During the Q&A, Poole answered a question from one of the masked employees. After his answer, he asked, "Did that help, Steve?" Shocked, and no doubt a bit intimidated, the employee asked how Poole knew his name. His answer: "Well, I read your name on the badge clipped to your belt."
Poole was smart and thoughtful and I was quite impressed (not just with his eye for detail). Not surprised he lasted so long at Google.
https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_moot_poole_the_case_fo...
Is it hard to 'last' at google? I have never gotten that impression.
e.g. if nobody ever leaves the company, but you always double the number of employees every year by very aggressive hiring, the average tenure according to that metric is 1 year.
"Rest and Vest" is a thing.
I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. It's anonymous so people around the world can express themselves - even in a way I might find horrifying - and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society.
It's anonymous but your national flag is automatically assigned, and if you hide this or use a "meme flag' like a pirate flag, you will be criticized and ignored as a likely troll, trying a "false flag" operation.
4chan/pol/ is interesting, I don't know about the other boards since I don't visit them.
- Anti-vax
- Anti-gay parents
- Goose
- Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die"
- Praising George Floyd mural vandalism
- Anti-transgender
- Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate
- Praising 'national rape day'
- Anti-Islam
- Anti-race mixing
- Illuminati
- Celebrating police shooting blacks
- British royals news
- Anti-mask, anti-Biden
- Silver
- Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race
Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
Aside from the fact that you pretty much took the bait with /pol/ there, you should take a look at their irl meetups and compare them to average reddit meetups. You would be wildly surprised by how non-white the average 4chan meetups are.
It's not that I'm a 'snowflake' or 'I don't understand chan humor', what they're doing is actually fucked up and dangerous even if they justify it as 'trolling' or 'irony' that should be ignored.
There is nothing normal about that boards pre-occupation with calling for racial extermination. I don't give a damn if they're posting that 'ironically', there is nothing normal about that type of constant, obsessive 'joking' about mass murder behavior to that degree, and repeating those things so much can lead to people truly becoming obsessed with those ideas, then justifying and actually carrying those actions out (like the Christchurch racial terror attack).
And why would I judge an online community based on the offline actions of a very small sub population?
Should I be impressed that non-white people also go there to spew hatred unrelated to white nationalism?
Shibboleths exist to exclude people outside the subculture stereotype - and a good way of doing that is to be offensive. Some subcultures desire to remain as subcultures.
Part of why shibboleths work is because we as a species tend to stop engaging rationally the moment we feel attacked - we switch to being defensive and actually entrench our own values further.
The 4chan shibboleth attacks everyone. No matter who you are or how you identify you're going to be debased and mocked openly - that's kind of the point.
I see plenty of posts attacking and calling for the killing and complete extermination of non-Whites, Jews, homosexuals, and women all over the place but 0 posts attacking straight white males for being straight white males.
Gee, I wonder why that is? I really wonder who is posting all these white nationalist talking points, it's truly a mystery. Could be anyone.
I honestly don't know the answer to complex questions such as "should this be allowed" or things like that, I'm just glad I can discuss other things in peace and know that political discussion elsewhere can be reported and will be deleted, or even have the user banned.
Yet when people mention that they visit 4chan, they talk about the 'very clever people posting there'. It's like mentioning that you regularly go paddling in your local river in order to collect tiny nuggets of gold, without mentioning that your local river is a flow of excrement, nuclear waste, and malignant psychopaths.
very clever people posting there
Nobody denies the extreme cesspool-like aspects of some corners of 4chan.
The one thing you can uncontroversially say is that 4chan is diverse. It's almost like reddit, where each subreddit has its own distinct culture, mods, etc.
I would say that overall, 4ch does attract... a pretty clever crowd. Almost everything there is layer upon layer upon layer of self-reference and iteration. Meta on top of meta on top of meta. Not saying you have to be a genius to "get it" but I don't see a dummy enjoying it.
I'm also saying this as somebody who doesn't particularly like the place. I grew out of that shock humor stuff about two decades ago.
