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]

In the time between 2008 and 2012 the power moderators created to censor during the 2008 campaign went mad with power and apread their influence to a large part of the internet. They pushed their own ideals like being transgender and child pornography to large swaths of the internet.

I am gonna offer some comentary.

SA's D&D politics board 20 years ago was rather good because the demographics of SA were also rather diverse. There are some cultural missteps.

9/11 became the war cry to the great war on terror, in 2004 the message was that we needed to stay the course.
Then the 2008 property bubble/finical crisis happened. OWS etc.

Obama rode a wave of "the war on terror is/was mistake" Lets have CHANGE!

Also we could all say america having a black president meant we are now post racial lol.

All this appealed to goons and honeslty looking back I cant blame them.

Obama/The DNC had younger people "working" for them and were able to tap those people to leverage the internet the tech.

Fuck former goon and rat king "kill it with fire" went troon. He had a job a teaching license and a wife. He threw it away for troonery before it was even trendy because at the time he was a white straight man and ID politics poisoned him.

Anyway back to my point the cat ladies, pushed the forums away from jokes, the tumblr people invading the Lets Play's and finally every mod/admin being an unfunny faggot trapped in a purity spiral brought the place down.

The glowies didnt target SA espically since facebook, reddit, and now discord are larger places.

 

[FunPosting101]

Its silly because Ranni's 'marriage' is purely a means to an end, she gives little indication that she has any affection towards the player beyond being a loyal servant and of course the player's sex is completely up to themselves.

This depends on if you get all her optional dialogue actually. She gets very pleasant and nice if you do, to the point of calling your character her "dear consort eternal" or something like that.

 

[northstar747]

Also brown moses/bellingcat just got banned from something awful for doxxing the military discord leaker....

 

[Spunt]

That's an overstatement. Yeah, SA absolutely went bananas for Obama during the 2008 campaign. It was nuts. They just dropped any scepticism they were proud of claiming to have for a snake oil salesman. It may have been stoked by embedded campaign managers since the site still had Internet clout, and drew in the kind of people who could be junior DEM staffers. But it was more an effect than a cause. It is more realistic to say SA was populated by posters who were very susceptible to the messages the Obama campaign were using. By 2012, SA was a spent force, and by 2016, it was a fringe site. They only influenced the extremely online community by virtue of originating a lot of net culture in the early 2000s. It was never a player, although for a brief time, it may have been a playing piece.

The big shift in SA's politics came just after the 2008 election, not before it. There was a forums tradition of "Toxx clauses" (named after the first user to do it) whereby you would make a prediction (usually on the outcome of the election), use the special Forbidden Emoji, and if you lost you would get permabanned. Huge numbers of Conservative and Libertarian goons toxxed for McCain in 2008, and when he lost they were perma'd en masse. This was several hundred of the most vocal and visible right-leaning posters. Most of them never bothered to make new accounts and as a result SA's Overton Window shifted hard to the left overnight. The leftist takeover of SA only really started in earnest after 2011, where the infamous Dangan Ronpa Let's Play thread brought hundreds of Tumblr users into the forums and they quickly set about embedding themselves in the moderation team (the existing mod team were too busy embedding themselves in minors to notice).

Of course HUGE numbers of liberal posters toxxed for Hilary in 2016, and when she lost the mods simply refused to ban them because Orange Man Bad. Lowtax had to intervene personally to make sure it happened (because those re-regs would buy him a LOT of pies after all), but I think they were just regular bans in the end. When Jeff bought SA, he ended the Toxx clause tradition because they caused so much drama in the by-now troon-infested userbase.

Also brown moses/bellingcat just got banned from something awful for doxxing the military discord leaker....

How things have changed. Brown Moses got a notorious schizoposter called Caro (who had Larped as a field medic during the Libyan civil war and was doing it again in Syria) picked up by Assad's goons and put in a Damascus torture prison for several years, and most goons were supportive of it at the time.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

Also brown moses/bellingcat just got banned from something awful for doxxing the military discord leaker....

eeer but wasn't that in public knowledge anyway after his arrest, or are SA claming brown faggot was the cause of his arrest?

 

[Ghostse]

Also brown moses/bellingcat just got banned from something awful for doxxing the military discord leaker....

That's not what he got banned for. And sadly just a regular ban.

He was banned for this (not paywalled currently)

PYF ProcGen: Damn thats nice I'd worship that - The Something Awful Forums

forums.somethingawful.com

Posting in the "Post your favorite AI Art" and basically doing his "Look at me and how cool and famous I am" schtick.
The mentally ill on SA thought it was brilliant so he really broke the #1 rule of SA: Don't try to make yourself more popular than the mods.

This Twitter thread got me banned from Midjourney and made international news, so I might as well post it here"

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Link to twatter thread:

https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1637927681734987777

 

[northstar747]

Seems theres legs to the brown moses arc

My browser isnt letting me upload screen caps

 

[whatever I feel like]

Brown Moses was always a terrible poster, never had anything relevant to say back before he was a mod. I like and respect Bellingcat, though.

