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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BlueSpark said:
I'd never in a million years have thought that I'd ever use twitter as a positive example of anything, but, as far as censorship goes, they are nowhere near as bad as SA.
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Yeah I'd love to see the backlash on twitter if they just had random moderators decide (for example just off the top of my head)

- To completely ban any and all fat jokes
- To ban the word retard or anyone saying that someone was triggered
- To ban the discussion of something like Doobie's Doghouse
- To ban people for supporting Trump and any discussion where that takes place
- To ban people from making fun of Hillary Clinton
- To ban images of Krusty the Clown
- To ban people from saying you can be racist against white people

Then cite a rule that the mods have 100% authority and users don't even have the ability to talk about these decisions existing much less question them.

The only reason SA has any activity at all is that the terrible mods are too lazy to completely ruin whatever is left of it. If you had more moderators or the existing ones had the stamina of Wikipedia admins then SA would have finally died a long time ago.
 
Doug_Hitzel said:
A marketplace for child pornography. That’s how somethingawful stays alive.
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Back when SA lead the charge to get all of those jailbait subreddits kicked off of reddit, one of the things used as reasoning for the shutdown were supposed screencaps of private messages of r/jailbait regulars sharing CP. People on reddit at the time who protested the shutdown theorized that goons were sending each other their CP collection and screencapping it as a false flag of sorts.

Given what we know about SA now, and the fact that the Aatrek and Shmorky incidents occurred since then (as well as FAU hemming and hawing about banning some random D&D shithead who was literally caught torrenting CP, they might have been on to something.
 
Ruin said:
Is there context here? That seems like a weirdly specific thing to ban.
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The mods have a long long history of getting pissed off by something weirdly specific and using their unquestioned authority to eliminate it.

A screengrab of Krusty having a heart attack became a meme that people were posting. After awhile Genesplicer decided he didn't find it funny and started punishing people for posting it. This made people post it more so he punished people for posting it even harder. This caused people to try and find ways around this by referencing Krusty in other ways which was also punished. It got to the point where any image of Krusty, at all, was punished. FactsAreUseless punished anyone who questioned any of this.

It's a more recent example of the terrible moderation on SA since genesplicer is an old man and got easily baited into being a gigantic faggot with his authority. The entire joke was that it was something completely stupid to forbid.

It's the same thing as gnarlyhotep deciding that goons spending $14,000 on a racist's hotdog restaurant kickstarter was forbidden as a topic of discussion and he punished anyone mentioning it and deleted any thread made about it.

Lowtax's stellar moderation he thinks Twitter needs to learn a lesson from is a long history of people using their unquestioned authority and discretion to take out their, sometimes really weird, personal frustrations on his customers. To the point where tens of thousands of them have been driven away and he is crying about being in debt with <10% of the revenue.
 
Anime is Blood said:
The mods have a long long history of getting pissed off by something weirdly specific and using their unquestioned authority to eliminate it.
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Don't forget Abe and his spreadsheet of wrongthinkers.

And don't forget Smallbart.
 
Ghostse said:
Don't forget Abe and his spreadsheet of wrongthinkers.

And don't forget Smallbart.
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There are a ton of examples of the SA mods being terrible and ruining the site but they get lost over the years due to the mods being able to forbid people from even mentioning their decisions. If you weren't around to experience it or didn't hear about it after they lost their power you have no idea.

At one point saying that The Original Series wasn't the best Star Trek would get you kicked off the forums. There are hundreds of examples like that over the past two decades depending on which poster has been given unlimited and unquestioned power over the others.

Lowtax refused to listen when people tried to tell him (Before he banned them) that maybe making your customers navigate a never ending and constantly shifting mine field does nothing but eliminate them over time.
 
Genesplicer is the 60+ year old goon mod right?
 
Anime is Blood said:
There are a ton of examples of the SA mods being terrible and ruining the site but they get lost over the years due to the mods being able to forbid people from even mentioning their decisions. If you weren't around to experience it or didn't hear about it after they lost their power you have no idea.

