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An Oral History of Something Awful

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Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#21

Post by enraged_camel »

philipkglass wrote: post #18
enraged_camel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 favori…

You are absolutely right about the time sink aspect, although the User Control Panel is pretty useful in that it provides a view of only the threads you have subscribed to, which minimizes the "hmm, this thread looks interesting... ah crap it's 4 AM!" problem.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#22

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

> Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things.

That's an understatement. By the time I started seeing tl;dr being used in its original meaning elsewhere on the internet, it had already long been a bannable offense on the SA boards.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#24

Post by edkennedy »

enraged_camel wrote: post #20
edkennedy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

I wouldn't say that quality increased at all, however it certainly made managing the forum a lot easier. I think around 2008 or 09 I shit posted a ban me thread with numerous images of god and the dinosaurs until I was culled. I had had an account since '00. I found by the time I had been banned that the quality (which is of course, subjective) had been lost by becoming exclusive. Sort of the same way an NYT Paywall made me lose interest in it. The decline did take a while, but I would say that when they instituted the paywall it was "Day 2" as Bezos said. The beginning of the end.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#25

Post by compuder »

djsumdog wrote: post #14
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.

Voat had remarkably little promise and followed the standard tragectory of sites designed to clone a site for angry users jumping ship.

Moot, founder of 4chan, had some good comments about the phenomenon during his resignation:

>To single out 420chan, it’s actually one of the imageboards that I have actually respected over the years. I think that what's kind of defined a lot of image boards, even going back to the first kind of spin off from 4chan (which was 5Chan), 7chan and all these others. They tend to spin out based on a decision I make, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like 4chan, or they don’t like 4chan culture or whatever. More or less over the years, most of those sites have kind of fizzled out.

>While 420Chan started similarly to 5chan, (the admin didn’t like me), I really respect that he wanted to have a bunch of topics that 4chan didn’t have ... ["]4chan is never gonna have a drugs board, or a wrestling board, or all these other boards that I want, and so we may as well create a site that caters to that.”

>I really respect the fact that he really took it in its own direction, it doesn't look like 4chan. The other sites ... created a whole era of open source clones of 4chan that offered 4chan in a box and emulated our front page and everything.

>People, for whatever reason wanted to make 4chan that wasn’t 4chan.

Voat is just the latest "reddit that isn't reddit".

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#26

Post by edkennedy »

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 9/11 thread was pretty shocking. Two things stuck in my memory from GBS/SA, the "All your base" thread and the 9/11 thread.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#27

Post by cloakandswagger »

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.

SA was the first forum I really got involved in and I posted there for years. When I was there I thought it was the pinnacle of comedy; I'd never been exposed to that brand of humor before it, and I thought it was genius.

When I look at SA today it just seems juvenile and try-hard. Really, painfully unfunny.

I think part of it has to do with the stricter moderation; SA in the early 2000s was 4chan before I knew there was a 4chan, and I appreciated the raucous, sometimes offensive humor.

Moreover though I think you're right, SA is still SA. My ideas about what is funny have changed, but SA is still the same.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#28

Post by cloakandswagger »

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…

There are many private forums still out there that are invite-only or have an entry fee, and some of them have communities as large and "healthy" as SA during its hay day
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