In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World\’s Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it’s worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.
Since moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world.
(From Time.com)
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according to the following article turns out the whole thing was a well organised hack.
musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/
“Ultimately, this hack involved lots of work and a little bit of luck. Someone figured out the voting URL protocol. A bunch of folks wrote various autovoters, which were then used by a thousand or more to stack the vote in moots favor. Others, sprinkled the spam urls throughout the forums tricking the ‘competition’ into voting for moot. When Time.com responded by trying to close the door on the hacks, the loose collective rallied and a member discovered the ’salt’ that would re-open the poll to the autovoters. The lucky bit was when Zombocom discovered that no matter what he did, he wouldn’t get banned. This opened the door to the fine grained manipulation that led to the embedding of the Message.”
This is scary.
You beat me to it Annarchy. I was just reading this article before I went to pt and was gonna post it we I got home.
@TGGeko: This is a poorly coded website poll.
@nyokki: Yeah, sorry about that. tiki is apparently way ahead of both of us, with the very next post. What am I saying? Of course he is, he’s a god.
yea way ahed to bad my post got rejected