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An Oral History of Something Awful

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Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#101

Post by smoyer »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #91
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.

I spent most of the late '90s and early 2000's building fiber networks across the country-side and then helping with the technical aspects of increasing Cable Modem speeds and reliability - I guess I missed most of the important human aspects of the Internet at that time?

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#103

Post by zardo »

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…

The $10 entry fee and heavy use of bans made the topic subforums the best on the web. While FYAD may have given birth to the shitpost, shitposting is only allowed in the designated shitposting zones.

If you want to talk or read about a massively popular topic: cars, guns, motorcycles, games, money, pets, health, houses, coupons... it's nice to go somewhere that weeds out low quality posting. How ever quality happens to be defined in that particular forum.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#104

Post by Scuds »

peruvian wrote: post #60
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…

> Message boards are not where the 'A' players of the world spend their time So what are you doing here? -- Personally, I don't regret the time I sank on 4chan/video games (still play a lot), anime, etc from ages 13-22. Maybe I am less ambitious than you, but I have a programming job in a good city and I'm not stressed about finances/rent. Good enough for me. My career is going fine and I'm learning new skills at wor…

> So what are you doing here?

HN is a nice stream of links with comments, not a community with a revolving cast of characters like SA. Totally different use case.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#106

Post by lsadam0 »

Scuds wrote: post #104
peruvian wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Message boards are not where the 'A' players of the world spend their time So what are you doing here? -- Personally, I don't regret the time I sank on 4chan/video games (still play a lot), anime, etc from ages 13-22. Maybe I am less ambitious than you, but I have a programming job in a good city and I'm not stressed about finances/rent. Good enough for me. My career is going fine and I'm learning new skills at wor…

> So what are you doing here? HN is a nice stream of links with comments, not a community with a revolving cast of characters like SA. Totally different use case.

Yeah dude. You've totes graduated to the 'A' players message board.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#107

Post by lsadam0 »

mercer wrote: post #99
ckozlowski wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It kinda hurt that I tried to impersonate jeffk in this thread and got downvoted into the negatives. I think people thought I was serious. Now I know for sure that I'm out of touch.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#108

Post by lsadam0 »

darren_ wrote: post #81
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.

But do you regret it? I'm gonna guess "no" :)

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#109

Post by cantbecool »

nailer wrote: post #92
cantbecool wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They say because of CP, but I highly doubt it. I'm assuming a three digit organization didn't like the conversations going on there.

Re: An Oral History of Something Awful

#110

Post by lobo_tuerto »

hashhar wrote: post #16
lobo_tuerto wrote: post #7

Wow that site feels slugish on a Core i7 + GTX 970 with 16 gigs of RAM.

I'm amazed. What browser do you use? Firefox is flying by really well (that too on a Core i3 5th gen + NVIDIA 920m with 8GB RAM). This sounds nuts.

I'm on Ubuntu with Google Chrome.
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