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An Oral History of Something Awful

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Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#71

Post by Nition »

Kallikrates wrote: post #55
swang wrote: post #52

Keep in mind SA forums hated "memes" unless you were really good at it. That made the forums great because it also involved an element of risk so if someone wasn't sure how good their stuff was they're at risk of getting banned. A simple example: There use to be a forums poster who posted just screenshots from old NES video games that was always super relevant so he was never banned (usually if you just post a meme w…

It's a shame that nearly all of gamequoter's history is gone.

Not sure if this applies to Gamequoter's posts specifically, but for a while there was a site called Waffleimages that was created basically for SA in the same sort of way Imgur was created for Reddit when all the other image hosts sucked. Just about everyone used Waffleimages for a while and when it eventually went away, tons of images went with it.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#73

Post by xor1 »

Nition wrote: post #70

A big part of Reddit's success has been the ability for any user to create a new subreddit for any topic. And a big part of the SomethingAwful forums' success has been having subforums for a whole lot of different general topics. 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 di…

They have, it's a private gamefaqs spinoff that's slowly dying ever since Megaupload shut down, since all of the site's content was hosted there. There are less than 300 active users at any given time when it used to peak at 10k. I'd be surprised if people are still posting a year from now. I hope the software gets open-sourced by the creator because it's the best forum I've ever used UX wise. I personally stopped using it a year ago.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#74

Post by ckozlowski »

xor1 wrote: post #65

The SA forums were so amazing from 2000-2004. I spent some of my most formative years posting there (no regrets!). It's pretty crazy to think how many people who were active on SA around then went on do Big Things: - 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…

Regarding VileRat, he was an active member in the online MMO EVE Online. Around the time SA was living it's glory days, an Icelandic company started EVE. A large group of SA members formed an organization in that game called "Goonswarm", which proceeded to become a dominant force in the game over the next decade. Organizations in EVE (called Alliances) became giant, complex things, and required a considerable amount of skill and a dedicated management team of players to run. VileRat was one of those.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#75

Post by paulmd »

Kyanka also gave several presentations over the years.

UIUC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gvo1uWAhHc

MTU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM4D4wrk6Vs

A lot of the same content as this, he previously defined the tendency for the internet to form niche communities as the "parrot-ass club".

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#76

Post by cantbecool »

meowface wrote: post #51
ue_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>or a wrestling board It does now, in the form of /asp/ I think :) However I don't know how well moot's prediction of fizzling out holds for say 8chan, which has started to very much grow in popularity; granted, having roughly some of the same popular boards as 4chan (except for where moderation doesn't matter, like on NSFW boards) but with some interesting and nice top boards, like /leftypol/ which 4chan would never…

8chan's growth rate looked promising for a time, but I believe it's pretty inactive at the moment.

Well, being removed from Google surely doesn't help, but it's still one of the 5k top visited sites in the US according to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/8ch.net

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#77

Post by ckozlowski »

throwaway13338 wrote: post #39
Scuds wrote: post #13

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 also lost a point or two off my GPA playing WoW/EVE, and lurking 4chan. Now I work at Google and life isn't nearly as fun. Some days I wish I could go back, so cheer up m8.

As I hit my mid 30s, I look back at all of this and I find myself missing it terribly. It's not like today is bad. But back then, it was really neat.

I was too young to experience BBS and Usenet; I grew up with AOL and Geocities, and when the 2000s hit and I could convince my parents to get a cable modem, things were just off the wall.

I spent a lot of time on forums too, overclocking this or that, or waking up for alarm clock-ops in EVE. I met people at LAN parties who I ended up working for later; set up servers to host our Unreal Tournament matches and learned to edit and repackage files so I could run around Jedi Knight as Deadpool with a lightsaber.

I cringe thinking about some of the stupid arguments I got in, things I wrote on my blog, my livejournal, on the forum. I like to think I learned a lot about how people feel their way through an argument, and how a flame war gets started.

One evening, when I'm not trolling HN at 1AM, I'll sit down and write how the early 2000s affected us all and set us up for today. I wish it was so fresh and new like it felt to me then. But I don't feel like today isn't as fun...but it definitely is different. I'm inclined to think that it's on us now to determine what the next chapter will be, what we will create that is fun that the next 18 year old will experience tomorrow and go "this is f&@#ing awesome."

Gonna go play some Descent. =)

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#78

Post by mrbill »

swang wrote: post #50
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.

i have no idea why but i remember you from some old efnet channels and SA as well... can't remember what you did though.

I was an EFnet server admin at Texas.Net up until '98 or so when the smurf attacks became too much and we pulled the plug on that server. Not too long after that a few friends and I started a tiny network of our own that still runs to this day.

I can credit SA and MetaFilter (what a combo, eh?) for keeping me sane after I got laid off in '02. Nowdays Reddit has pretty much replaced SA for me, and I don't participate on MeFi as much as I used to... but the folks there kept me from killing myself after my wife died suddenly in '09.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#79

Post by gargarplex »

kalleboo wrote: post #67

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 once made an advert for you =)

"Welcome to goon radio... get off my plane!"

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#80

Post by jcurbo »

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.…

Much like Reddit, the value at SA is in niche sub forums. I haven't looked at GBS in years but still visit places like Ask/Tell, Book Barn, etc as well as specific game threads. (Is this like advanced "there's a front page?) I bookmark them and visit via the control panel pretty much exclusively. Big threads are like communities, especially around specific games and TV shows. It's wild to me that SA is still a thing after all these years (I started in 2001) but I think the site has been through so much that it can survive anything these days.
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