This is very strictly enforced in practice, one doesn't see any nudity or gore remain up on those boards for more than ten minutes before a janitor catches it.
Pornography is allowed on all boards that aren't designated “safe for work”, but gore is only allowed on a very select few.
/pol/ is a U.S.A. board that takes a firm single side in the U.S.A. culture war.
Most 4chan boards are largely outside of it and the hatred one sees there does not align with any of the two factions in the U.S.A. culture war and the hatred that flows is indeed very diverse in that sense.
I have never seen this kind of content on Twitter or Facebook, in my own feeds or in trending topics. I would have to actively look. I have however seen a ton of real diverse content from a diverse group of people. This is a lie that where the intent is to downplay the white supremacist content.
Communities with no moderation at all sans removing child porn and copyrighted content (to avoid getting v8 by the feds) will always be overtaken sooner or later by the content you just listed because this sort of stuff gets driven out of communities that care about at least some decency. The exception proving the rule is r/worldpolitics, which has no rules per se but there's enough porn to drown out hate speech.
eventually all not heavily moderated communities
will suffer their version of Eternal September.
Unfortunately, it's hard to cite 4chan as an example when talking about the merits of unrestricted free speech vs. moderation/curation since most people think it was always that bad.
You would be surprised.
The bait is this silly narrative that the reason they talk in depth and at length everyday about exterminating non-Whites is because it's elaborate "trolling" to own the libs, until they start sprinkling in enough "justification" and repetition to radicalize you into becoming a white supremacists.
Sadly many young men are taking the bait and becoming radicalized online.
It's true in that yes they are agitators and trolls.
But it's false in that the line between unserious troll and serious activist was blurred or erased long ago, and most recently with Trump being elected president.
It's no longer possible to distinguish between unserious troll attempt and serious statement when such a large audience subscribes to the trolling as their actual reality.
Is this something you have considered?
4chan is the same. They accept anyone from all over the world. The majority of posters are foreign. If you disagree with their narrative or political ideals, they insult you and tell you to leave. Except on 4chan you don't get banned or your life ruined for disagreeing. It's an actual safe space for ideas.
It's hilarious how similar they are.
Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me.
And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons.
Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population.
It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions.
I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).
All of 4chan, but especially /b/, is built around "haha just kidding ... unless", ridiculing people for getting offended while "trolling" with the most nefarious opinions and defending them "as a joke". This escalated with /pol/ which at some point became mask-off unironically white supremacist.
This is not just about 4chan being too white and too male and everybody self-identifying as NEET (whether as a joke or in earnest). The perpetual "ironic" regurgitation of racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic talking points attracted Nazis because it allowed them to hide in plain sight and they very successfully used it as part of their pipeline by getting people to repeat their jokes until they stopped laughing.
There are a lot of people on 4chan from non-European countries. I've seen vile anti-semitism expressed by someone with a Saudi flag. It's not uncommon.
Considering that we know for a fact that you don't know the ages, genders, nationality, or races of the people with these beliefs, and can only see their beliefs posted anonymously on 4chan, and then you think you have enough information to extrapolate that these people must be white, male, and young, says a lot more about YOUR prejudices than the people on 4chan, quite frankly.
You see hate and just assume the hateful are the gender, race, and age, that you perceive to be the enemy.
I'm sure there are other races posting racist things there as well, but I said disproportionately young white males tend to post white nationalist talking points, which I stand by and this shouldn't offend anyone.
I am in no way implying most white males are white supremacists. I'm saying most white supremacists are white males which is an uncontroversial obvious statement that I stand by.
You cannot convince me that most white nationalists are non-white, that's a silly deflection.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/975/547/c10...
Always fascinating how they refer to themselves.
You have n-words.
Then potato n-words for the irish (and lithuatians)
Pasta n-words for italians
Bongs for the british
Leafs for canadians
Burgers and Amerimutts
Toothpaste for the netherlands
Gypsy for hungarians and romanians (who are at a perpetual shitposting war against each other)
Hohols for the ukranians
Finngolians
The usual suspects for anyone of any asian country, extra special hate towards the chinese and Xi's internet army.
and on and on
No matter what nation of the world you are from, they will find an insult for you. It's endearing in a way really.
