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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I knew dudes who weren't sure if they were gay or not until they were like 25, but apparently a 6 year old can be trans.

Honk.
 
Anime is Blood said:
Kiwifarms seems like vintage SA for a bunch of reasons, a couple of which you pointed out.

SA was always more strict and never had as much focus on helldumping as Kiwifarms does but I think the core thing people pick up on is that you can actually have a discussion here. I think when SA was still massively popular and had 10x the posters there were simply too many people for the faggot moderators to crush under their heel so you had more interesting and varied threads with a lot of different viewpoints.

Kiwifarms does this by having an actual good moderation system which is extremely hands off and only steps in when appropriate for severe forum affecting issues. There are anti-trump people arguing in the TDS thread without being punished. There are pro-pitbull people arguing in the pitbull thread. It makes for interesting reading where topics are actually explored and you fucking learn things by reading about them.

SA morphed into some weird neo-feudalist posting environment where your local posting subforum/fiefdom has a dictator lord you have to appease who gets to approve or disapprove of you as a person and everything you say. Filtering discussion down to what a few dozen people want it to be with 24/7 oversight and swift punishment for literally any reason they can think of and no one is allowed to question this in any way without being punished. Discussion isn't really the point anymore and it's just a purity test for the mods/posters to decide what discussion and people should exist. Surprise, this is a dull, boring and never ending process that just makes a worse forum that nobody wants to read.

It's funny seeing FAU still doubling down on the smug assured stance that SA just needs to ban more people to become popular again. "Getting rid of the people who suck" never ends because there is no real definition for "people who suck." They are just locked in this dumbass mentality that a moderator is responsible for the entire concept of discussion who gets to choose who speaks and what they say that will also somehow die Crank-Style if they don't punish someone regularly enough.

The only reason Kiwifarms hasn't taken most of SA's posters already is that the vast majority of the remaining ones there are so insecure and autistic they can't co-exist with thoughts and ideas they don't agree with after decades of having a curated safespace constructed brick by brick around them. Yeah I don't agree with some things on Kiwifarms, so I just don't read about them. On SA "Don't Like it Don't Read It" became a meme used by the people who throw apoplectic fits demanding people/content be removed to mock the concept that they shouldn't be throwing huge fits and executing posters/viewpoints by the thousands.
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Just to add one more thing onto this radical post -

SA started with and KF currently has all kinds of posters, which leads to frequently interesting discussion. KF currently has lawyers that will chime in on legal issues, we've got some comic book pros posting in the comic book thread, we've got a few youtubers that chime in on youtube stuff, etc.

Politically we've got all kinds of people. It isn't just a "left vs right" thing, either. We've got people that used to be left that turned right, people that are right but don't like Trump, people that are left but voted Trump over hillary, etc. You get a lot of different angles of political thought and a lot of different jobs and perspectives.

SA started like this (and remained for a while) because of a similar moderation style. SA greatly benefited by being one of the newest/largest forums and you could find all kinds of interesting thread topics. This was pre-reddit, this was pre-twitter, pre-facebook, and pre-neogaf. There was a dude who wrote about what it was like to be huge (he was over 7' tall), there was a dude who was a porn cam operator, there some video game devs (Ropekid aka Josh Sawyer of F:NV fame) talking about the behind the scenes process, and there was even a dude who was a cop in Chicago in the 70s.

As other sites grew, those content providers moved to different platforms and SA turned more into a nuthouse more and more of those content providers got banned. What happened is there became substantially less things to talk about on SA and less people to talk about it. There was no reason to post on SA when Reddit/Twitter/YouTube/Facebook/Neogaf/anything else was a better/larger had a better audience, you were less likely to be banned, and in some cases you could make money from it. This is what lead SA to being a "hugbox", it was whittled down to a single type of poster, a milquetoast left leaning activist.

Money was another part of it, as well. Lowtax was terrible at making business decisions and a lot of content creators that are "loosely" associated with SA (Mega64, most LPers, Ben "Yazhee" Crowshaw, all Front Page writers, etc) are all "loosely" associated because Lowtax refuses to spend money. Most of the people who left SA went on to make piles of cash and considering that Lowtax (who at the time had a large platform) did nothing/little to help them, they see (correctly) no reason to help him in return.
 
