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

[northstar747]

Mods?...knew?

 

[autistic dog]

there are tons of thriving forums like lipstick alley and narrow, single interest travel sites

the difference is that the janitors there are people who work behind the scenes to make things work and not ham-fisted tyrants enforcing message discipline

you don't get banned on the southwest airlines forums for complaining about the snack mix

bodybuilding.com forum is still going strong I think

 

[Ghostse]

I know, right? Where else but SA can you get the raw experience of reading a marginally funny post followed by twenty people quoting it and adding "lmao". That's some good engagement.

lmao

 

[White Devil]

lmao

 

[Thumb Butler]

lmao

:

 

[Weppers]

lmao

im gay

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

Mods? ban these chucklefucks

 

[Ghostse]

If anyone wants a serious post about why SA will never come back, the reason why is because there’s no need for it anymore. If you want to broadcast your thoughts to the world, you have Facebook and Twitter. If you want to chat in a closed small-knit community of likeminded individuals, there’s subreddits. What do you get from SA that isn’t done better somewhere else?

In conclusion, the poster that said SA is essentially a retirement home for people who can’t quit Web 1.0 is pretty much spot on. Nobody else wants to use an internet forum built (literally) 25 years ago, whether they’re on PHP8 or not. And as much as I think astral really is doing an OK job (updating from PHP5 to 7 is a pain in the ass I’ve literally done it), you can only polish this turd so much.

You're broadly correct but I think there is a certain value to still be had in old school forums, this place is clearly evidence of that, and even somewhere like Resetera shows it can still be viable in the modern age.

I guess the question is what could SA possibly offer that's unique and sets it apart? Its mostly kept on life support by inertia from people who've posted there for years, its lunch has been thoroughly eaten by both Twitter and Reddit, and even here to some degree, so where can it go? I almost feel like they might be able to do something if they played into the notion that they are a vault of some of the most important moments of internet history, but then that might mean recognizing its problematic past!

The moment that started it's downturn circa 2007 was due to how strict the moderation back then was compared to pretty much every other web forum at the time, along with the new crop of mods being a cat-lady brigade that would end up giving the keys to the site to the troons half a decade later out of fear. A certain strictness was fine but it was then combined with clear favoritism of specific posters and excessive neuroticism about 4chan lingo that would net you a ban because the world "Lulz" was used once in a post the length of several thousand words. The reputation for the place being a bunch of elitist nerds was now firmly established and the list of persons who'd want to pay 10 dollars for an internet forum account became a lot shorter due to this excessive legalistic strictness.

I like my Web 1.0 forums. I don't need a bunch of bells and whistles to make shitposts. SA is just a hive of sad brain tranny commie cucks ... which isn't a problem except you can't troll them because of the gay mods.

In TYOL 2000, SA's low barrier to entry of "Have a credit card and $10" worked amazingly well by keeping out the worst spam bots, highschoolers, and drooling retards, but still allowing anonymity - Lowtax keeping a plaintext csv of you CC data not withstanding. There was great fun to be had in getting idiots to spend $10 to come to try to defend themselves and then get soundly mocked.

$10 was also just enough skin in the game to keep people from being complete morons without making it paralyzing.

I'd argue the comparitively strict moderation was one of the key facets of SA's rise. Banning people for low-content posting and shitting up busy threads kept discussions interesting and on topic. That attracted creatives because when you posted what you made it wasn't buried by a bunch of frothing retards or spammers.

The problem wasn't the moderation was strict, it was that it was unequally enforced.
At first, legitimately interesting, smart, or creative posters were given a longer leash because they contributed to the site.
That turned into if you were sucking off the moderators, even if you had nothing to add to the forum beyond moistening a mod's browneye, you could get away with murder and anyone who stepped to you doing the same got punished. This turned into gay posting cliques and mod/admin cults of personality - made worse by Lowtax having checked out and leaving the lunatics to run the assylum.

This came to a head in the 2008 election, where the moderation didn't even try to hide their bias and many McCain toxxers wisely decided to never come back. Then a few years later you got the Dangan Rompa tumblr influx and the cancer was terminal.

