discussions. Still, there are pitfalls involving harassment, doxxing (revealing personal information about individuals), and illegal activities.
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At its peak, the site played a significant role in internet culture, contributing to the creation and spread of numerous memes, inside jokes, and viral trends. Some notable examples include “Rickrolling,” “LOLcats,” and “Pepe the Frog.”
Through the fracturing of 4chan communities, activist group Anonymous was spawned and some argue was the melting pot for the alt-right and incel culture that got Donald Trump elected as president in 2016. This evolution is explored in Netflix’s The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem. Here’s what happened to moot.
What happened to moot?
What happened to moot? The 4chan founder left the site in 2015 after it was sold to Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man whose 2channel message board in Japan had inspired 4chan’s creation in North America. In his goodbye message broadcast on YouTube Live to more than 40,000 viewers: “This is it for me,” he said. “This is goodbye.”
“The journey has been marked by highs and lows, surprises and disappointments, but ultimately immense satisfaction. I’m humbled to have had the privilege of both founding and presiding over what is easily one of the greatest communities to ever grace the web,” he continued in a post on the front page of the site at the time.
Being at the center of the leak of naked pictures of celebrities hacked from Apple’s iCloud in September, Poole said that was a particularly trying month. “It took a toll,” he said. “We had close to a billion page views that month. I was completely overwhelmed.” He said he “got many a legal nastygram from firms representing the actresses, spent a sh*tload of time on the phone to lawyers” and spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
One user asked if Poole disliked or hated any of the boards on the site. “There are no boards I hate,” he said. “I find it’s very tiring to hate people on the internet. … For people who are angry on the internet,” he added, “I hope that one day you find the beauty in things.”
In an interview with The Verge in 2015, Poole explained where his head was at after selling 4chan. “I don’t really have any plans. A friend of mine has a kind of mantra, “one life change at a time.” In his case, it’s starting a company, having a kid, or moving. But in my case, ending a 12-year chapter is a pretty big life change, and so I’m trying to take it one step at a time,” he said.
“Honestly, I’ve spent the past 12 to 18 months trying to avoid technology like the plague. I still had a responsibility to manage 4chan, but I tried to sort of wind down my obligation to everything else and take a breather from the wonderful world of startups and tech. I spent a lot more time outdoors last year and this year and picked up a lot more offline hobbies like bicycling and cooking. As somebody who pretty much spent 12 to 16 hours a day glued to a computer for the past decade, that’s where most of my hobbies used to lie; I did try to take a big step back from that.”
In 2015, moot revealed that he’d joined tech giant Google as a continuation of his work, and in a now-removed post, explained that he’d use his “experience from a dozen years of building online communities” and “grow in ways one simply cannot on their own.”
He wrote: “When meeting with current and formerGooglers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm. I’m also impressed by Google’s commitment to enabling these same talented people to tackle some of the world’s most interesting and important problems.”
Some employees weren’t happy with the hire, and in a now-removed post, Google+ chief architect Yonatan Zunger defended Poole and promised Google Plus wouldn’t “become a den of infamy” adding that Poole was “going to make something really exciting.”
In 2021, Poole left Google; his last day was April 13th, according to an internal repository viewed by CNBC, which described his last role as a product manager. Reportedly, he jumped between several different roles during his five years, reportedly becoming a partner at Google’s in-house start-up incubator, Area 120, which was just getting off the ground in 2016. He then became a product manager in Google’s Maps division, according to Crunchbase.
The Antisocial Network is available to stream on Netflix.
