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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TheMonkeyMan said:
I'm pretty sure that when some mock threads crept back in after EPW got doxed, there were tumblr and "PYF SJW" threads that were around for a while. It really didn't come across to me as EPW banning the thread for wrongthink. I think she specifically said to "make a tumblr" if you wanted to mock people, because while there was some stuff about tumblr types in the mock thread there was considerably more about MRAs and the like. She had previously said that the people who got mocked in the thread just depressed her, which is a totally understandable reaction, but if you can't stand moderating the most popular thread in a forum, maybe you should just let the other mod handle it?
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That's something I never understood about Something Awful. The posting culture over the years developed to where Moderators are gatekeepers to discussion and the entire community learns how the king of their personal subforum fiefdom prefers they talk about things or are driven away.

It wasn't a problem when SA had such amazing inertia and so many people joining but once growth turned negative it's just a never ending purity test where unemployed mentally ill people are curating discussions and the community has convinced itself that this is the way things should be and is actually preferable to any place other people can have actual opinions.

I guess I get the concept of a curated safe-space but Lowtax's wallet isn't liking that less and less people agree with the extremely woke arbiters of all thought on his discussion forum.
 
Anime is Blood said:
That's something I never understood about Something Awful. The posting culture over the years developed to where Moderators are gatekeepers to discussion and the entire community learns how the king of their personal subforum fiefdom prefers they talk about things or are driven away.

It wasn't a problem when SA had such amazing inertia and so many people joining but once growth turned negative it's just a never ending purity test where unemployed mentally ill people are curating discussions and the community has convinced itself that this is the way things should be and is actually preferable to any place other people can have actual opinions.

I guess I get the concept of a curated safe-space but Lowtax's wallet isn't liking that less and less people agree with the extremely woke arbiters of all thought on his discussion forum.
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Even back in the halycon days, SA had a thing where you could get banned for any reason at any time, even for goofy shit like starting an otherwise fine thread with the word "So". So, everyone was always on their toes, which naturally attracted the kinds of mods that would like to abuse that privilege. It's kind of a wonder the boards were as good as they were for a while, come to think of it.

2004 drove momentum into the forum with the attraction of Bittorrent Barnyard. In '04, piracy was still rampant and popular, but file sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus were popping up and dying left and right. Lots of red herrings were everywhere, where you'd go to download a song and just have it be a 30 second loop that's cut to be the same length as the normal track, or just garbage sound entirely. Bittorrent made it so that couldn't happen, but public bittorrent sites were always giant, high risk shitholes with dead torrents everywhere. SA's strict rules made BTB popular. But it was shut down at the end of 2004, and a lot of people who came for that, stayed because the boards were a hell of a lot better than any other forum at the time. Social networks weren't really a thing, either.

A little momentum can go a hell of a long way, apparently. Plus, I never heard about much noteworthy trouble or drama with the mods until Aatrek got exposed, and he was already a notorious piece of shit even by SA mod standards, throwing his weight around in The Walking Dead's TV thread.
 
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Piss said:
Even back in the halycon days, SA had a thing where you could get banned for any reason at any time, even for goofy shit like starting an otherwise fine thread with the word "So". So, everyone was always on their toes, which naturally attracted the kinds of mods that would like to abuse that privilege. It's kind of a wonder the boards were as good as they were for a while, come to think of it.
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SA had a bunch of strict rules in place because at one time they had too many people posting and it was a way to filter out garbage posters from good ones. It was pretty basic stuff like grammar, punctuation, and a few "gotchas" hidden in the rules section to make sure that people read them all the way through. As dear leader says about this forum, you want to encourage the behavior that you want (and SA's was good, clear posts) and discourage bad behavior (for SA it was shitposting, worthless posts like "Ok" or "That's cool"). The rules also gave a lot of leeway on enforcement so mods/admins could let stuff slide for a good post and nail repeat offenders.