At one point saying that The Original Series wasn't the best Star Trek would get you kicked off the forums. There are hundreds of examples like that over the past two decades depending on which poster has been given unlimited and unquestioned power over the others.

Lowtax refused to listen when people tried to tell him (Before he banned them) that maybe making your customers navigate a never ending and constantly shifting mine field does nothing but eliminate them over time.
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It "helps" that in order to look up all of this shit, not only do you have to pay $10 to simply register, you have to pay another $10 to access a search function that didn't work half the time and even now only barely does (other goons that actually know how to code shit made better search extensions but Lowtax banned them all), as well as accessing post histories of users so you know exactly how retarded they are, and another $10 to access the forum archives since regular members can only see threads going back a certain number of months.

Since 99.995% of people aren't going to pay upwards of 30 bucks in order to autistically research all of the bullshit that's gone on over there, it creates a convienent "memory hole" of sorts where certain goons can just make up forums history in order to win arguments because they know everyone else isn't going to spend autismbux/hard earned money just to argue with some asshole on the Internet.
 
I've mentioned this before, but this behavior by admins/mods is not a new thing and you can trace it WAY back:

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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=232482 (archives required)
 
EPG and fistgrrl were easily the most egocentric of all admins. I secretly wanted to meet him IRL,slap him in the face, then whisper "I have a something awful forums account" into his ear, without him knowing who I was. The mental anguish of knowing a good had disrespected him, but not being able to do anything about it would have killed him.
 
Boss HM-2 said:
Back when SA lead the charge to get all of those jailbait subreddits kicked off of reddit, one of the things used as reasoning for the shutdown were supposed screencaps of private messages of r/jailbait regulars sharing CP. People on reddit at the time who protested the shutdown theorized that goons were sending each other their CP collection and screencapping it as a false flag of sorts.

Given what we know about SA now, and the fact that the Aatrek and Shmorky incidents occurred since then (as well as FAU hemming and hawing about banning some random D&D shithead who was literally caught torrenting CP, they might have been on to something.
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This cp is also why lowtax is so fucked, because if he tries to “drain the pedo swamp,” he’s going down together with the other degenerates. It really is something horribly awful.
 
There was a rumor floating back in the day that EPG's first wife left him for someone she met on IRC back in the late 90's.

The biggest problem is the SA mods see themselves as the best poster in their subforum, because how else would you choose a mod? And it's their job to make sure the unwashed rabble post only the best things on their hallowed board, like a King overlooking his fiefdom.

The truth is a mod is more like a janitor: Just clean up the shit and make sure it's a pleasant experience for everybody. And you can tell a mod is doing a good job when you don't even know he's there.
 
BALLZ-BROKEN said:
The truth is a mod is more like a janitor: Just clean up the shit and make sure it's a pleasant experience for everybody. And you can tell a mod is doing a good job when you don't even know he's there.
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100% spot on, and there are still a small handful of mods who understand this. Star Wars Sex Parrot, for example, basically took a "hands-off unless there's shit everywhere" approach in YOSPOS and it worked well. Gendo in SAS was another good moderator (although I think I heard that he lost it at some point).

They're not ALL shit, it's just that you only hear about the ones that are shit. You're right, the better a moderator is, the less they're noticed.
 
if you go over to somethingsensitive they got the doxx of egg plant wizard. She was a minor wreck of a person, and a monor modd on the post your favorite subform. She basically made thread specific rules then cross applied them. At one point a goon nailed her on that she would have a shitty thanks giving and then just take in out on the posters.

The death kneel for her was that she was too much a goon and over shared the details of personal like, like diva cup boyfriend who wouldnt commient etc.

Then she tried to virture signal about femisism while writing rape erotica.
 
Anime is Blood said:
The only reason SA has any activity at all is that the terrible mods are too lazy to completely ruin whatever is left of it. If you had more moderators or the existing ones had the stamina of Wikipedia admins then SA would have finally died a long time ago.
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The only thing SA offers nowadays is a critical mass of posters to interact with in a traditional forums setting. It sure as fuck isn't producing anything creative or funny anymore.

SA used to be a one-stop shop but for the first time in years I'm posting across multiple forums.
 
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