Oh and also there's someone shitposting from a research facility in Antarctica.
That you have to blank that out and none of the others, should tell you everything you need to know about how equal or "endearing" this is.
Bongs, Leafs, Burgers... This is all white supremacy no matter how someone tries to reframe it.
There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.
Even if it would be the worst game in the world. Cause the really normal response to and small game you don't like is to not play it and maybe write a bad review. Not what happened.
As usual, it isn't the crime, it's the coverup that gets you, and GamerGate was a great example of that.
Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists.
I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
I almost never have. On /lit/, maybe, but on /pol/ either you get no actual engagement, all the serious replies are drowned by spam and the thread necros, or one of the argumentators when called out simply stops replying or switches to shitposting.
You can sometimes have a good argument to completion, but it's very rare. Unless the argument is something the 4chan hive finds uncontroversial or is empathetic to.
Always reminds me of the classic 1978 Johnny Rotten interview BBC interview where he calls out Jimmy Savile. (Video features a gross Piers Morgan pretending like he never heard about Savile.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0
We don't need the white supremacy, but we as a society do need the crass asshole who's not afraid to knock down the elites by a peg or two. (And the John Stewart "jesters" of the world do not count.)
I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/
for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a
decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign
in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the
site for it. I don't think Google would have
hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality.
Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit.
Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.
Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.
That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?
Especially when you consider how anonymous and the occupy movements were all the rage among woke leftists a few years back, and they originated from 4chan.
People don’t spend 9 days creating the perfect YTMND thing because they can spend that time on Instagram, YouTube or whatever in pursuit of enough fame to create a career out of it.
The only reason we still have so many memes and so many (less than an A4 page) blog posts is because of how little effort it requires with modern tech.
I think 4chan is actually one of the places that has changed the least. I mean, /b/ without talented users is just 100% shit instead of only being 99% shit, but /tg/ is exactly the way I left it a decade ago.
Boards have increasingly enacted rules to cater to advertisers as they found out that simple word filters to stop “bad words” from being mentioned improve their advertisement revenue.
I remember Reddit when the purpose of the voting system was encouraging a laid-back approach by moderators on the logic that objectionable content would be downvoted, and hidden, so that those who did not wish to see it could ignore it, but that's long gone now, and moderators are highly zealous and on top of that one has the hivemind voting system to deal with.
Internet indeed became a pursuit of profit, rather than memes for fun.
And indeed 4chan never bowed to advertisers and consequently actually is not that profitable despite being one of the largest websites.
The culture on, say, IRC channels which do not rely on advertisement is very different from on websites that do and typically enforce various language filters.
Back then we cheered when "legit" tech appreciated those of us from the backwater meme-world by hiring our "leader". Now it seems like tons of people get into things with that as the goal.
This is something I've been kind of depressed about lately. I grew up with the internet of the early 2000s, through the blog boom and the early days of YouTube. I used RSS, and was into things like Creative Commons and GPL. Free culture stuff. We had a wealth of cool things that people were making just because they wanted to, and crass commercial motive was hardly something that crossed peoples' mind. Just as app stores killed free web games (far more than the demise of Flash), the growing commercialization of the Web has eroded the wonderful mashup culture that permeated it.
I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I got turned onto actually listening to Hatsune Miku music, and it's a terrific example of what once was: remixing, memetic evolution and building something bigger collaboratively. (Miku has been vaguely on my radar all along, but I never bothered to give the stuff a fair chance until I realized a Wagakki Band song I liked was a cover of one of the most popular vocaloid songs, Senbonzakura.)
* The Leakspin meme was a thing in the early 2000s, combining the Finnish folk song Ievan Polkka with a random anime clip. That was all over the place back then, and I wasn't even a 4chan user.