So you ended up with things like
Back in the day you had femcels like Eggplant Wizard (real name Elanor Jefferson who worked for the classics department of Rutgers University and wrote werewolf rape and incest fiction under the pen name Kali Lowe) who, when sad because they were alone for the holidays, would wander into threads like the Military History thread and make them justify their existence because she didn't find them interesting.

and more recently, You had the commies come and shit up the Landlord thread a few years with only the most token of punishments for the threadshitters and zero for the ring leaders. The entire commie thread should have been banned + 30, but instead they shut down the Landlord thread and any of the regular thread posts who attacked to 'clap back' got punished and anyone who brought it up in QCS likewise got a sack tap.

Really though SA is in a death spiral.
As others said, it doesn't bring anything to the table.
They drove off all the creatives for being more popular than the mods, and not maintaining sufficient levels of right-think.
Its just cannibalizing trannies now who post the same "conservative pwns" you can read on facebook.

It's cute Jeff spent 450k to make like what 40k in profit? A year honestly not bad but lowtaxs Patreon brought in better money.

I think Jeff is right to shut down all goon grifting funds etc.

He might want to grow the site and sell it like resetera did.

To be frank Jeff should just drop the 10 dollar fee. Or do a mass email and re instate all banned accounts and just have shark month. If he wanted to get more people back or on.

A business paying for itself in about ~10 years with no growth is about normal for valuation. And don't forget you've got access to 'tards so gulliable they'll give people 90K with no accountability.
Jeffo got a pretty good deal money wise all things considered.
OTOH, its like buying a Civet Cat farm. Yes, you have money making entity, but you have to pick coffee beans out of catshit.

Lmao, I forgot about that, fucking AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and your homepage, really going to reel in the zoomers with those options on their profiles Jeffrey!

My god, it can't be that much work to update it with things like Twitter, Discord and Instagram surely?

AIM was online until almost 2018; the service only really shut down because the top-level certs were expiring and Oath (nee america online) didn't want the support headache from swapping them and having old ancient clients not working so they pulled the plug.

ICQ is still alive and kicking, more than ever before. It faded in the west but is #1 in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It is (or was) getting a bigger market share in China due to WhatsApp cucking to the commies. That's probably going to stop once Russia cucks to Xi due to Ukraine.

Anyway, most forums have just relabled "AIM" as "Discord".

Hilarious bit of Web 1.0 trivia:
The world's commodities markets ran on Yahoo messenger until Verizon the plug on it (reason: YIM supported plugins, including an end-to-end encryption plug in which is why traders adopted it). I don't remember what the replacement was, YIM got a life extension because brokerages that had big blocks of Verizon called them up an said "You can't, we run hundreds of millions through this platform".

 

[autistic dog]

In 2016 the mods tried to bitch out from banning all the Hillary toxxers until Lowtax showed up to ban them. Something about the psychic damage everyone suffered being punishment enough.

 

[Next Task]

At the end of the day, the only thing Something Awful has to attract new users is access to its community. And look at that community. I can't imagine that there's anything more than the weakest dribble of actual, new members signing up, and of them they're all people you'd want to kick out of any regular group of people. So you're stuck with an increasingly bitter, insular group of old-timers prone to purity spirals and driving out threats to their popularity. It's likely enough to keep YOSPOS in profit, but as @Ghostse points out, he's still only king of Shit Mountain.

Even worse for him, he actually cares about his community. No ResetEra golden parachute for him - he wants to stick around and make things better, not just keep it vaguely humming along until it's attractive enough to offload for a profit. He still could, though. Just to compare to a couple of other community watch threads we have, I don't think million-dollar payouts are even remotely possible for anyone at RPGNet or ResetEra, certainly not anymore.

 

[AnOminous]

Just to compare to a couple of other community watch threads we have, I don't think million-dollar payouts are even remotely possible for anyone at RPGNet or ResetEra, certainly not anymore.

Isamu Fukui sold out for $4.55 million. Probably whatever company bought it could eject all the loony troons and turn it into a normal forum if they felt like it. For some reason it gets traffic despite its completely toxic, retarded userbase.

 

[Next Task]

Isamu Fukui sold out for $4.55 million. Probably whatever company bought it could eject all the loony troons and turn it into a normal forum if they felt like it. For some reason it gets traffic despite its completely toxic, retarded userbase.