 

[Goodbye Horses]

I like and respect Bellingcat, though.

Why? You know they're just front for the State Department, right?

 

[whatever I feel like]

Why? You know they're just front for the State Department, right?

Press [X] to doubt.

Not everyone's a conspiracy theorist loon like you.

 

[Ghostse]

Press [X] to doubt.

Not everyone's a conspiracy theorist loon like you.

Nigga they are literally funded by the CIA.

Piggins admitted to this, tried to play it off as getting one over on the glowies by taking their money saying no strings were attached.
If you believe that, I have a dead, gay forum to sell you.

 

[bucolic]

That's not what he got banned for. And sadly just a regular ban.

He was banned for this (not paywalled currently)

PYF ProcGen: Damn thats nice I'd worship that - The Something Awful Forums

forums.somethingawful.com

Posting in the "Post your favorite AI Art" and basically doing his "Look at me and how cool and famous I am" schtick.
The mentally ill on SA thought it was brilliant so he really broke the #1 rule of SA: Don't try to make yourself more popular than the mods.



Link to twatter thread:

https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1637927681734987777

They banned him for "self promotion" over that post, but the doxxing was the impetus for it. Here is what led up to it, from the Glenn Greenwald thread in CSPAM:





...and the aftermath:


Also, for anyone who doesn't believe that Bellingcat is a CIA-funded glowie front:

& lastly, I thought this was interesting:


I was never involved in Goonfleet, but I remember similar threads being posted on SA back in the day, probably in Ask/Tell, & goons getting each other jobs in the State Dept becoming a "thing" for awhile

 

[DeusVult]

... This was several hundred of the most vocal and visible right-leaning posters. Most of them never bothered to make new accounts and as a result SA's Overton Window shifted hard to the left overnight. The leftist takeover of SA only really started in earnest after 2011, where the infamous Dangan Ronpa Let's Play thread brought hundreds of Tumblr users into the forums and they quickly set about embedding themselves in the moderation team (the existing mod team were too busy embedding themselves in minors to notice). ...

Ah, finally I can understand some things a little bit better.

Maybe minor powerlevel incoming, I don't know.

I was first aware of SA because of Eve Online and Goonswarm. I was never a member of it, but because of the way they were shitting up the sandbox, the likes of Darius Johnson and Mittani (yes, I know those are very different personalities), I got the impression that they were assholes that were having fun at the expenses of others. I'm not judging (being a member on kiwifarms), but I'm trying to say that the last thing I could've imagine is that SA are some politically correct pussies, who are offended by everyone and everything. Maybe this was even correct at the time, I think it was somewhere between 2007/2009.

Now, fast forward some years - I'm not terminally online, life goes on. I'm not sure which year is exactly, but people were starting to think that maybe Star Citizen is a fucking scam (well, they are selling jpegs for 50+ bucks), because Derek Smart is more obnoxious than usual, but like a broken clock he makes some good points by accident. Then I - still under the impression that SA are politically incorrect assholes - decide to make an account (yes, fuck me, I know) to follow the Star Citizen drama more closely. All is good for some time, the Star Citizen thread was more or less everything that I looked at when visiting SA and then I posted in some other random game thread some mildly racist meme.

Now imagine my shock that not only I was banned for some time, but when I clicked around a bit more, I finally realized that I've created a paid account for some shithole infested by antifa trannies. Yeah, I haven't touched my account since then and in hindsight burning the 10 bucks would've been a better decision.

At least now I know more or less why there was such big difference between how I've imagined SA and the actual state of the forum. Some years later I found my way to the farms, so all is good at the end.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

They banned him for "self promotion" over that post, but the doxxing was the impetus for it. Here is what led up to it, from the Glenn Greenwald thread in CSPAM:

View attachment 5064318
View attachment 5064324View attachment 5064327
View attachment 5064329

...and the aftermath:
View attachment 5064334

Also, for anyone who doesn't believe that Bellingcat is a CIA-funded glowie front:
View attachment 5064339

& lastly, I thought this was interesting:
View attachment 5064358

I was never involved in Goonfleet, but I remember similar threads being posted on SA back in the day, probably in Ask/Tell, & goons getting each other jobs in the State Dept becoming a "thing" for awhile

In the attack on Benghazi an SA goon was killed and he was a regular member of Goonswarm. I recall the forums doing a fundraiser for him in the wake of his death. He has been regularly posting on SA, right up until he got killed, using state dept computers sitting in his office in Benghazi. My memory is hazy on this detail but I think he was even actively chatting with some goons on a game server when the attack started and after a few worried messages "something is happening" type messages, went silent. Later it was revealed he was one of the Americans killed.

There was definitely a network of state department workers within goonswarm and on SA. I don't think it was nefarious, mostly just recent male college grads that had some, or none, tech skills, needed jobs. They discovered by chatting online that the state department might hire them and its way easier to get hired if you have contacts with current employees. I think the sorry state of tech skills by the generation in charge of state dept. hiring during the early aughts thought shit like posting on the internet, basic html and uploading jpegs seem like legit tech skills for many lower level embassy jobs within the State Dept. so happily hired lots of goons. (Any college grad with real tech skills was recruited by NSA and the CIA if they had any interest in govt work.)

