Google hires 4chan founder Christopher Poole

4chan founder Chris ‘moot’ Poole joins Google. It’s not entirely clear what role he’ll be taking there, but he was welcomed by Bradley Horowitz, who works at Google for services such as photos and streams.

On his blog, Poole writes that he looks forward to sharing his experience building online communities with Google. He adds that he is impressed with the fact that Google empowers its employees to solve the most interesting and important issues in the world. Variety and Ars Technica assume that Poole will use his talents to breathe new life into Google+.

Poole, better known by his “moot” alias, founded 4chan in 2003 as an image-sharing forum. In the years that followed, it grew into a popular site, thanks in part to the anonymity enjoyed by its users. As a result, 4chan regularly appeared negatively in the news, be it about child pornography, the hacker collective ‘Anonymous’ or the leaking of nude photos of famous Americans, among others.

‘Moot’ retired as administrator of 4chan in early 2015. The site had then generated 42 billion page views since its inception, with approximately 1.2 million visitors per day. In September 2015, news came out that he had sold the site to Japanese Hiroyuki Nishimura, who founded 4chan example 2channel.

Tweet from Horowitz in response to Poole’s blog post