* Some guy in Japan used the relatively new synth voice bank VC01 Hatsune Miku to release a sort of cover of Ievan Polkka, including a silly redrawing of the box art, which blew up on the Japanese streaming site Niconico and later made it onto YouTube. Which has lead to the character being associated with leaks/spring onions. [1]
* Someone else made the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" with the same voice, which was later covered with another synth voice and then paired with a now famous animation of a pop tart cat. [2]
* The growing "memetic velocity" surrounding a character derived from a synth voice and the anime art on the box it came in resulted in an absolutely fascinating music scene where synth artists bill themselves as producers and give a performance credit to the synth, releasing their amateur music for free on video sites (and sometimes getting album deals as they grew in popularity). And eventually you get a worldwide phenomenon with global tours of a hologram performing with a live band, drawing from thousands of songs and visual artwork created by whoever wants to contribute. A "wiki celebrity," so to speak.
Kind of random, I guess, but reading up on how that all connects (and was going on in the background of related memes that I was aware of) has kind of restored my faith in the Internet. I think that if you get enough creative people together, you're going to end up with some cool stuff. The question remains, though...would it happen today? (And if not, what do we need to torch to fix it?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku#Cultural_impact
Actually we should already have changed it - that's standard practice when one article cribs from another. But I missed it in this case.
They make it sound like he barely managed to get any stock. That's like saying, "person worked at X for 1 year, just long enough to get 1 year's salary." Well, yeah, but if they left in 11 months they'd get 11 months salary. It's not like if Poole left at 1 year or 4 years or anything in between he would have left with anything different proportionally to his tenure.
What an odd article.
Meanwhile I've been at 4 startups, from seed to Series B . I just get bored so easy.. after 3 or so years I NEED a change. Or maybe is because startups dont care about w/l balance and drain you until you quit.
I've never worked anywhere where people were much use before 2-3 years in harness. Too much domain knowledge maybe.
A lot of the time it may be warranted. But just as often, like in this article, it definitely is not.
I mean imagine if Facebook had the option to be anonymous somehow on their platform and called everyone Unnamed who hadn't finished their registration or didn't want to.
You'd see Unnamed responsible for nation-state sponsored terrorism and manipulating the votes of other countries. What a joke.
Eventually they moved beyond fun, simple little social causes to more seriously disruptive and economically/politically dangerous stuff, and at that point, not surprisingly, the alphabet agencies slipped in and broke up the party.
DDoS attacks as well as actual hacks were performed in the name of 'Anonymous', and at the time of the Stratfor hack, various LulzSec members were already in their late twenties...
I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).
Isn't that hackernews
It's just reddit for people who hate
It's pretty interesting, because as long as I've been conscious on the Internet it's always been posed as an 'inaccessible cult.' Probably due to all the inside jokes, I guess?
First time you go there is a Chaotic mess that feels you went back to 90's.
Then in shock you start to see the subs like /pol/ then you click and bam More chaos.
Threads and threads you are more lost.
Then you click catalog and set order Reply-by-count.
Then it does start to make sense. You read people talking in two ways. On the text and on the image attached.
It is full-duplex com.
In the 90's I used to read my Mainstream media + Pravda (the other side) jornal.
Now I read the local MSM and 4chan (the other side ) jornal.
You gotta ask yourself "by whom?". Actual users of the site, people having serious discussions about the site, writers of pop articles aimed at non-users of the site, or someone else?
Even then, you have this conflation of /b/ (or I guess these days /pol/) and 4chan at large. Some communities are more welcoming than others.
That's true on a technical level only. But culture matters.
Attitudes like yours were why 4chan was such a surprise to the rest of us. The culture that we all thought was just "ironic" and "edgy" with its casual racism turned out to be... kinda actually racist when right wingers decided to weaponize xenophobia and bigotry. The groupthink of a bunch of almost-exclusively-male incels turned out to be hiding genuine misogyny once they had an enemy to point themselves at in gamergate.
Culture matters. Being an "open website" just describes how it happens, not why.
