Chris "Moot" Poole, the person behind the controversial online community known as 4chan before finally joining Google back in 2016, has officially left the search engine giant after he jumped around to several groups within the company itself. Poole's last day working at Google was back in April 13, according to a certain internal repository.
Christopher Moot Poole
According to the story coming from CNBC, Poole's last role was that of product manager. The reason behind Poole's exit is still unknown. Poole also did not give any response to multiple requests made by CNBC for a comment. Google, however, confirmed that Poole is currently no longer an employee at the company.
Poole, who often goes by the popular moniker "Moot," previously founded 4chan back in 2003 at just 15 years old. It reportedly grew into one of the top influential but also very controversial online communities as of today. Rolling Stones even called him a boy-genius and referred to him as Mark Zuckerberg of the whole online underground.
Hiroyuki Nishimura: 4chan
4chan reportedly became an early internet haven for people practicing free speech online. Over time, however, 4chan faced heavy criticism for hosting obscene imagery, hackers, harassment, and even leaked information, namely about women and even minority groups. 4chan even became a target of a number of lawsuits and even FBI subpoenas for certain threats of violence that were posted to the site.
Back in 2015, Poole took it to Twitter to announce his retirement from running 4chan and even sold the site to a certain Japanese internet entrepreneur by the name of Hiroyuki Nishimura for an amount that remains undisclosed. Poole then revealed back in 2016 that he would be joining Google as a continuation of his own work.
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What happened to Christopher Poole?
Poole reportedly joined Google as product manager in the whole photos and streams unit. He reportedly oversaw social networking efforts working under VP Bradley Horowitz during that time, according to TechCrunch. This reportedly sparked wide speculation that the company had hired him in order to revamp its own social media ambitions. A few claims even noted that the company wanted to compete with Facebook.
Poole had reportedly jumped between a number of different roles during the course of five years. At a certain point, he even reportedly became an official partner at Google's very own in-house start-up incubator known as Area 120, which was just basically getting off the ground back in 2016. He had also become a product manager working for Google's Maps division, according to the article by Crunchbase.
A number of employees and industry workers all criticized the hiring of Poole, since Google reportedly made public commitments when it came to diversity and even viewed the executives' enthusiasm regarding Poole's hiring as "tone deaf." Google+'s Yonatan Zunger, chief architect, reportedly wrote a post that defending Poole and even promising that Google Plus won't become what was called a "den of infamy" noting Poole was going to make something particularly exciting.
Related Article: Feds Looking Into 4Chan Thread Potentially Tied To Oregon College Shooting
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