And no one still there can get a payout now, can they. There's, what, one employed 'manager' and the rest are unpaid jannies who do it for the dopamine of being teeny tiny fascists over a group of equally teeny tiny fascists. A buyout would involve none of them, except for the likely 'why can't we make it a collectivist forum?' posts that some of them would make before continuing to post as usual.

Jeff made an investment. It's a dumb, culturally-based investment, but the goons have already shown that they'll just throw money at whoever has the keys to they safe space. Any improvements he makes have been on hold for at least a decade already, so there's not even any need to spruce up the forums to make them more inviting or accessible. SA has a great deal of inertia keeping it going, so I'd expect him to turn a profit, no matter how few changes he makes; all he has to do is occasionally sound like he's trying to make things better and that's enough. Toxic, retarded userbases can be a source of income if you're the one monetising them. He, at least, inherited a system of doing that.

ResetEra is a free registration with ad revenue going to whatever Nordic company bought them, so there's not even a personal stake there. Of course, they were all also stupid enough to believe that Cerium did have a personal stake, rather than just taking advantage of woke outrage to siphon off some of NeoGAF's userbase. Somehow, I think ResetEra's userbase is even dumber than Something Awful's, and that takes quite some doing, especially considering they're not the ones constantly repaying to be on the forum.

 

[AnOminous]

And no one still there can get a payout now, can they. There's, what, one employed 'manager' and the rest are unpaid jannies who do it for the dopamine of being teeny tiny fascists over a group of equally teeny tiny fascists. A buyout would involve none of them, except for the likely 'why can't we make it a collectivist forum?' posts that some of them would make before continuing to post as usual.

The current owner could if they turned it into a normal forum and/or just shut it down and sold it for whatever name value it has. I doubt it would be what they paid for it unless they actually did turn it normie though. Even normies are getting sick of being continually harassed by freakish perverts for saying normie things and you need them for advertisers.

 

[Tanner Glass]

At the end of the day, the only thing Something Awful has to attract new users is access to its community. And look at that community. I can't imagine that there's anything more than the weakest dribble of actual, new members signing up, and of them they're all people you'd want to kick out of any regular group of people. So you're stuck with an increasingly bitter, insular group of old-timers prone to purity spirals and driving out threats to their popularity. It's likely enough to keep YOSPOS in profit, but as @Ghostse points out, he's still only king of Shit Mountain.

It's also worth pointing out - that even if a new user did accidentally join and pay $10 - Something Awful is the single most hostile community there is towards new users.

Anything you might conceivablely do as a new user on SA has all kinds of barriers to jump through and you'll be regarded as "lesser" the entire time. Let me share with you this list of instructions.

To be invited to one of these groups, join the Discord and follow the instructions in the #welcome channel:

• Step 1. Accept the Discord server's rules in the #before-you-begin channel.
  
  
• Step 2. Request an invite code by typing pls inviteme [FC] [firstname lastname] in #ffgoons-auth, where [FC] is the company you wish to join: PBC, DGKK, TPT or EMC (NA groups) or PCD (EU group). @Tataru will send you a direct message with an invite code.
  
  
• Step 3. Right-click on the placard outside the FC house or an FC member and chose "View Company Profile", then "Submit Application". In the box that pops up, type in your full Discord username (for example, minfilia#1234; not your nickname) and the provided code. Your application will be processed as soon as possible.

These are the instructions to join the fucking FFXIV guild (which is not a roaring fun time, shockingly). The DMV has a simpler set of instructions. On top of that - because that's just the discord and initial invite - you also have to sign up on the offsite to sign up for most raid groups (and that offsite has it's own instructions and links to your SA account).

Shockingly most people don't bother jumping though that gigantic pile of hoops to play a fucking video game with internet weirdos - who don't do much beyond what a normal guild does these days anyhow.

I don't play Dragonflight - but pre Dragonflight the WoW guild was basically fucking dead as shit and never did anything of fun or value for the years I was in it - the random guilds I was in before/after were much more fun and any "good WoW memories" I have aren't in the SA guild.

 

[White Devil]

It's also worth pointing out - that even if a new user did accidentally join and pay $10 - Something Awful is the single most hostile community there is towards new users.

Anything you might conceivablely do as a new user on SA has all kinds of barriers to jump through and you'll be regarded as "lesser" the entire time. Let me share with you this list of instructions.



