Sounds like a naive dude who was in the right place at the right time to do a good job implementing a bad idea, refuse to admit it, and cause a great deal of trouble for the entire world and still fail up into a cushy high paying job in one of the most rarified industries. Damn… that poor poor man. It must have been so hard.
10 Likes
The people who make the mistake, if they are truly sorry, need to abdicate control over forgiveness.
People can hold a person in contempt for the rest of their lives if they want to. That’s just their autonomy.
8 Likes
Exactly. I’ve said this elsewhere on BB, but I’m not in favor of forgiveness without atonement.
I don’t mind it at all. He’s had five years to squirrel away his ill-gotten gains. Plenty of other people who are members of the groups he had a hand in oppressing don’t have the luxury of failing upwards through life. Maybe he’ll gain some empathy for folks who aren’t easily hired by tech firms because of their gender, ethnicity, age, or other reasons unrelated to skills and qualifications.
The main thing that would convince me he should’ve kept that job is proof he’d taken an active role in getting members of marginalized groups hired during his tenure. Given we’re talking about Google, that’s unlikely. Failing that, proof that he’s donated a significant portion of his salary to worthy causes (ones in line with righting his past wrongs) would be an acceptable substitute.
I’ll be sure to save this for future reference when the next person comes along wondering what proven racists, misogynists, and their enablers could possibly do to redeem themselves. It’s not hard to come up with solutions.
Healthy for whom? This guy and his supporters? How 'bout no. Demanding or suggesting everyone should just forget about, overlook, or get over harmful actions is exactly how the perpetrators keep repeating and getting away with that shit. That’s really unhealthy for the folks who’ve been harmed - and I’m more concerned about them and their ability to live their lives.
15 Likes
Right. It doesn’t really matter if he made money. It was an awful place that he literally owned for a very long time. If I were hiring and I knew about his history I would at the very least expect him to fully and publicly disown and reject 4chan and what it became before considering him. As far as I can tell he has never owned up to the monstrousness of the thing he created.
Yes there needs to be a place for anonymity on the internet. But that is a very different thing than saying that there needs to be a place for anonymity and that every anonymous person should feel free to express whatever their id dictates.
2 Likes
It’s not my job to dole out punishment or to have all the answers to life’s ills… especially those that I did not participate in or contribute to. Maybe do a little creative thinking on your own, since you yourself spend time there and contributed to it.
But…
8 Likes
I’m sorry, just to be clear, he hosted child sex abuse pictures on his site for a long, LONG, LONG time and knew that to be wrong, but claimed he didn’t want to remove them because of freeze peach.
Are you defending someone who is okay with that? Because I can gauranatee you I at 15 and most other 15 year olds ever would say that is horribly wrong. Get out of here with the whole “But everyone makes mistakes.”
This guy at 15 knew what he was doing. He could have easily stopped it. He didn’t, and continued not stopping it until he finally started trying to sell the place. Then, suddenly, he realized it was wrong. Gimme a break.
11 Likes
Brennan has spent some effort trying to see that 8chan/8kun stays dead, but a lot of that seems to be personal vendetta against the Watkins. I can’t be bothered to look at the timeline of when he suddenly noticed that it was evil, verses all the evil that happened before then.
2 Likes
And then after they cancelled his project, he basically did nothing but hold on until precisely the moment his millions vested in his signing options. Instead of just getting let go like happens to other googlers who don’t really find homes elsewhere.
1 Like
Bullshit. He realized he created a monster. At that point you shut it down or you get it the resources it needs and make sure they work, because otherwise you are releasing that monster to the world. He chose option 3, get a payout and avoid responsibility.
There should be consequences for that choice, including no corporation with any moral standard ever hiring him. It’s not like he was forced to sell or something, he made the choice. Full stop.
But that’s not what happened - it was toxic. He left anyway because preserving the ideals of /b/ was more important than the reality of what he created.