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Looks like lowtax abandoned the thread before I thought. I figured he’d make some simple change which everyone would hate so he’d revert and then complain that he can’t do anything without pissing people off but apparently he’s run out of low hanging fruit. oh Well, off to Facebook which is terrible but not as bad as posting on his own forums?
 
Poopoostinky said:
Looks like lowtax abandoned the thread before I thought. I figured he’d make some simple change which everyone would hate so he’d revert and then complain that he can’t do anything without pissing people off but apparently he’s run out of low hanging fruit. oh Well, off to Facebook which is terrible but not as bad as posting on his own forums?
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It seems like he has more dick riders on FB from what I've seen.
>Lowtax Posts
>5+ Goons respond in minutes.
 
They used to support or egg on child abuse for the yucks, rather than whatever is going on in that abomination of a thread.
 
The Grognard said:
The guy has been posting on the same thread, complaining about shit like warham figurine boobplates for a full month and he's been active on the Traditional Games board for many, many years. It's quite unlikely that he's joking.
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Traditional Games seemed like one of the worst subforums even back in the days before SA went full socjus troon. Everytime I went there to just try and find cool stuff to read about DnD/RPG type games it would be filled with "hunt the bigots in our hobby" type shit, and the extremely hyperbolic "every grognard neckbeard dudebro at your gaming table is one second away from committing sexual assault" type delusion that's spread to about every other nerdy hobby at one point in time or other since. Not surprisingly, honestly, since a good chunk of the scammer types that fake being socially conscious for paypig bux nowadays seem to have been involved with Goonery on SA back in the day,
Shit, iirc, even the few decent tabletop gaming related threads weren't even in the ttg forums anymore, like "PYF Your Favorite TTG Horror Story", but even those threads would get bogged down in stereotypical goon drama that wouldn't have happened if people were just allowed to banter like adults with senses of humor.
 
Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
But KF is a billion times better than other forums that way. I guess maybe the only people trying to be forum mods are maladjusted wannabe tyrants? For example, I think I would make a good forum mod.
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I think Null mentioned something about only getting people who either hate him or don't particularly wanna be mods to be mods. Only hiring power-tripping troons and NEETs is how you get Something Awful situations.
 
tantric_depressive said:
Traditional Games seemed like one of the worst subforums even back in the days before SA went full socjus troon. Everytime I went there to just try and find cool stuff to read about DnD/RPG type games it would be filled with "hunt the bigots in our hobby" type shit, and the extremely hyperbolic "every grognard neckbeard dudebro at your gaming table is one second away from committing sexual assault" type delusion that's spread to about every other nerdy hobby at one point in time or other since. Not surprisingly, honestly, since a good chunk of the scammer types that fake being socially conscious for paypig bux nowadays seem to have been involved with Goonery on SA back in the day,
Shit, iirc, even the few decent tabletop gaming related threads weren't even in the ttg forums anymore, like "PYF Your Favorite TTG Horror Story", but even those threads would get bogged down in stereotypical goon drama that wouldn't have happened if people were just allowed to banter like adults with senses of humor.
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So now we know where Jake Alley/SGG and his ilk were born.
 
vertexwindi said:
I think Null mentioned something about only getting people who either hate him or don't particularly wanna be mods to be mods. Only hiring power-tripping troons and NEETs is how you get Something Awful situations.
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Mods that insert themselves into discussions they then moderate is a particularly shitty aspect of SA. This is partly why the shrieking about bad faith works so well - ass kissers use it to cover gaps in their argument, but it gets turned around and suddenly you're mod sassing.

SA mods being generally thin skinned babies is also irrelevant at that point.
 
vertexwindi said:
I think Null mentioned something about only getting people who either hate him or don't particularly wanna be mods to be mods. Only hiring power-tripping troons and NEETs is how you get Something Awful situations.
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It's completely ass-backward on SA and I never understood it.

