When 4Chan Gamed the Time 100
One year after the event, TIME was posted a video discussing how 4Chan hacked the TIME 100 poll, which allowed its founder Moot to claim the top spot as the most influential person of the year. Actually the word "hacked" gets thrown around quite a lot in this story, but as Moot himself corrects, what 4Chan did was "game" the TIME 100 poll. That is to say, the poll wasn't hacked but rather manipulated.
In the video, Moot reveals that he had nothing to do with the poll hijacking. Rather, it was done by faithful followers & 4Chan frequent visitors. You can call these people the Anonymous. One tech blogger managed to get in touch with them in their IRC chatroom & got a hold of the actual hacks used on the poll, which he shared on his site.
Eventually it was realized that these hackers gamers weren't just making sure that Moot was on top of the poll. They were also manipulating the other top 20 spots below him. They were making sure certain people were obtaining just the right amount of votes so that they placed in the exact right spot to spell out a phrase using the first letter of their first name. With Moot on top, the phrase spelled out "Marblecake Also the Game." Sounds almost like complete gibberish, but there is method behind this madness.
Marblecake is the name of the IRC chatroom that is the meeting place for a specific group of Anonymous members of 4Chan. They are called Project Chanology, who over the past few years have been responsible for, among other things, protesting & attacking Scientology. By the way, the chatroom isn't named after cake. Marblecake, in this case, is named after a certain sexual act that I wont go into.
As for "Also the Game," that is a reference to The Game. The Game of course is a forever lasting mind game where the only way to win is to not think about The Game. The moment you think about The Game, you have lost The Game, & have to start all over again. It's impossible to win The Game, therefor you can only try to keep from losing for as long as possible. Referencing The Game in the TIME poll was just a way to remind people playing it so that they would lose.
The end result though is that roughly 20 individuals manipulated the poll so that TIME believed that Moot really was worthy of being the most influential person of the year. At least they're big enough to admit when they got tricked. Please note that Firefox sucks, so if you can't view the embedded video above, you can check out the full piece here:
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,79177365001_1983486,00.html