Very much this. But the point is, he had the choice, decided not to kill it, and now wan’t people to forget he made that choice. But he did make the choice, and it’s still a monster, and the consequences are he (should be!) a pariah in Silicon Valley as a result.
Of course it’s hard. That’s why responsibility is a thing - he made the monster and made the wrong choice. He could have spent all the years since trying to make up for that monster but instead… silence. How is that coming to terms with what he created? He wants instead to pretend it never happened.
Fuck no we don’t. Because the mistake is ongoing! Where is he online taking a stance against the sort of garbage 4chan is now? Where is he using his influence to say “You know what, I fucked up, let’s fix this”? Nowhere. Which leads to only a few possibilities IMHO: 1) he doesn’t care, 2) He wants to forget the monster he created or 3) he’s more ok with it than it seems. I personally think #3 is most likely.
Most people who make a mess at 15 don’t do things that continue to be terrible, terrible creations years later. That’s like saying “Oh, yeah, I had an unwanted pregnancy when I was fifteen but now I abdicate responsibility to the monster my child has become since I was 15, what did I know?”
This is the part I understand the least of your argument. Why isn’t it obvious that if you create a monster, you don’t accept responsibility and begin actively trying to change the culture around that monster? Around what we consider ok in social media? He made the thing. He profited off the thing, Now he has a responsibility to get people to focus on not just dismantling the thing he created but the culture it now fosters.
This is no different than ex-gang members trying to stop others from joining a gang, or ex-extremists trying to work to ensure more people aren’t radicalized. Instead, he walks away and ignores the monster.
It takes a profound amount of privilege (or the expectation of it) to be able to create something like this and believe that they can just “ignore it and move on”, and IMHO it takes a belief that someone deserves that profound privilege to advocate that we collectively “move on” and just “be ok” with Moot doing less than everything he can to correct the situation he created.
24 Likes
Can we get extra hearts for this post because one isn’t enough.
8 Likes
Here’s a place where I need clarification. To my knowledge 4chan never allowed child sex abuse pictures, unless what you are referring to is the content of the loli/shota boards, in which case, yes those boards in retrospect and with a clear mind were wrong and should not have existed.
For what it’s worth I wholly agree that Poole should be out there speaking against what 4chan was and is. At the same time however, I can understand the mindset of just wanting to disassociate from the whole situation. If it’s privilege that makes me more inclined to a forgive and forget mindset, well then so be it. I just don’t see the benefit of holding on to the hate.
I linked it to the needsmorelike thread, so we can up the likes of @orenwolf excellent comment!
6 Likes
it’s of great comfort to me that 4chan never hosted any child porn except for those boards within it that hosted child porn.
12 Likes
At the time, many of us were willing to buy into the argument that loli/shota being drawings meant that such content wasn’t as a result of abuse of actual children and thus was a grey area that could be ignored. Again, in retrospect we were all kidding ourselves and those subforums were clearly wrong and were eventually removed as a clearer mindset prevailed.
Neither did Fredrick Brennan when he created 8chan. The difference is Poole hasn’t seemed to express an ounce of regret for what he created while at the very least Brennan has.
2 Likes
I honestly don’t feel like people feel the need to defend yet another remorseless tech bro white silicon valley millionaire. Why is there this incessant need to defend rich white guys by complete random strangers? They do it with Elon, they do it with moot, they did it with Lowtax, and they keep defending shitty people.
2 Likes
“There but for the grace of God go I.”
I’m not rich, so I don’t identify so much with guys like Elon, but I imagine there are people who do. I also don’t identify much with Lowtax and I can’t see any defense for his actions. But I don’t hold any personal hate for the guy and would instead argue that he needs professional help for his problems. But moot? A guy who gained a bunch of notoriety for the terrible website he created… yeah that could have been me.
1 Like
in 2014, while Poole was looking to get hired by a big tech firm, his forum’s users were posting stolen nudes and lewds. Some of the victims of the mass phishing and account hacks were minors.
Poole did nothing.
6 Likes
You your main concern in this is the social standing of your fantasy self? Next level.
8 Likes
