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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TiggerNits said:
SA desperately wanted to be the gatekeepers of cool, which would have been like letting the kids from the short us tell people where they had to sit during lunch
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This was the best way to understand the site. It had cache; reputation for being funny, articles written about it, the memes and photoshops spread around the web (enter the need for watermarking), fights with ebaums, IRL posters were showing up on G4... And on top of that it had like other's have pointed out, the $10 gate that not only blocked most of the hoi polli from doing anything but fogging up the glass as they looked in, but also created this mystique of 'wow a site you have to PAY to use? whoaaaa'.

This in turn led to goons somehow thinking that they were a cut above when in reality they just wrote words on a forum of a "famous" website that required paying Richard to do God knows what (tranny fucking, pills) and this extraordinary sense of internet elitism. If you weren't good enough or broke the rules: banned!

Basically, imagine the biggest losers you can think of but with a totally misguided sense of superiority/smugness, and the ability to send you to the internet shadow zone for upsetting the mods or enough other loud schizos mashing the big ole report button, and you understand SA.
 
Brain Problems said:
This was the best way to understand the site. It had cache; reputation for being funny, articles written about it, the memes and photoshops spread around the web (enter the need for watermarking), fights with ebaums, IRL posters were showing up on G4... And on top of that it had like other's have pointed out, the $10 gate that not only blocked most of the hoi polli from doing anything but fogging up the glass as they looked in, but also created this mystique of 'wow a site you have to PAY to use? whoaaaa'.
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also the internet landscape is totally different now than it was back then, that was kind of what you needed to do to run a forum back in like 2004. the internet was the wild west and people didn't know how to behave themselves online and moderation was just as much about keeping the forum functioning as it was about keeping people behaving. i remember the facepunch forums were clearly blueprinted on something awful, like a lot of other forums, and they kind of did have some semblance of prestige. but it was Internet Prestige, on a website specifically made to make fun of people who took the idea of Internet Prestige seriously

which probably would have self corrected but then obama gets elected and the big tech social media ecosystem rolls around and completely pulls a 180 on how internet culture is structured. so now the irony that used to just be a blowoff valve for any minor rule breaking or criticism for a website's federated authority became a literal zone rouge of constant global meta-ironic warfare. people who moderate forums are now seen as gatekeepers from the masses instead of gatekeepers for the masses even though their job didn't change at all, people's perception of it did. see: /b/

specifically the whole FYAD part of something awful was clearly a rotten tumor that metastasized outside of the website and continued spreading to rest of the internet, the entirety of twitter's early following and buzzfeed's original staff was just FYAD posters. the 'ironic' girlie girlie lisa frank sparkle butterfly stuff that was jarringly funny back then is just unironically how trannies act now so in hindsight it was probably some weird pseudo-fetishistic thing layered on top of all of the irony
 
big pauper said:
specifically the whole FYAD part of something awful was clearly a rotten tumor that metastasized outside of the website and continued spreading to rest of the internet, the entirety of twitter's early following and buzzfeed's original staff was just FYAD posters. the 'ironic' girlie girlie lisa frank sparkle butterfly stuff that was jarringly funny back then is just unironically how trannies act now so in hindsight it was probably some weird pseudo-fetishistic thing layered on top of all of the irony
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Did niggerstomper58's famous rereg post become a meme due to it being seen as ridiculous or due to it being disturbingly prescient?
I assume the opening sentence just had a nice catch to it but his words always struck me as being dead serious.
 
Coolio55 said:
Did niggerstomper58's famous rereg post become a meme due to it being seen as ridiculous or due to it being disturbingly prescient?
I assume the opening sentence just had a nice catch to it but his words always struck me as being dead serious.
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the culture of something awful was in constant conflict between 'people doing things ironically to mock the thing' and 'people doing things ironically to avoid criticism.' ultimately what tore the website's relevancy and lowtax's skull apart was the culture of gaslighting and petty moderator sycophancy that made it impossible to distinguish which camp of intentions someone belonged to until they dickrode a moderator to dish out a punishment to you for being 'unfunny'. i don't think anybody even considered it could have been genuine because it was funny
 
big pauper said:
specifically the whole FYAD part of something awful was clearly a rotten tumor that metastasized outside of the website and continued spreading to rest of the internet, the entirety of twitter's early following and buzzfeed's original staff was just FYAD posters. the 'ironic' girlie girlie lisa frank sparkle butterfly stuff that was jarringly funny back then is just unironically how trannies act now so in hindsight it was probably some weird pseudo-fetishistic thing layered on top of all of the irony
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I don't know how true this rumor is, but I saw a lot of discussion and near-confirmation of it during gamergate, which shook out a lot of anons and former goons who had issues with forum administration and endless dirt on the inside dealings. FYAD goons took over r/SRS and gained powermod status over multiple subs, then openly trooned out and became the "ironic" trolling. They'd done it before with smaller forums on their whole furry exterminatus campaign.
 
