An Oral History of Something Awful
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An Oral History of Something Awful
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#2I read this about a week ago and it is very well done. I've not logged into SA (I only used the forums) in a couple of years at least, glad to see they're still existing.
I still use a torrent site that was a SA spinoff.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#3"fuck you and die". My CPU took this literally when it visited the site.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#4I read this about a week ago and it is very well done. I've not logged into SA (I only used the forums) in a couple of years at least, glad to see they're still existing. I still use a torrent site that was a SA spinoff.
Spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off...
Edit:Wow, downvotes for making an oblique reference to the fact the SA offshoot torrent sites have disappeared and reappeared under new names a half dozen times in the last decade.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#5Is this oral history written?
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#6Despite Something Awful's notoriety for shitposting as noted in this article, the Let's Play forum (the concept of which was incidentally pioneered by SA) is the highest-quality forum on the internet for video game playthroughs, due in part to the registration paywall, chronological ordering of posts, and very heavy moderation.
I do think the older BBS architecture could still work in the 2017 for new discussion forums (e.g. Discourse), although it likely would not be very appealing to venture capitalists who want to see explosive growth metrics.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#7Wow that site feels slugish on a Core i7 + GTX 970 with 16 gigs of RAM.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#8Something Awful really set the stage for a lot of what followed in internet culture. "Let's Play" spawned from it. The template of the modern meme. 4chan's culture was really seeded with a lot of people kicked out of SA, which steered it in an interesting direction.
But it maintained quality via community, and through a simple $10 barrier. Rules were followed because they were simple and mutually agreed with.
I don't think anything like it could happen today.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#9SA was great during the GWB years. The developer forum had really smart and helpful users. The Photoshop challenges produced work that was significantly better than what floats up to r/all today. The political arguments were vicious and pretty smart. The front page could almost always make me laugh.
Another brilliant monetization not mentioned in the article: you could pay to customize your own user image and title. For twice the price, another user could pay to anonymously choose their own title/image for you, usually to insult. Want to change your appearance back? Pay again.
If you were banned you could pay to re-register and come right back. If you were permabanned you couldn't. A funny pseudo-permaban was that sometimes a user would get put on probation for a ridiculously long time like 9999 hours.
I'd love to find a modern SA: large enough to be always raucous and lively, moderated well enough to keep out really poisonous users. On Reddit the only good subreddits are locked down really tightly and the ones that aren't are full of garbage and full of meh.
Re: An Oral History of Something Awful
#10There's a strange graduation you end up going through as a mid-term denizen of the internet (i.e late 90s), for me it was SA rather than Slashdot etc, even before Digg, 4chan and Reddit. Lots of high quality threads in the specialised forums like Debate & Discuss, dedicated games threads etc. Very fondly remembered. I do still prefer the threaded format rather than the subtree style of Reddit et al.