These are the instructions to join the fucking FFXIV guild (which is not a roaring fun time, shockingly). The DMV has a simpler set of instructions. On top of that - because that's just the discord and initial invite - you also have to sign up on the offsite to sign up for most raid groups (and that offsite has it's own instructions and links to your SA account).

Shockingly most people don't bother jumping though that gigantic pile of hoops to play a fucking video game with internet weirdos - who don't do much beyond what a normal guild does these days anyhow.

I don't play Dragonflight - but pre Dragonflight the WoW guild was basically fucking dead as shit and never did anything of fun or value for the years I was in it - the random guilds I was in before/after were much more fun and any "good WoW memories" I have aren't in the SA guild.

Almost all the goon gaming guilds had those hoops. I think it started with EVE and then everyone else did it.

 

[proteus4994]

Isamu Fukui sold out for $4.55 million. Probably whatever company bought it could eject all the loony troons and turn it into a normal forum if they felt like it. For some reason it gets traffic despite its completely toxic, retarded userbase.

True, but Christ, if you can’t imagine who would visit SA in 2022, I really have to question who would visit if you just removed 80% of its existing user base.

There are no new users to draw to SA no matter what you did with it. The only money to be made are from the people still there. I cannot possibly see what you would turn SA into after ejecting the vast majority of the only people who would still want to use it.

 

[Something Awful]

ICQ is still alive and kicking, more than ever before. It faded in the west but is #1 in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.

This is not true. WhatsApp and Telegram are the most popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, most people there have no idea what ICQ is. I don't know about Central Asia, but I doubt it's hugely popular there either. According to some article I found, ICQ has 11 million monthly users worldwide as of 2022 (down from 100 million a couple of decades ago).

 

[Shotgun Badger]

This is not true. WhatsApp and Telegram are the most popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, most people there have no idea what ICQ is. I don't know about Central Asia, but I doubt it's hugely popular there either. According to some article I found, ICQ has 11 million monthly users worldwide as of 2022 (down from 100 million a couple of decades ago).

Yeah it was my understanding that Telegram is very popular in the former Soviet Union, its were people seem to get all their updates on the Ukrainian war.

 

[Brain Problems]

It's also worth pointing out - that even if a new user did accidentally join and pay $10 - Something Awful is the single most hostile community there is towards new users.

Anything you might conceivablely do as a new user on SA has all kinds of barriers to jump through and you'll be regarded as "lesser" the entire time. Let me share with you this list of instructions.



These are the instructions to join the fucking FFXIV guild (which is not a roaring fun time, shockingly). The DMV has a simpler set of instructions. On top of that - because that's just the discord and initial invite - you also have to sign up on the offsite to sign up for most raid groups (and that offsite has it's own instructions and links to your SA account).

Shockingly most people don't bother jumping though that gigantic pile of hoops to play a fucking video game with internet weirdos - who don't do much beyond what a normal guild does these days anyhow.

I don't play Dragonflight - but pre Dragonflight the WoW guild was basically fucking dead as shit and never did anything of fun or value for the years I was in it - the random guilds I was in before/after were much more fun and any "good WoW memories" I have aren't in the SA guild.

Vaguely related but also nearly every fucking thread has its own sub-rules and hidden third-rails buried inside multi-post OPs. It's pants on head retarded that isn't gatekeeping as much as just laying out invisible rainbow bear traps for people who don't know better and will never get the chance to know because speds that consider the site and threads their own special places mash that report button faster than a goon hitting "download" on underage n00dz.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Vaguely related but also nearly every fucking thread has its own sub-rules and hidden third-rails buried inside multi-post OPs. It's pants on head retarded that isn't gatekeeping as much as just laying out invisible rainbow bear traps for people who don't know better and will never get the chance to know because speds that consider the site and threads their own special places mash that report button faster than a goon hitting "download" on underage n00dz.

It's every mega-post, every online game, every offline game, every single thing is full of hoops to jump through. There are hoops for posting LPs, posting photoshops, and buying/selling stuff. It's insane.

They're shocked when most normal users fuck off to Reddit instead to do things easier because "joining a video game guild" shouldn't take 4+ forms and 2+ verifications.