The idea that the dipshits who reeeeeeally want to be mods so bad they never shut up about it should be mods is so stupid. All their whining means they clearly care so much about the forums and totally won't abuse it at all.

But hey, Lowtax is lazy, and goons will fight each other for the chance to work for free, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.
 
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vertexwindi said:
I think Null mentioned something about only getting people who either hate him or don't particularly wanna be mods to be mods. Only hiring power-tripping troons and NEETs is how you get Something Awful situations.
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“The people that make the best managers are those who don’t want to do it.”

-Steve Jobs
 
TheGreatCitracett said:
It's completely ass-backward on SA and I never understood it.

The idea that the dipshits who reeeeeeally want to be mods so bad they never shut up about it should be mods is so stupid. All their whining means they clearly care so much about the forums and totally won't abuse it at all.

But hey, Lowtax is lazy, and goons will fight each other for the chance to work for free, so I don't see it changing anytime soon.
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Reminds me of this image that got posted frequently on SA a long time ago.

788136
 
The Grognard said:
Meanwhile, back on SA...

View attachment 786754
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It's funny you posted that after my rant about how SA doesn't have real discussion. The thing is FAU isn't lying. It's the best place on the internet to have the kind of discussion he wants to have. He thinks SA isn't terrible because he gets to decide what "Discussion" means there.

This person said they have a six year old trans child. On Something Awful to avoid risking a ban, like thousands before you, to discuss this you

- Can not use the words "Gender Dysphoria" as this suggests trans people can be mentally ill
- Can not Question mental illness at all in regards to the subject of transgender people
- Can not honestly tell the person they are projecting their wants and desires to have a trans child on their toddler because suggesting any trans person isn't actually trans or that it is a choice is transphobic
- Can not suggest the parent see a therapist or get counseling on the subject because of associating transgender people and mental illness, even indirectly
- Can not cite studies or research papers on gender if they do not validate what the OP wants to hear
- Can not joke about the subject at all, in any context or capacity, otherwise you are mocking transgender people
- Can not say anything that sounds similar to any notable TERF, Nazi, Republican, White Supremacist, Critic of trans people or anyone goons consider to be those people
- Can not say anything that a moderator or admin, that is extremely left and pro-trans, could be potentially offended by
- Can not say anything that can be used to craft a hypothetical argument that fits any of these criteria, even if you never actually said but it can be attributed to you by anyone
- 500 other unspoken rules or just literally anything from posting too much to being too dismissive. Derail the thread? Talk about yourself too much? Someone just doesn't like you from other threads? Who knows. Could be anything. Applied to any topic. About anything.

So yeah, if you want to validate this person's crazy beliefs and encourage them to inflict irreparable harm on their toddler because it's the correct thing to do in Something Awful's social circle then that forum is the best place on the internet for that kind of thing. That's why the psychopath claiming their toddler has gender dysphoria before it even understands the concept of being alive is thanking people for patting his ass and apologizing to him. People might not have been banned for being mildly critical but the threat is there which influences the people that haven't been removed and what they choose to contribute.

It's just like that unemployed, obviously mentally ill Goon being encouraged to get their dick cut off. His life exploded because he had castrated himself, got infected and had no support structure while the underlying mental illness was never questioned or addressed in the slightest. They unfortunately chose to base their life around a one-sided echo chamber where the facets of discussion deemed problematic for the subject are banned. This includes facts, objective opinions or criticism in any degree, form or context real or imagined.

And I know you might say ResetERA or Tumblr are better for a echochamber because SA costs money, but that means the wrongthinkers that are punished are more likely to be eliminated entirely. You can be more protected from criticism since your desire to be validated and told what you want to hear is stronger than someone's desire to spend money to talk like a normal person would anywhere else.
 
I've added a data point to my big graph, but I'll spare you the picture and just give you the point.

In the last 60 days, SA added an average of 3.8 new accounts per day. That is the very lowest number in the entire data set so far. The months after 9/11/2001 only got down to about 8, and in the year before these last 60 days, April 2018 to April 2019, it never went below 4.5.
 
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