Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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SwiftBucks said:
In all fairness it's an absolutely timeless post. It warms my heart to know someone out there is still whining about tsunderes on a php bb
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But yet they still watch anime and never go outside.

I wonder if there is a word that describes someone who outwardly vocalizes a dislike for something, but inwardly carries a great affection?
 
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Dude admitting to playing a fucking anime song at his sister's funeral.
 
The Hardest R said:
I feel this downplays it for Jeffrey a bit. Jeffrey was SA’s number two guy, running things day to day, for several years while Poor Richard had his spine literally crumbling into dust.

SA’s approved “trolling” these days is dad gay so what monkeycheese directed at approved targets who are lower on the progressive stack.
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dad gay so what is a goddamned hero in this house
 

Jeffrey (who I never see anymore) posted his state of the forums 2026, pretty boring, mostly just promising something's going to happen to try and stem the decline in the userbase and make SomethingAwful a household name on the internet once again, just like the last time they got somebody to write for the front page I suppose.
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I know it goes without saying, but I love when he says "Mod coverage has been more of an issue this year, so the admins have been putting in more work to make sure all forums are covered. If you feel an area needs more moderation, please reach out to the admin team.", the only way Goons can conceptualize community maintenance is making sure you have a mod ready to slap probations and bans over anything at anytime, and it just gets increasingly absurd when you have such an overmoderated, slow and banal site as Somethingawful has become, with 90% of the bans and probations currently coming out of CSPAM which is the only part of the site that gets particularly high traffic anymore and has a gaggle of idiot kings who think giving random sixers is the height of comedy.
 
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Shotgun Badger said:

Jeffrey (who I never see anymore) posted his state of the forums 2026, pretty boring, mostly just promising something's going to happen to try and stem the decline in the userbase and make SomethingAwful a household name on the internet once again, just like the last time they got somebody to write for the front page I suppose.
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The only things that would revive that site would be dropping the $10 to sign up and banning every current user.
 
Samuel Fuller said:
The only things that would revive that site would be dropping the $10 to sign up and banning every current user.
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More seriously, I was wondering what they should do, like even if their mystery media project beats all expectations and becomes a big hit, I don't think there's going to be any new influxes of people onto the site, there's really nothing at all that's attractive about it, the paywall, the extremely insular and impenetrable culture, the fact that its so easy to get punished, the lack of activity, especially in niche topics that are better served with Reddit and Discord now, the general sense that its old and tired, the lack of interesting content that comes from it (SA still fancies itself as a comedy website but its in the unenviable position of getting clowned on by random shitposting subreddits), there's no appeal. I'd say the vast majority of new registrations you see are just reregs of people who were banned in the past trying not to get noticed, and even then its fucking rare to see anyone who registered from 2020 onwards.

I kind of feel like the paywall is too integral to SA, maybe they should just reduce it down to 5 bucks and have a free weekend every month, I seriously doubt its actually bringing any meaningful money to the site anymore compared to Patreon and Nord VPN. They should also just get rid of the platinum upgrade and archives upgrade being something you have to pay an additional 10 bucks for since its ridiculous that such basic functionality is also paywalled beyond just being able to post and browse. You have to pay for platinum to use the fucking search function, or to upload images, or have private messages, all things completely free on any other site, like here! Likewise with archives, especially since SA often tries to sell itself as a font of ancient internet content, if you are putting that behind a 30 dollars for registration, platinum and archives, nobody beyond a few dedicated youtubers who make videos about ancient internet drama is going to pay for that, and its indicative of the nickel and diming that SA does to its own dwindling userbase that likely no longer has a meaningful impact on site finances anymore.

That's my suggestion Jeffrey, if you happen to be reading this, halve the registration cost, remove Archives and Platinum being something you have to pay extra for, buying a new avatar maybe you can keep as a paid thing since its so good as a way to troll people since people can buy one for whoever they want, and I guess you can keep the fee for getting rid of ads too, who cares. Nobody normal is going to pay that much money to use the basic functions of your site in 2026, and its likely offputting to a lot of potential users which is constricting growth, Patreon is clearly the main thing keeping the site afloat now, not up front payment for using it.
 