Edit- it had live (think chat room) but threaded comments and was anonymous (temporary, randomized identites)
I haven't had the heart to completely decommission it yet so I've stood it back up so you can see what I am talking about .
Anonymous posting prevents weird popularity cliches from taking over, and post linking via ID allows multiple conversations to flow much smoother than reddit's tree-structured comments. I'd also say that sequential ranking over popularity upvote would prevent as many low-effort hot takes/jokes from always being at the top of each thread, but I'm practice that doesn't really seem to play out like it should.
To you and I, maybe! But even arstechnica's readership may not be aware of all this stuff.
Media reporting on internet communities, or places that I physically live in that I've seen are invariably very inaccurate.
Propaganda to teach that anything free is dirty/salacious to keep people in their walled gardens.
There was an article in Motherboard[1] how /pol/ is being idealogically driven due to moderation choices. I don't believe moot would have allowed such an ideologically driven moderation changes to continue for so long. (IIRC, moot had deleted /pol/ twice, once as /n/ which he removed for being too much like stormfront).
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
Yes. This is an extraordinary business case for strategic HCM discussions.
I never try to take for granted when I'm involved in artists' spaces, FOSS projects, hacker spaces, etc. The point is to continue a cycle of learning and contributing back, not consume until all the resources are sucked dry...
On the one hand, no one would blame him for just continuing to drift off into obscurity. On the other, he's a smart guy, and smart guys tend to be restless. Add to this that the hurricane of anti-trust lawsuits happening right now may result in a re-shuffling of the deck when it comes to the landscape of the web in a few years, and there's some real potential for new projects on the world-wide information superhighway, in a way there hasn't been in some time.
Just want to say you did a good job, thanks for being you and doing your thing. I know it's been tough and all, so thanks for the hard work.
Dunno about google maps though, that seemed to have taken a dive since ~2013. Maybe look into biotech and that jazz, it needs people like you.
Still, be good to see what you're doing next. Keep up that hard work and effort, it shows.
like literally what is the point of this to lead people to talk about unrelated aspects of 4chan and maybe how that influenced his time at Google
but the article describes an extremely normal and extremely extended time at Google
what...?
It is a smart hire in that aspect, but Google+ was going to be an also-ran and I don't think M00t alone could save it.
It was really just copied from a formula that was long popular in Japan, and being the first it became the biggest.
An interesting matter is that Lainchan follows largely the same formula and is very civil in comparison, despite not enforcing it, perhaps because it's main focus is technology and not entertainment.
Lol such a dishonest representation of FANG employment. Well above average (2 years) a year past the vesting cliff, and about average in terms of team switches
Typically there’s also a ‘Cliff’ at the start - a period during which no options are available to you.
addendum: the ‘standard’ Silicon Valley stock option deal is: 4 year vest, 1 year cliff.
Eg: first 12 months, no options
Day 1 of 13th month - 25% of your options are available to you
Then the rest of the 3 years vest at a regular pace with the remaining 75% of your options dropping on a monthly cadence
The exception being Amazon who basically give you nothing for 2 years and then ramp up significantly.
This helps them reduce compensation during hard times. Salaries are very sticky; it’s hard to cut salaries. So they offer RSU comp because it’s tied to stock price. When the company is doing poorly, they can pay less. But it also lets the pay high compensation and retain long term talent.
In addition to the initial grant at year 2 during your review some employees get more shares on top of the initial grant(that vest over a certain time frame, usually 2-4 years), these are called stacking RSU grants and its why people stay at FANG companies a long time as these grants stack higher and higher all the while your career progresses and the company stock goes higher.
That spin had so much torque I'm surprised the article stayed motionless.
This is sort of misleading. The 2 year quote often thrown around is a measure of the average tenure of current employees at the company, not a measure of the average tenure of people leaving.
I like to note that a company with exponential growth (and all of the major tech firms, excepting perhaps microsoft since it's been around longer count here) can have a seemingly low tenure by that first metric even if no one has ever left the company.
How he avoid cancel culture is beyond me