I had never heard of 4Chan until a few days ago. Any reactions to it, either specifically or as a cultural barometer?

24 Later, on July 10, Grossman admitted that there was an outside chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, rather an obscure reference to a 4chan inside joke. 38 The Washington Post concurred that "Christopher Poole" could be "all a big hoax, a 'gotcha'. It would be just what you'd expect from the creator of 4chan."25 In March 2009, Time backpedaled somewhat on the issue by placing the moot persona on the 2009 Time 100 finalists list.

Prior to the Wall Street Journal and Time interviews, Poole deliberately kept his real identity separate from 4chan. He told Grossman "my personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between."24 As moot, he has spoken at conferences at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 24 A 2008 article in The Observer had him down as "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of", though he has since been described in more limited terms such as "benefactor".

In February 2009, The Washington Post reported that Poole had attended Virginia Commonwealth University for a few semesters before dropping out. It reported that Christopher Poole was living with his mother while looking for a way to make money from owning 4chan. In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine.

42 The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote. 434445 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. 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."). On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California. 4950 He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites like Facebook and Twitter and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites like 4chan.

In 2010, Poole was reported to have raised $625,000 to create a new online enterprise, called "Canvas". 1153 The website opened on January 31, 2011, and features digitally modified images uploaded by users who are required to self-identify using Facebook Connect.