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Shotgun Badger said:
That's my suggestion Jeffrey, if you happen to be reading this, halve the registration cost, remove Archives and Platinum being something you have to pay extra for, buying a new avatar maybe you can keep as a paid thing since its so good as a way to troll people since people can buy one for whoever they want, and I guess you can keep the fee for getting rid of ads too, who cares. Nobody normal is going to pay that much money to use the basic functions of your site in 2026, and its likely offputting to a lot of potential users which is constricting growth, Patreon is clearly the main thing keeping the site afloat now, not up front payment for using it.
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I'd argue the oppsite for Archives. Make it like $50, that way when some dangerhair dickflipper comes in with froth because someone 20 years ago used "tranny" to mock a faggot, Jeff-o can shrug and say "Well, that's why archives are locked behind the double pay wall".

I do think you are correct and more frequent free weekends is how Jeff-o would get more retards posting more often, developing a habit, and then paying $10 to fund that habit.
 
Ghostse said:
I do think you are correct and more frequent free weekends is how Jeff-o would get more retards posting more often, developing a habit, and then paying $10 to fund that habit.
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Let new users register for free. They can't see most of paid member posts so they're mostly replying to other new users. Troons and other paid users can see posts by new users and report them. When they do that some automated mod response flips a coin and say that user Free1234 is now banned or probationed but in reality that poster will be put on the ignore list of paid members and the people that reported them. Troons will think that they have successfully banned a bigot but in reality they have used a panic-button to activate the ignore feature.
 
With the death of waffleimages there is no point to the archives. Almost all of the best threads were image heavy. Years ago I tried revisiting some classics and it's all gone.

Shotgun Badger said:
I don't think there's going to be any new influxes of people onto the site, there's really nothing at all that's attractive about it
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Forums are completely anachronistic. A shitty, broken, complicated forum is worthless. It reminds me of trying to read usenet when I was on SA. Sure, some content could be funny but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

What even would be the appeal of SA now? It used to be a place to discuss things that you couldn't anywhere else. Lots of really detailed threads and subforums for shit like vidya, comics, anime and whatever. Now? You can discuss 25 year old shows with troons I guess. I remember people joining SA just to become goonsquad griefers after finding out about them in some game.
 
SwiftBucks said:
With the death of waffleimages there is no point to the archives. Almost all of the best threads were image heavy. Years ago I tried revisiting some classics and it's all gone.



Forums are completely anachronistic. A shitty, broken, complicated forum is worthless. It reminds me of trying to read usenet when I was on SA. Sure, some content could be funny but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

What even would be the appeal of SA now? It used to be a place to discuss things that you couldn't anywhere else. Lots of really detailed threads and subforums for shit like vidya, comics, anime and whatever. Now? You can discuss 25 year old shows with troons I guess. I remember people joining SA just to become goonsquad griefers after finding out about them in some game.
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Its funny you say that because we are posting on a traditional style forum and Kiwifarms is one of the only notable ones to emerge after 2010. One of the weirdest things about here is that its kind of just obviously better in terms of user experience than SA, despite being a grungy gossip forum most people think is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. As I touched on in the previous post, you don't need to pay to register, you don't need to pay extra on top of that to use the search function, send PMs or host images, you don't have another fucking payment to look at archives,

