Those are the sort of stats that techies and investors salivate over. Yet to this day, Poole has shunned conventional business practices.
He is 4chan’s only official “employee.” If the site is down at 2am, Poole is the person to fix it (chances are, with a cup of tea nearby). If you want to buy ad space on its music imageboard, Poole will walk you through the process. And if you find yourself staring at a nude photo your ex put online or someone swiped from your private Photobucket, Poole is the one who'll handle your takedown request. Poole has worked for free and, on countless occasions, sunk the little money he has earned back into the site. In 2008, when the world’s economy collapsed and the little advertising the site had collected dried up, he asked his mother for $9,000 to keep 4chan afloat. (He paid back the loan just a few weeks ago.)
Why on Earth would someone punish himself like this? Why would he jeopardize himself financially and legally for a website that collects 10 negative headlines for each positive one?
It has to do with this idea of being a father, sure, but it’s also like being a priest. Leading a congregation isn’t about the money. It’s about giving people a place to worship freely. Under the confession booth’s guise of anonymity, they’ll share some deep, demented secrets, shit they’ve never told anyone—but they’ll tell an anonymous forum. Does that make Poole complicit in his community’s crimes and possibly guilty himself? Particularly when it comes to pornography, homophobic slurs, and pranks carried out at the expense of completely innocent people? Maybe. Certainly, it makes him similar to the likes of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tumblr cofounder David Karp, two fellow Internet entrepreneurs who faced the same challenge: When you’ve got millions of users, how do you rein them in? Do you even bother?
The golden age of memes
The tale of 4chan’s humble beginnings is one of the Internet's favorite fireside stories, and it has received its fair share of personal embellishments through the years. Many people still believe Christopher Poole isn’t even his real name (a theory given credence in July 2008 by Time magazine’s Lev Grossman). Using more than a half-dozen news stories from the past 10 years, and fresh information from Poole himself, I tried to get to the truth.
by Fernando Alfonso III, Daily Dot | Read more:
Image: via:
The tale of 4chan’s humble beginnings is one of the Internet's favorite fireside stories, and it has received its fair share of personal embellishments through the years. Many people still believe Christopher Poole isn’t even his real name (a theory given credence in July 2008 by Time magazine’s Lev Grossman). Using more than a half-dozen news stories from the past 10 years, and fresh information from Poole himself, I tried to get to the truth.
by Fernando Alfonso III, Daily Dot | Read more:
Image: via:
