Christopher Poole

Christopher Poole (born ), known online as moot, is an American Internet entrepreneur. He was born in New York City. He is best known for founding the anonymous English-language imageboard 4chan in October 2003. He served as the site's head administrator for more than 11 years before stepping down in January 2015. In 2016, he began working for Google. As of 2018, he works in the company's Google Maps division, based in Tokyo.
Career.
4chan.
In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by "Time".
On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the "Paraflows Symposium" in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory"). His talk was published in the academic reader "Mind and Matter: Comparative Approaches towards Complexity" (edited by Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen).
On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California. He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites such as 4chan. Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper "O Estado de S. Paulo" said his inclusion in the conference "indicates that something extraordinary is happening... [4chan] challenges every Internet convention: it is, alone, the antithesis of Google, social networking sites, and blogs."
Canvas.
In 2010, Poole was reported to have raised $625,000 to create a new online enterprise, Canvas. The website opened on January 31, 2011, and featured digitally modified images uploaded by users who are required to self-identify using Facebook Connect. The enterprise ran until January 2014 when Poole announced that Canvas, and its DrawQuest feature, would be going out of business.
Post-4chan.
In January 2015, Poole announced that he would be stepping down as the 4chan administrator. On January 23, he hosted a final Q&amp;A with site users using the /qa/ board and YouTube to livestream. This marked the beginning of his "retirement" from being an administrator and owner of the website after eleven and a half years. He began a process of turning control of the site over to three anonymous 4chan moderators while searching for a buyer for the website. On September 21, 2015, it was announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of the Japanese BBS 2channel, would take over as the site's owner.