Its not just the many paywalls though, SA is just so obviously an old forum that never tried to update itself meaningfully and accordingly is plagued with outdated features and shitty user interface that makes just more of a pain to use than it should be:
  1. The search function sucks ass, its so much more awkward to do things like search the posts in a specific thread or for a specific user compared to here, or almost any other social media site or forum I can think of.
  2. Formatting posts and replies is crap, compared to here you have way less options for basic things like fonts or page layout, even something stupid like putting in the right smiley (there's no smiley menu, you have to open a new page to see the options then type it in manually). You can't attach files, the draft system, such as it exists, is absolutely shit and basically doesn't work at all, its all still based on clunky BBCode stuff from the early internet that really feels out of date.
  3. This might be a bit more controversial but the reaction system on KF here is much more engaging than SA, yeah there's a certain amount of reddit style updooting but overall it lets you just smack a post with something like a dislike or autism reaction instead of goon style emptyquoting or 20 guys taking up a page to quote a post saying you're dumb, its also kind of encouraging if lots of people respond positively to stuff you say. More importantly though, its much easier to stay engaged with a conversation since you are automatically informed if someone responded to you and its crucial for the thread highlights system that lets you quickly move through massive threads and see the most important or funniest posts. This last bit is something I think SA desperately could have used since old, long megathreads are completely impenetrable if you don't have the time to go through them all one page at a time or if someone else hasn't gone through the trouble of marking out the best bits.
  4. Similarly, the community highlights on the front page for KF is far more effective at getting people engaged and interested in things going that they wouldn't otherwise, its also very organic in its presentation since its user submitted stuff that the admins say yay or nay for. The best SA ever has is there's sometimes a best of the month thread stickied in GBS with new threads the staff think people should check out, but I haven't seen them do that in long time now.
  5. If you go onto people's profile on SA the options for social media links are SA's Private Messages (irrelevant if you don't have platinum), ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and whatever Home Page they might have, its so fucking funny that the site is this out of date that they never got around to changing these to things like Twitter or Instagram and just keep all of this internet 1.0 stuff instead.
  6. This one always cracks me up but you can't even delete a post on SA lol. Maybe its for the better since it makes it harder for people to erase some embarrassing shit they may post.
Like Jeffrey doesn't need to fear SomethingAwful taking on Kiwifarms' much hated forum culture by looking at stuff like this and seeing what works that SA is clearly falling behind and updating the site accordingly. It wouldn't be enough to make SA the talk of the town again online but it would go some way towards making the overall user experience smoother and more enticing, especially since the main draw can only really be the community of SomethingAwful itself now a lot of this stuff would be trying to encourage more community interaction and elevation of people who put time and effort into the site, making it easier to find as well. Finally, they really need to be getting rid of all or most of the ridiculous monetary barriers that nobody in their right mind would fork out money for and which I can guarantee is not an important part of the site finances anymore, its by far the most off-putting thing for any new blood..

Just about the Waffleimages thing, you're right that that's a gigantic problem that basically ruins the experience of looking at forum threads before that site went down, but this was actually partially fixed a few years ago when a goon was able to retrieve a lot of the old images.
 
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Shotgun Badger said:
Its funny you say that because we are posting on a traditional style forum and Kiwifarms is one of the only notable ones to emerge after 2010.
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As far as I know it's the largest, most active english speaking forum online right now. It's why I'm here. I've been posting on forums for the majority of my life and I wish I could stop.

The thing is any successful forum has a point, this one is lolcows. It kind of keeps the focus and attracts likeminded people.
I know model train forums also thrive.

SA doesn't have a point anymore. They don't produce comedy, if you had a kid when the frontpage died they'd be old enough to drink now. They don't grief vidya anymore, they don't make edgy humor. It's just a retirement community for people perpetually wishing it was 2004 (but less problematic and transphobic).

Shotgun Badger said:
This might be a bit more controversial but the reaction system on KF here is much more engaging than SA,
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The other day I was literally thinking thank fuck I don't have to scroll through 10 pages of emptyquotes and 5 emoticons on popular threads. Turns out if you don't keep up with the times even cutting edge things become horribly outdated. It was kinda funny seeing SA go from this advanced forum to being mogged by literally any readymade forum template.
Shotgun Badger said:
are SA's Private Messages (irrelevant if you don't have platinum), ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and whatever Home Page
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In all fairness leaving those is fucking hilarious
Shotgun Badger said:
This one always cracks me up but you can't even delete a post on SA lol
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You expect the database to just respond like that?? I think the spaghetti code wouldn't let you do stuff like that.

With regards to the image fix, it's too little too late. Everyone was clamoring for LowT to host the images locally so this exact thing wouldn't happen and that was like 25 years ago lmao.
 
