Dirty Poole - 4chan Fuckhead profiled by ROLLING STONE

When it comes to covering "pop culture," a good Rolling Stone article...is damn good. Few do a better job. In fact, few bother. The others, in that waning category of newspapers and magazines that still value quality reporting, tend to figure their readers ONLY want to know about political and economic issues. That's the D&M stuff (dry and musty). Their reporters don't usually have the juice to make these long, long articles remotely interesting or worth reading.

Where would you turn for an in-depth look at 4chan, when The New Yorker or The New York Times never heard of it? Some bean-brained Buzz Monster Zero Researched Bluffington site would just say "we like free" and leave it at that. While Rolling Stone has gaffed badly (was there a gang rape at a major college or wasn't there...and did their best TV columnist actually consider Norm MacDonald among the worst comics ever to be on SNL), usually they give you exactly what you want.

Assuming, for example, you wanted to know if the little wonder-prick behind 4Chan is a millionaire like Kim Dotcom.

Just how much longer Rolling Stone can afford to run long expose pieces, who knows. The Grant Williams of magazines, it has been undergoing an appalling procress of shrinkage for many years now, from oversized magazine to normal sized to an increasingly anorexic number of pages. What if they decide to abandon a print edition?

That leaves it up to fate and Internet tastes. With so many Internet websites and so little time, will people want to even visit Rolling Stone's website instead of, say, fucking 4Chan with their fap-happy pictures of naked celebrities (real or faked) and their world of petty brats, Fascist little monsters and the joys of bullying each other?

Rolling Sone admits:

"Poole had started 4chan as a way for fellow anime obsessives to post and discuss images. But over the next decade, it morphed into the Net's greatest factory of memes and mayhem. LOLcats and Rickrolling started on 4chan. So did Anonymous, the international collective of hacktivists and geeks. Most recently, 4chan has been in the crosshairs of two of the biggest controversies on the Web: the celebrity nude leaks called the Fappening, and Gamergate, the increasingly vicious battle over sexism in the video-game industry."

Just what the incredible shrinking Rolling Stone will morph into, who knows. But if you want to learn more about the successes and failures of one of the Nets most high-profile nitwits, check out the Rolling Stone dot.com.