Poole To Zuckerberg: You’re Doing It Wrong

An anonymous reader writes "At South by Southwest Interactive 2011 in Austin, Texas this week, 4chan founder Christopher Poole (also known as 'moot') took the stage to talk about various online issues. One of these was how important anonymity is on the Internet and how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't get it."

Facebook is not for people who seek anonymity

[H0p313ss]

How anybody could not understand that, particularly an internet veteran like moot is rather mind boggling.

Re:4chan and facebook are both wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think 4chan is worthless.

Vulgar, irreverent, mob mentality... Can you honestly say facebook is none of those things? Wouldn't you say that it is all of those things, if you were honest? Is the veneer of "manners" and censorship really so important for its own sake?

Maybe your mom would feel more comfortable in the lie (see what I did there?), but 4chan's /b/ is just as valid a form of human interaction and expression as facebook -- it merely operates by different rules, with different norms, and a different history. To deny that 4chan is important as a feature of the human condition is to deny that anyone has a mental life: the life that we don't blurt out in public for fear of social repercussions. Nevertheless, this aspect of humans does still exist, and you won't make it disappear just because you get rid of 4chan and other anonymous modes of communication. Repression makes things worse, never better.

You do need both -- and you can't assert that 4chan is "worthless" and be self-consistent. Facebook, in all its corporate data-farm glory, is no more legitimately "good" no matter how much less child porn, no matter how much less gore, no matter how popular it is, and no matter how wealthy its owners.

You're a a soft-skulled, sophomoric, self-righteous hypocrite. It doesn't say anything good about /. that you were modded up (why expect an enlightened, objective moderation response from the anonymous internet, though).

Still. Parent remains profoundly inane.

Re:Useful info

[Anonymous Coward]

No. 4chan takes $85,000 in ads per year just to break even [imageshack.us]. Canv.as' $650,000 of investors' money can hardly be counted to his personal wealth either. If he has other money, he hasn't let 4chan know.