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An Oral History of Something Awful

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Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#11

Post by edkennedy »

mabbo wrote: post #8

Something 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…

Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things.

But it's funny, I sort of have the opposite opinion of SA in regards to its content. Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it. Slowly.

A really interesting comparison of Reddit and SA takes place in Eve Online, where massive fleets clash on the regular. SA has a huge history there, and tons of political heroes (vilerat! rip) but they ended up sort of being the exclusionary bullies of the Eve universe. TEST/Dreddit (Reddit's corporation) ended up having that easy entry and encouraged a lot of growth from the people other companies in Eve were ignoring - the new player. This resulted in a lot of good fun and chaos. Now there are whole companies devoted to new players (Brave Newbies)

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#12

Post by clydethefrog »

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #7

Wow that site feels slugish on a Core i7 + GTX 970 with 16 gigs of RAM.

Glad I am not the only one. This seems to be the problem:

https://twitter.com/tlakomy/status/849156272524021760

Since they have not fixed it, almost would think it's by design? It definitely forces you to read the article slowly... fast scrolling is discouraged.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#13

Post by Scuds »

I have all sorts of conflicted feelings about my time with SA during the Bush years when I was a college student. It was fun, but I think the time I spent there cost me a point or two off my GPA. The people I knew of that went off to the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and various startups of the world were more focused in their studies and their technical passions and didn't pay too much attention to many of the things that concerned Goons (video games, politics chatter, the ongoing internet popularity contest).

In the end, SA's culture was something I should have put down earlier if I wanted to get ahead. Message boards are not where the 'A' players of the world spend their time. Caring about the fans of your stream is not exactly of the list of 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#14

Post by djsumdog »

philipkglass wrote: post #9

SA 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.…

Voat had a lot of promise, but it's degraded into a cesspool of racism.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#15

Post by djsumdog »

mrbill wrote: post #2

I 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.

Shhh. What torrent site? The one that doesn't exist? I think that's what you mean.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#17

Post by enraged_camel »

philipkglass wrote: post #9

SA 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.…

The SA you describe still exists, and it still has those things you mention.

A lot of people (including SA posters) say it's not as good as it used to be, but that may be the same phenomenon HN users complain about when they say HN used to be better back in the day.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#18

Post by philipkglass »

enraged_camel wrote: post #17
philipkglass wrote: post #9

SA 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.…

The SA you describe still exists, and it still has those things you mention. A lot of people (including SA posters) say it's not as good as it used to be, but that may be the same phenomenon HN users complain about when they say HN used to be better back in the day.

I just took a look for the first time in years and it does look pretty good, though not as active as I remember. I was never banned. I ended up walking away permanently in early 2008 because I realized that it had become a dangerously deep time-sink for me. I just logged out and never logged in again. (I left kuro5hin earlier in a similar way.) Now of course I sink my time across other forums. HN is my current favorite. I seem to have a little better graduated self control nowadays; I'll not post here for a week or more if higher priorities interrupt.

I'm still active on Ars Technica but the constant political sniping allowed there is really tiresome. I could happily live the rest of my life without seeing "snowflake" used as an insult again. Or without seeing a snarky anti-Trump comment in an unrelated article with 70 upvotes. I don't like Trump either, but that doesn't mean I want to read lazy insults against him all day in every discussion. Reddit's never tempted me to register an account though I like to read Ask Historians.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#19

Post by TulliusCicero »

philipkglass wrote: post #9

SA 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.…

As someone who's read SA since Hellchick was joking about crates, I think the SA boards are still pretty great. There's a weird phenomenon currently tolerated where some posters sort of lazily semi-troll, but other than that it's still a good forum.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#20

Post by enraged_camel »

edkennedy wrote: post #11
mabbo wrote: post #8

Something 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…

Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things. But it's funny, I sort of have the opposite opinion of SA in regards to its content. Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it. Slowly. A r…

>>Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it.

Quantity went down, but quality increased.

I mean, that's what barriers to entry are about: they keep out the lowest-common-denominator trolls, while those who actually care about the community have no issues paying the entry fee (sometimes several times, as they get temp-banned).

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