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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big pauper said:
it could have sunsetted into obscurity with little fanfare but the 2016 culture wars really just killed the website in the span of a few years. everybody i met on SA got banned and stopped associating with the website
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It was wild to see the change happen. Almost overnight the IRC channels got invaded by people demanding shit like the removal of flashing gifs because they were spastics and of course policing language and banishing wrongthink.


vinrock said:
I'm an early SA goon and recall reddit being a pretty barren site around 2009 that was mostly fulla kids shitposting nonsense. After the Digg redesign everyone from there moved to reddit and i moreso consider those people the first real redditors.
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When GBS became just endless news puns in the catlady era, a not insignificant amount of goons spent time on reddit. They were proto redditors, and there was a fair amount of channers too.

The very early redditors even gave a poster of the year award to an account called Gradual Nigger, a poster who wrote each post so that it started off normal, went through minstrel affect and then ended in ebonics.
 
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Mods clashing with their userbase on horny shit.

I also learned that the reason MLP was banned from the website was because people really fucking hated pony avatars.
 
Something Awful said:
Ok, but we're not online marketers trying to figure out of it's worth advertising on the site, so pure "traffic" is less important than the number of active posters. The way you phrased it made it sound like it's a complete ghost town, and that's not really the case.


That seems in line with what Jeffrey has posted:

View attachment 8708191
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When was the last time Jeffrey posted a state of the forums?
 
Ghostse said:
Blud, its literally in the screen shot: May 2025
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Wait, he's not done one since? That's a poor sign.

I feel in general I don't see Jeffrey much anymore, I guess its just tiring to deal with a forum like this when its mostly just middle aged men making the same stupid jokes for 20 years straight, but that begs the question of why even buy, if I recall correctly he talked about SA as if it was the only thing keeping from killing himself.
 
Shotgun Badger said:
Wait, he's not done one since? That's a poor sign.

I feel in general I don't see Jeffrey much anymore, I guess its just tiring to deal with a forum like this when its mostly just middle aged men making the same stupid jokes for 20 years straight, but that begs the question of why even buy, if I recall correctly he talked about SA as if it was the only thing keeping from killing himself.
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Yet another reason why SA should be destroyed!
 
My assumption is at this point SA is just a lost cause and it's the elephant in the room nobody wants to really acknowledge. Jeffrey bought it for a pittance compared to what Lowtax could've sold for at its peak and today SA is the virtual equivalent of buying the row of vending machines at the laundromat. You are absolutely never going to be able to do anything at all with them in any sort of meaningful way, but if you show up once a week to refill the Doritos and Coke you can nickel and dime your way to making your money back and then having a small bit of constant cash flow. Just replace Doritos and Coke with forum avatars and unbans.
 
northstar747 said:
I thought it was because pedo mod aatrek in the tviv, personally hated MLP FIM, and made mentioning it verboten and the culture just kinda stuck.
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No that's why he threw the first thread to the wolves. The second thread generating scores of pony avatars in just two weeks is what caused a forever ban on the franchise.

Anyway a poster called "The Colonel" went fucking nuclear at Twitter spergs bitching about not having a Spanish translation of Undertale yet, and in the middle of a bunch of textwalls revealed they have a youtube channel.
 
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Barry Williams said:
My assumption is at this point SA is just a lost cause and it's the elephant in the room nobody wants to really acknowledge. Jeffrey bought it for a pittance compared to what Lowtax could've sold for at its peak
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never4get the Conde Nast offer lmao

Jeffrey buying SA is like the adults who buy the toy they wanted as a kid. It's a weird, desperate attempt to relive imagined glory days. Nothing funny has come out of SA, they're completely irrelevant. They cant even sustain griefing operations in vidya like before.

With the culture the way it is now could they even do any trolling? Would they be allowed?
 
Ghostse said:
Something Awful said:
Dunno, but little known fact: you can put a fake name in the form when making a purchase. It seems there’s no system in place for actually comparing it against the name under which your credit/debit card is registered.
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No longer the case.
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If you're in the USA and have a checking account you can get around that by using privacy.com. :smug: (It will assign a virtual credit card, you can have it generate a number that can only be used once, or only on one site, or until you shut it off. The virtual number has no address data or name on it, so you can enter any name, address, and phone number - for any country - and it will work.)
 
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