Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Oral History of Something Awful

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 111 posts

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#81

Post by darren_ »

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 think it's a YMMV thing. I'm at google, and I'm pretty certain that a lot of my improvement as a programmer came from time spent posting/irc-ing with the SA programmer crew, to the degree that I don't think I would've made it to google without it. But, definitely spent too much time there.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#82

Post by jtmcmc »

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…

right - this was my high school life.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#84

Post by flomo »

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…

> But it maintained quality via community, and through a simple $10 barrier.

One thing written-out of the official history. 10bux was introduced when SA had a wide variety of infringing bittorrent links in various subforums. Somehow, Lowtax shut this down before he got busted for it, but if anyone ever mentioned it for years afterward, insta-permaban.

The idea that $10 was quality control developed later. The real rules had nothing do with "quality" and were always opaque and deeply political. Pretty much a Lord of the Flies scenario -- which was great if you loved internet drama, and they weren't coming after you. SA's business model was essentially semi-randomly banning people who would re-register. I haven't been back in more than ten years, so things might have changed. But to pretend they were trying to foster some great community ... no. Just no. Goons were acknowledgedly horrible people engaged in online barbarism.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#85

Post by riffic »

tenpies wrote: post #40
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.…

It's also worth noting what an important role the SA file sharing forums had on on SA and the file-sharing scene. Many of today's private file-sharing communities are direct descendants of what began as "No Mp3s" and "Don't Post Porn Here". It was terrible for the SA community, but I'm sure all the bans for "where the filez @" posts were quite good at mitigating server expenses.

We don't talk about nmp3s/dpph.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#86

Post by jtmcmc »

tenpies wrote: post #40
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.…

It's also worth noting what an important role the SA file sharing forums had on on SA and the file-sharing scene. Many of today's private file-sharing communities are direct descendants of what began as "No Mp3s" and "Don't Post Porn Here". It was terrible for the SA community, but I'm sure all the bans for "where the filez @" posts were quite good at mitigating server expenses.

ah nmp3s was great for so long and IIRC oink grew out of it as well.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#87

Post by adamnemecek »

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…

There's no way llamaguy is worth 9 figures.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#89

Post by xor1 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #87
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…

There's no way llamaguy is worth 9 figures.

shrug, david choe is worth 9 figures and did the first mural a year before llamaguy started working there

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#90

Post by csydas »

xor1 wrote: post #73
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 us…

Llamaguy:) already did source the core of it. I don't know if tags were included, but a large majority of it was there, and Tiko was working to replicate the other functionality awhile back too; not sure what happened with it though. He had a prototype where you could have a board up and running and make your own tags, etc. I think livelinks still didn't work at the time.
Post reply on HN