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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Rational Volcel said:
Slowbeef is a sort of mini-Lowtax in a way. Lazy, insipid, insecure, attention-seeking, and extremely bitter about how the concept "he" invented - Let's Plays - didn't stay as some sort of holy sacrament inside the tight confines of the LP subforum but instead exploded and became a thing for the masses.

I actually posted in the LP forum way back when and in the long, long list of shitty tinpot moderators on SA, Slowbeef was definitely up there. He'd arbitrarily prohibit LPs from people he didn't like, and then have a bunch of dumb rules to make sure only his toadies could actually post. Years later he is still trying to eke out some sort of fame as the "father of Let's Plays" or whatever, begging table scraps from people who have more success and fame in their pinky finger than he has ever had in his life. Birds of a feather with Lowtax, that one.
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Slowbeef was honestly a bit kinder than the average LP forum member was once video LPs started taking off. The LP subforum as a """community""" was turned to shit the second diseased crab got a fanbase. Wave after wave of SA getting outshone by youtubers drove bonkers any person who identified strongly as an SA LP community member. Him pushing the 'creator of video LP' angle is definitely true though, I remember him doing a lot of that shit during the LP of the prime trilogy.
 
software said:
Slowbeef was honestly a bit kinder than the average LP forum member was once video LPs started taking off. The LP subforum as a """community""" was turned to shit the second diseased crab got a fanbase. Wave after wave of SA getting outshone by youtubers drove bonkers any person who identified strongly as an SA LP community member. Him pushing the 'creator of video LP' angle is definitely true though, I remember him doing a lot of that shit during the LP of the prime trilogy.
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The way I remember it is that Slowbeef did sit on top of this pyramid of toadies and sycophants who could get special favors if they were in the in-group. So the shittiness of the """community""" had a lot to do with his shitty moderation style. One thing about the SA LP forum was that it was like a Soviet command economy for let's plays: free of the burdensome impositions of "likes", "views", and "subscriptions", as one might find at a site like YouTube, you could have people like TheDarkId who just made shitty screenshot LPs of horror games with really bad photoshops thrown in for that exquisite goon humour we all know and love. Perfect! What could ever go wrong?

Once the free market of let's playing opened up, this entire ecosystem was crushed, and in its wake you had a ton of extremely bitter people fuming over the fact that their stuff never got to take off.
 
Originally YouTube was absolute shit for let's plays from a technical standpoint, so the SA patricans shunned everything YouTube. DeceasedCrab and ProtonJon didn't and got efamous as a result.

Things changed and YouTube became good. Goons are goons and never change unless there's literally no other choice. Now all the goon-approved video hosting services are gone or worthless, so the old guard are years behind in building a brand. The true shame in this is some really funny old videos are just gone forever now.

Also it turns out that most of them are actually shit at doing let's plays, but they've been sheltered for so long they'll never believe it.
 
Rational Volcel said:
The way I remember it is that Slowbeef did sit on top of this pyramid of toadies and sycophants who could get special favors if they were in the in-group. So the shittiness of the """community""" had a lot to do with his shitty moderation style. One thing about the SA LP forum was that it was like a Soviet command economy for let's plays: free of the burdensome impositions of "likes", "views", and "subscriptions", as one might find at a site like YouTube, you could have people like TheDarkId who just made shitty screenshot LPs of horror games with really bad photoshops thrown in for that exquisite goon humour we all know and love. Perfect! What could ever go wrong?

Once the free market of let's playing opened up, this entire ecosystem was crushed, and in its wake you had a ton of extremely bitter people fuming over the fact that their stuff never got to take off.
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Not sure if I really saw it that way, primarily because I remember slowbeef doing a whole lot less moderating than most other forum mods at the time. The LP subforum being a poorly policed ghetto was a running joke in the main game forum for years. Lots of good LPers really weren't big in the """""""community"""""" anyways, like pokecapn + friends, supergreatfriend, Quovak, and I don't remember any LP mods taking a swing at them for being popular and above it all or anything.
 
software said:
Not sure if I really saw it that way, primarily because I remember slowbeef doing a whole lot less moderating than most other forum mods at the time. The LP subforum being a poorly policed ghetto was a running joke in the main game forum for years. Lots of good LPers really weren't big in the """""""community"""""" anyways, like pokecapn + friends, supergreatfriend, Quovak, and I don't remember any LP mods taking a swing at them for being popular and above it all or anything.
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Well, I'm not sure we actually disagree. I didn't mean the shittiness of Slowbeef as a moderator was because he was a heavy handed tyrant, but because he was mostly interested in circlejerking with his superfriends and didn't care about much else. Spare the rod, spoil the goon, you might say, but also the entire shittiness of the """""""community"""""""" kinda had a lot to do with just how informal and circlejerky even the moderation was, even if it was infrequent. To name one example: Slowbeef had a long-running vendetta against Phallic Baldwin, made awkward by Baldwin's very popular Dragon Age 2 LP; Slowbeef and his pals more or less openly copped to just looking for an excuse to probate him and shut it down.
 
