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An Oral History of Something Awful

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Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#91

Post by godzillabrennus »

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…

Reading about all of those folks makes me feel like I wasted my time in the early 2000's on BBS systems talking about prerelease Windows systems like Neptune.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#92

Post by nailer »

cantbecool wrote: post #76
meowface wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why did it get removed?

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#93

Post by walrus »

djsumdog wrote: post #15
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.

I find it annoying when people do this, so I'll save others the frustration. "The one that doesn't exist" is probably referring to LUElinks (that's their little in-joke). It's a pay-to-join + invite-only forum/link sharing site. Its userbase significantly declined when MegaUpload shut down, as many of the links were broken.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#94

Post by makomk »

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.…

One of the threads from that era that really stood out for me was when they went on to a predominantly-gay niche dating site, posted pictures from it, and mocked the members for their height, weight and general appearance. It eventually got gassed after a newer member who didn't share the traditional SA belief that it's not homophobic to call men from groups SA has dehumanized who are in relationships with men "faggots" - because obviously they're not really gay, just too much of a loser to get women to sleep with them - objected to the people using this term, someone bought him a custom title calling him a faggot, and the mods finally decided this was too far.

The thing that contributed most to SA's reputation, in my opinion, was the fact that it became an internet cultural norm that their choice of who to dehumanize, their morally grey tactics, and their edgy humour were beyond criticism even by sites and people who campaign against the exact same things elsewhere on the web. Imagine what Vice would say about a subreddit that did this, or harassed someone until they killed themself, or permabanned a woman because her boyfriend said she'd been raped at a community-related meet up by someone from the site, or...

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#95

Post by nailer »

emmelaich wrote: post #61

The SA forums had predecessors on Usenet in the form of alt.flame, alt.tasteless and others. 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 ex…

alt.sysadmin.recovery was Slashdots precessor

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#96

Post by buzzybee »

makomk wrote: post #94
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.…

One of the threads from that era that really stood out for me was when they went on to a predominantly-gay niche dating site, posted pictures from it, and mocked the members for their height, weight and general appearance. It eventually got gassed after a newer member who didn't share the traditional SA belief that it's not homophobic to call men from groups SA has dehumanized who are in relationships with men "faggo…

Yep. There was a definite feeling of "elitist tastemaking" that permeated SA as it hit its peak and post-peak years. The forum regulars were consciously engaging in the performance of a forum post, rather than a forum post, which, in tandem with the banning and fees, developed towards an anxious, cynical, and insincere atmosphere ripe for toxicity - qualities which remain true of many of the prominent alumni. At the same time, it was productive for a certain kind of effortful, memetic content, which made it alluring and popular.

Because open hate clearly wasn't in good taste and tended to get moderated out, SA would more often focus on dogwhistle cues, e.g. furry groups instead of LGBT groups, [0] and then harass critics for not getting the joke. Material that originally developed from outside the forums was claimed and appropriated as it passed through. There were a lot of ways in which the claims to quality were overblown or outright false. Even so, I got curious and bought an account too, though I lost the password to it at some point.

[0] https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#97

Post by kalleboo »

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…

With the $10 in place, it died through attrition.

If they haven't added the $10 barrier, it would have died through a flood of low-quality content and not enough moderation resources.

It's your typical "how to grow a community" dilemma.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#98

Post by mercer »

xor1 wrote: post #69
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 remember GBS FM :) 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'm one of them. I didn't post much, but I was on SA as much as I am currently on HN and this is all a huge blast of nostalgia for me. I just read through the whole 9/11 thread and logged in an explored what's currently going on. Very strange feeling.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#99

Post by mercer »

ckozlowski wrote: post #77
throwaway13338 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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.

As someone approaching mid-thirties, aside from EVE that's pretty much me you're describing.

Jedi Knight was my first foray into modding. I never release anything, but spent a lot of time in JKEdit (and/or that other editor). I also working on two UT and UT2003 mods after that.

Then there were the LAN parties, coping tons of crap from each other computers in between Quake and whatnot. There was also local play: Comet Busters, Liero, Molez, One Must Fall 2097, Wacky Wheels.

And the flash stuff! Salad Fingers, Strongbad, that thing with the cats singing Independent Women in a French accent. JeffK, Cliff Yablonski Hates You.

The drama fascinated me too: the TTLG forums and their colorful cast of characters, Digg 'selling out' and this new 'reddit' website, etc.

> 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, for one, would very much like to read more articles like this submitted one about the history of the web, similar to the earlier posts here on the days of Ultima. It's far back enough in the past to be worth writing about (damn, makes me feel old) and yet I can't help but feel understanding those developments, or discussing them chronologically, will play an important role in understanding our current world. More, at least, than often superficial articles and theories about Trump/alt-right/Brexit/SJW that are written by people who did not experience what 'we' did.

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