 

[White Devil]

In the attack on Benghazi an SA goon was killed and he was a regular member of Goonswarm. I recall the forums doing a fundraiser for him in the wake of his death. He has been regularly posting on SA right up until he got killed on state dept computers sitting in Benghazi. My memory is hazy on this detail but I think he was even actively chatting with goons on a game when the attack started and after a few worried message about something happening went silent. Later it was revealed he was one of the Americans killed.

Vilerat. He was also a Eve goon.

He's a permanent mod of DnD in remembrance. From what I remember of him, he was a real asshole too but god forbid you mention that nowadays since he's dead.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Vilerat. He was also a Eve goon.

He's a permanent mod of DnD in remembrance. From what I remember of him, he was a real asshole too but god forbid you mention that nowadays since he's dead.

If I'm not mistaken his mom went hardcore Trump supporter and was happy to let Trump use her, and Vilerat's death to lambast Clinton and demand Benghazi investigations. It was an ultimate trolling of Vilerat's martyrdom on SA.

Vilerat was definitely a lefty. I thought his mom using his death to vilify and crucify Clinton during the 2016 campaign was darkly and hilariously ironic given the background I knew.

 

[Something Awful]

Alright, here's the latest drama that's almost too stupid to talk about. I don't even know where to start with this one, but it resulted in two staff members autobanning, so I guess I shall try to document it.

As a result of some dumb argument, someone publicly posted screenshots of private messages that (accidentally) revealed the phone number of noted troon "Lady Radia". Apparently, before this happened, the perpetrator had messaged recently-appointed admin Fritz the Horse (in the middle of the night), who simply told him not to post the PMs instead of instantly going for a ban. Turns out this was a mistake.



"Real harm was done to Radia that can't be undone or apologized for, posting a goon's phone # even accidentally is insanely bad". Yeah I don't know about that, we must have different standards for "real harm" and "insanely bad". It's a fucking phone number.

Be that as it may, Fritz the Horse resigned in shame and autobanned.


"Lady Radia" also autobanned, because, uh, I'm not sure why.


"getting Actually Doxxed was a bridge too far for me". Yeah, you didn't get doxxxed, it's just a phone number. They used to publish them in public phone books. But of course everything is heightened for troons, as demonstrated by the Hogwarts genocide.

Troons somehow feel this is a reason to "finally quit SA". Wish they actually would, but we all know it's not happening.



Also somehow involved in this was cinci zoo sniper, a mod mainly responsible for the D&D Ukraine thread (I think he was doing a decent job, although his personality was that of a humorless hall monitor). Anyway, he autobanned as well.




I'll note that Fritz the Horse and cinci zoo sniper were both D&D mods, and this dumb shit is part of a wider power struggle between C-Spam (insane Marxists), D&D (liberals), GBS (random retards), and assorted troons.

The latter in particular have a grudge with D&D because of a thread about trans athletes that was allowed to go on for almost 30 pages. The thread was really just a honeypot to weed out wrongthinkers, but it meant that people were "debating the existence of trans people", and obviously that's unacceptable.



And here we have a C-Spam poster smelling blood in the water and trying to go for the kill:




Et cetera. I'm sure there's more to this, since it resulted in several threads with hundreds of posts, but I've already lost enough brain cells writing this post. If none of this shit makes sense to you, you're not alone. Forget it, it's Goontown.

 

[northstar747]

phone posting but in the SAD thread the Lady Radia thread a goon made remarks that it was discord drama leaking over.

the zoo sniper dude, whose I believe is finish, or some other Eastern European County hence his modding of The Ukraine War Thread, Anyway he was going to Bat for Brown Moses So I m sure that put him on a list.

Also his post about excel are that he was tracking the top SAD posters and trying to prove that a new QCS "crew" was forming.

I m starting the see that the moderation of SA is like a fucking HOA. The Admin team needs to make a vitrual meeting meaning goons need to prepare beforhand what the issues are set the post time limit an hour.

Have the admin team agree that like every 3rd tuesday they and jeff will be online goons post their pre written issue/problem/idea for solution etc.

 

[Something Awful]

the zoo sniper dude, whose I believe is finish, or some other Eastern European County hence his modding of The Ukraine War Thread, Anyway he was going to Bat for Brown Moses So I m sure that put him on a list.

He's Latvian, and as much as I dislike his personality, I have to give him some props for putting his money where his mouth is: he helped organize a donation drive for Ukraine in D&D and personally donated 6,300 euros.

 

[Hybrid Icing]

Yeah, if you accept what the D&D Ukraine thread was going for (a somewhat dispassionate and boring tone, as opposed to the "PUTIN POOPED HIS PANTS" of GBS or "Why haven't the Ukrainians surrendered yet so Russians can kill them easier?" of C-SPAM), cinci did a pretty good job of it.

He should've just said his judgment was clouded by troon hormones, he would've been fine.