Shotgun Badger said:
Its funny you say that because we are posting on a traditional style forum and Kiwifarms is one of the only notable ones to emerge after 2010. One of the weirdest things about here is that its kind of just obviously better in terms of user experience than SA, despite being a grungy gossip forum most people think is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. As I touched on in the previous post, you don't need to pay to register, you don't need to pay extra on top of that to use the search function, send PMs or host images, you don't have another fucking payment to look at archives,

Its not just the many paywalls though, SA is just so obviously an old forum that never tried to update itself meaningfully and accordingly is plagued with outdated features and shitty user interface that makes just more of a pain to use than it should be:
  1. The search function sucks ass, its so much more awkward to do things like search the posts in a specific thread or for a specific user compared to here, or almost any other social media site or forum I can think of.
  2. Formatting posts and replies is crap, compared to here you have way less options for basic things like fonts or page layout, even something stupid like putting in the right smiley (there's no smiley menu, you have to open a new page to see the options then type it in manually). You can't attach files, the draft system, such as it exists, is absolutely shit and basically doesn't work at all, its all still based on clunky BBCode stuff from the early internet that really feels out of date.
  3. This might be a bit more controversial but the reaction system on KF here is much more engaging than SA, yeah there's a certain amount of reddit style updooting but overall it lets you just smack a post with something like a dislike or autism reaction instead of goon style emptyquoting or 20 guys taking up a page to quote a post saying you're dumb, its also kind of encouraging if lots of people respond positively to stuff you say. More importantly though, its much easier to stay engaged with a conversation since you are automatically informed if someone responded to you and its crucial for the thread highlights system that lets you quickly move through massive threads and see the most important or funniest posts. This last bit is something I think SA desperately could have used since old, long megathreads are completely impenetrable if you don't have the time to go through them all one page at a time or if someone else hasn't gone through the trouble of marking out the best bits.
  4. Similarly, the community highlights on the front page for KF is far more effective at getting people engaged and interested in things going that they wouldn't otherwise, its also very organic in its presentation since its user submitted stuff that the admins say yay or nay for. The best SA ever has is there's sometimes a best of the month thread stickied in GBS with new threads the staff think people should check out, but I haven't seen them do that in long time now.
  5. If you go onto people's profile on SA the options for social media links are SA's Private Messages (irrelevant if you don't have platinum), ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and whatever Home Page they might have, its so fucking funny that the site is this out of date that they never got around to changing these to things like Twitter or Instagram and just keep all of this internet 1.0 stuff instead.
  6. This one always cracks me up but you can't even delete a post on SA lol. Maybe its for the better since it makes it harder for people to erase some embarrassing shit they may post.
Like Jeffrey doesn't need to fear SomethingAwful taking on Kiwifarms' much hated forum culture by looking at stuff like this and seeing what works that SA is clearly falling behind and updating the site accordingly. It wouldn't be enough to make SA the talk of the town again online but it would go some way towards making the overall user experience smoother and more enticing, especially since the main draw can only really be the community of SomethingAwful itself now a lot of this stuff would be trying to encourage more community interaction and elevation of people who put time and effort into the site, making it easier to find as well. Finally, they really need to be getting rid of all or most of the ridiculous monetary barriers that nobody in their right mind would fork out money for and which I can guarantee is not an important part of the site finances anymore, its by far the most off-putting thing for any new blood..

Just about the Waffleimages thing, you're right that that's a gigantic problem that basically ruins the experience of looking at forum threads before that site went down, but this was actually partially fixed a few years ago when a goon was able to retrieve a lot of the old images.
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Voted 5
 
Something Awful said:
It explicitly wasn't banned.

View attachment 8180244

Mocking and scorning lazy AI-posters should be normalized worldwide, though. It's <90 IQ shit. Like watching grandpa discover MS WordArt in 1999 over and over again.

Prescient post:

View attachment 8180246

Seth hasn't posted since he was demodded. He was an unfunny GBS-brained faggot, so it's for the best.
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i dunno man the will stancil show is legit funny

or maybe i'm retarded?
 
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