Piggle-o said:
I don't know how true this rumor is, but I saw a lot of discussion and near-confirmation of it during gamergate, which shook out a lot of anons and former goons who had issues with forum administration and endless dirt on the inside dealings. FYAD goons took over r/SRS and gained powermod status over multiple subs, then openly trooned out and became the "ironic" trolling. They'd done it before with smaller forums on their whole furry exterminatus campaign.
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peak Staring Into Abyss behaviour - also a ton of ironic and popular twitter accounts like Dril are ex-FYAD that have managed to import their shtick over there
 
Piggle-o said:
I don't know how true this rumor is, but I saw a lot of discussion and near-confirmation of it during gamergate, which shook out a lot of anons and former goons who had issues with forum administration and endless dirt on the inside dealings. FYAD goons took over r/SRS and gained powermod status over multiple subs, then openly trooned out and became the "ironic" trolling. They'd done it before with smaller forums on their whole furry exterminatus campaign.
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It was less FYAD and more done by LF and it's offshoots. They were the ones who focused on politicizing the site as much as possible and went on crusades against things like Reaganbook and whatever MRA blogs existed at the time.
 
Iirc FYAD went on to make “Weird Twitter,” LF and CSPAM and the other political boards (and E/N lol) went on to colonize Reddit and Tumblr with extreme woke shit. There was a lot of overlap of course, which is why legacy Xitter superstars like dril spend so much time seething at Elon and yelling at establishment democrats for not being sufficiently pro-troon and pro-immigrant.

You can’t really overstate how the paywall and broadband Internet not being common until the 2010s set up SA to become the hugbox it is now. Up to like, 2008, everyone I knew who had free access to the Internet and a credit card was a latchkey kid with rich and/or neglectful parents. They got sucked into this because their parental figures didn’t really give a shit and would, at best, throw money at them in lieu of proper attention and parenting. Goon I knew irl who fit this description also diagnosed himself with “gynophobia” because he went to an all boys private school so he didn’t know how to talk to women, and he’d also tell you about his lactation fetish if he had the slightest excuse to. Not trying to get all Freudian but those types clearly knew they needed real parental figures in their lives, and ended up seeking that on fucking Something Awful of all places. A lot of those kids ended up joining the computer science club once they went to college, and then they started hanging out exclusively with other unwashed, maladjusted goons since they had more freedom.

Got off on a bit of a tangent there but that’s why I think troonism is a first world phenomenon.
 
It's funny how SA had the most obvious lesson about the internet. Originally the other forum moderators were Al and Rainbrow Bright and had a cabal of IRC friends who ran the forum. They also secretly made hidden forums and did whatever they wanted behind his back. So, he permabanned them and replaced them with elpintogrande and Fistgrrl. Who would go on to pretty much do the same thing just slightly more openly.

The whole place is a lesson on a lack of leadership means everything gets subverted by retards and malicious actors who ruin anything good and make you kill yourself. It's patient zero to the modern internet for that very reason. You even get the open usage and recruiting from Glowniggers like Vilerat.
 
Brain Problems said:
This in turn led to goons somehow thinking that they were a cut above when in reality they just wrote words on a forum of a "famous" website that required paying Richard to do God knows what (tranny fucking, pills) and this extraordinary sense of internet elitism. If you weren't good enough or broke the rules: banned!
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Meanwhile they were mostly pathetic lunatics. Most of them were basement dwellers, but amazingly, some of them were actually below that and were actually LITERALLY living in crawlspaces. And literally literally, not figuratively literally. Literally in fucking crawlspaces.
big pauper said:
the 'ironic' girlie girlie lisa frank sparkle butterfly stuff that was jarringly funny back then is just unironically how trannies act now so in hindsight it was probably some weird pseudo-fetishistic thing layered on top of all of the irony
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SA unironically ruined irony.
 
Havel the Rock said:
Up to like, 2008, everyone I knew who had free access to the Internet and a credit card was a latchkey kid with rich and/or neglectful parents. They got sucked into this because their parental figures didn’t really give a shit and would, at best, throw money at them in lieu of proper attention and parenting.
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It worked out well enough for most of them. Maybe not the diehard goons, but the casuals and lurkers. That whole cohort ended up pretty resilient and immune to memes and psyops. Some were radicalized, but nowhere near as bad as the generation right after that. I don't think the total results are in yet, suicide rates take a long time to form a real pattern and the oldest of them have barely hit 50.

AnOminous said:
Meanwhile they were mostly pathetic lunatics.
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As someone already said, SA was the paradigm for forums for years.
 
FYAD was never really all that political, mostly they just made fun of retards and posted about lunch/video games while doing improv comedy.
 
Frederica Bernkastel said:
Another popular board for a lot of these people for their weird politics was the Rhizzone. A lot of them are graduate humanities majors that only have degrees that exist to produce propaganda mills for higher education. And many of them were ChapoTrapHouse retards too.
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Isn't Rhizzone just one shard of the infinitely splintering LF diaspora?
 
Henri Barbusse said:
Isn't Rhizzone just one shard of the infinitely splintering LF diaspora?
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One of the first ones that got formed after LF got shut down. They are less culty than WDDP.org but still, they are pretty much as you'd expect them to be. Whiny white americans bitching about being born in the USA and white people existing.
 
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