61–70 of 111 posts
alt.tasteless, in particular, promoted high quality and originality. Using catchphrases and hackneyed meme-like sentences resulted in humiliation.
There was the occasional real gem. It was quite a feat considering the lack of moderation.
Not that I would suggest reading it unless you have a stomach for actual (occasionally extremely) tasteless content.
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…
I know many successful people (PhDs, government employees, "popular twitter users", SW engineers) who used SA to make weird jokes to get over boredom in college. The most successful people either became mods or were permabanned. SA admins liked to take their life problems out on the forum by breaking it, a kind of self-harm, and then ban you if you complained. Also liked to claim anime forum posters were "child moles…
As one described it to me, he's trying to protect the reputation of games as a creative medium by pushing back against bad works of the craft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
- CliffyB
- moot
- notch
- deadmau5
- llamaguy (guessing most people here don't know who he is, but he created a Gamefaqs spinoff called Luelinks/EndOfTheInternet, and was one of the first 100 employees at Facebook and is now a 9-figure millionaire)
- vilerat (aka Shawn Smith, one of the Americans who died in Benghazi)
- garry (of garry's mod and rust fame)
- Yahtzee
Stuff that can trace back to SA around that time:
- 4chan itself
- Memes ("image macros")
- Let's Plays
- Weird Twitter
- That shitposting/shittexting ironic writing style that is now beloved by modern middle/upper class American teenagers everywhere
Nearly everyone that I met as a teenager and still keep in contact with is really successful.
Sadly, I think Lowtax is the most incompetent businessperson I've ever encountered. It's frankly amazing how badly he mismanaged the SA forums, and how much he took all of that amazing talent that was creating free content for him for granted.
I think the best example is how he initially offered Yahtzee some insultingly paltry compensation for doing Zero Punctuation. IIRC it was like $100 per episode. Zero Punctuation alone could have kept SA relevant, I think.
The stuff that went down in 2005 and beyond drove all of the best posters away, IMO.
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.
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…
Wow that site feels slugish on a Core i7 + GTX 970 with 16 gigs of RAM.
SA really had an amazing culture. I ran GBS FM (a 100% user-contributed online radio station for Goons) and some of my best friends to this day (offline and online) come from that project.
I'm actually really surprised to see this on the front page of HN today. I wonder how many people who actively read/post on HN were also on SA back in the day, or still hang out in Cavern Of Cobol and/or YOSPOS.
I wonder why no-one's made a forum site where anyone can create subforums the way reddit does subreddits (or have they?). There are still major benefits to proper chronological forum-type discussion, but forums for different things are spread in small groups all over the Internet and you have to discover, learn the interface, and sign up for every one separately.
I don't know if you could also make it a paid service like the SA forums in this day and age, but the $10 entry sure kept the site running and kept the spam and some of the idiots out as well (particularly since if you got banned you had to pay another $10 to come back).