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Rational Volcel said:
One thing about the SA LP forum was that it was like a Soviet command economy for let's plays: free of the burdensome impositions of "likes", "views", and "subscriptions", as one might find at a site like YouTube, you could have people like TheDarkId who just made shitty screenshot LPs of horror games with really bad photoshops thrown in for that exquisite goon humour we all know and love.
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Lol what? I've never even seen the SA forums and TheDorkId was the only LP'er I ever liked
 
Rational Volcel said:
Well, I'm not sure we actually disagree. I didn't mean the shittiness of Slowbeef as a moderator was because he was a heavy handed tyrant, but because he was mostly interested in circlejerking with his superfriends and didn't care about much else. Spare the rod, spoil the goon, you might say, but also the entire shittiness of the """""""community"""""""" kinda had a lot to do with just how informal and circlejerky even the moderation was, even if it was infrequent. To name one example: Slowbeef had a long-running vendetta against Phallic Baldwin, made awkward by Baldwin's very popular Dragon Age 2 LP; Slowbeef and his pals more or less openly copped to just looking for an excuse to probate him and shut it down.
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He did that with T40s too, and any "funny" LPs that werent already circlejerk superstars. In the case of t40s, he said he was pissed they were accepting money (look at him now) and he was very elitist about the "purity" of his vision of what LP was, should be, and what the forum should be like, what you could do with them ("theyre only for fun, NOT money" he was pissed and bitter over Pewds' success even back then 2010-2012) then got burnt out when it all went to shit and they all looked to him to fix it. So he just dumped it and let it fester. He tried to get in with Lowtax and Schmorky (well they tried to get in with him) but even he saw that was shit because it wasnt pulling even like a quarter of the numbers of some rando video released under the Retsupurae brand. He also had a huge hate vendetta against Khad, but he at least had some more solid reasoning there in that he thought Khad's LPs were awful shit because he wasnt good at games, or very funny, but I think Khad still has those same fans who liked him then to this day. I didnt really like him, he was funnier when he had guests but those videos got lost, I checked on him recently and I think his site is still up and he's got his group of like 30 viewers and shit that are buds with him.
 
sslps were the only decent ones and once the community switched to 60 hours of listening to someone's nerd voice they became intolerable
 
gobbogobb said:
Originally YouTube was absolute shit for let's plays from a technical standpoint.
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Youtube used to be shit for LP because they had videos limited to 10 minutes for technical reasons - so you had playthroughs chunked into 3,000 part series. Once hardware and storage got cheaper (and they got bought by google) that the hardware limit wasn't a problem, the video codec Youtube used had a 15-minute limit for non-commerical use. That got rolled back and now its at "fuck it, whatever".
 
Ghostse said:
Youtube used to be shit for LP because they had videos limited to 10 minutes for technical reasons - so you had playthroughs chunked into 3,000 part series. Once hardware and storage got cheaper (and they got bought by google) that the hardware limit wasn't a problem, the video codec Youtube used had a 15-minute limit for non-commerical use. That got rolled back and now its at "fuck it, whatever".
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It also wouldn't let you upload high-definition video at first so tons of games looked like absolute crap on YouTube.
 
It's shit like this that makes me think youtube e celebs are gonna be our generations equivalent of fucked up child stars.

Slowbeef is married and has a kid that should be in school by now. You'd think he would focus on that more than playing games with people half his age and clinging to let's play fame.
 
Rational Volcel said:
To think I used to consider the D&D libertarians - bowtie weenies like Calenth - annoying and the worst sort of posters one could ever imagine. I used to think the GBS of 2005 was intolerably conservative and right wing. The naiveté of youth.
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To be fair, the D&D libertarians were mostly, well, weenies... they'd try to be libertarian insomuch as you could without getting banned from someone like McCaine, and they'd still try to be "goons," so they'd be "libertarians, but, like, not those libertarians, dude, we love a lot of government programs!" So they'd tiptoe around their own beliefs or capitulate in certain ways to keep them accepted by the community and/or avoid getting banned. Anyone who wasn't such a pussy was soon booted out.

D&D was largely filled with reddit-tier socialists and buttmunch liberals. If you didn't accept the premises that far-left wingers accept as inherently true, then you were either considered trolling or off-topic a lot of the time since the topic was essentially, left-wing philosophy.

I think the only bonafide conservative was some guy named "Voice of Reason," (ironically similar to your username if I'm recalling correctly, and of course I think he got banned.

If you want an idea of what D&D was like back in the day, you only have to browse reddit's /r/politics.
 
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:thinking:
 
I mean we knew it was coming and that day is finally here.

Since they banned re.tard, SA is now officially gayer than Kiwifarms
 
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