It made sense at the time, but through normal attrition (other forums, social media sites, or websites in general) or SA specific attrition (horrific moderators/admins, terrible circle jerks, volunteer writers getting paid gigs elsewhere and never returning) within a few years SA no longer had the problem of too many people posting. They now had the problem of not nearly enough posters and what they were posting was basically garbage. SA never went and updated their rules to encourage posting so they bled out more people, because a forum is boring when there's nothing to read. The leeway from before was now being used to target specific people for things other than rule infractions (posts on other sites, "wrongthink", or the admin just didn't like you specifically).

The worse of a place SA was to post, the less people posted there. Most FYAD posters moved over to 4/8chan or weird twitter, most "I have a cool story/job" people went over to Reddit, most video game people went to Youtube/Twitch/Their own website, and so on all the way down the line until there were (and still are) very few actually quality posters on that site. Even most of the SA video game guilds moved off of SA and barely acknowledge it these days.

Lowtax has a problem of his own making - he wants people to post interesting content/write articles for his website, but there's no longer a draw to his website. Putting content on Reddit gets more hits, putting videos on youtube/twitch are actually monetizable, people will pay directly for articles via Patreon, and even if you got past all of those hurdles - SA has the worst audience (in terms of numbers and attitude) for any kind of content. Lowtax would also like people to do this for free.
 
I think trying to monetize every brainfart is one of the things that really ruined the internet as a whole, but otherwise I agree. You could be a poster adding actual quality content to SA and all you'd get is attitude for not toeing the party line or people trying to deconstruct that content because of poorly hidden jealousy about you actually not being some unemployed sadbrains regular/alcoholic computer janitor in E/N but actually somebody with gainful employment/a good social life/cool and interesting hobbies/a general positive outlook on life.

I used to post on SA until a few years ago when one day I asked myself why I even bother dealing with those miserable pricks. Just up and left the site and never looked at it again. Nothing of value was lost. I don't even remember my password.

Reading this thread was a wild ride, I had no idea what a fuck-up Lowtax really is. All I knew was that he was completly absent from actually administering his place. Quite an interesting read. The state of SA makes a lot more sense for me now.
 
griefsquirrel said:
I think trying to monetize every brainfart is one of the things that really ruined the internet as a whole, but otherwise I agree.
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I agree, but that's the world we live in. It's also the world that SA lives in, another thing that Lowtax never updated for SA was the business model.

He claims (and I believe) that he moved to paid accounts because they were getting so many troll account that it was all he could do to make a ban stick. It turned into a large revenue stream (he bought a garish house and a Nissan GTR) as SA was a destination spot so times were good. There was so much content on SA it was (arguably) worth signing up for to be able to access it and participate in it.

All of SA's revenue stream are tied to content (and most of them tied to forums content, specifically) and when Lowtax had people lining up to throw free content at him life was great, but as content creators leave the platform for whatever reason, he never adjusted his revenue stream to something that would not be based around forum activity.

I don't like monetized content either, but if it's going to get paid out regardless (through advertising) - I'd rather the content creators get it rather than someone like Lowtax who just runs an aggregate site and poorly at that.
 
Weppers said:
One last little observation:
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Total threads and total posts, and archived threads and archived posts. Now in every forum I checked the active threads go back to May or April of 2014, later than that and you need the archives upgrade. GBS is 2016, but that's because they deleted it and reopened it in 2016 for no good reason. The GBS graveyard is 2014 like everything else.

Take that post total and divide it by the thread total.
Archived threads, up to 2014: 52.8 posts per thread
Active threads, 2014 to present: 24.0 posts per thread

Each thread is getting half the average activity it used to, and it can't completely be blamed on the full exceptional individual GBS 2.0, the "active" part of GBS graveyard only has ~34,800 threads. If anything that may have brought down the archives number more than the active number.

This could be taken to mean that there are more threads which get a brief burst of focused activity, which would be good, but I don't think that's what is happening. Every forum is dominated by its huge megathreads, most of them going back years, and I think this means that any thread outside of those gets next to nothing these days.

Never mind, that counter broke on March 26, 2016 and hasn't moved since.
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3 years ago, 11.7% of accounts were banned. I bet it's more than double that today, just look at any older thread, every 4-5th post is by a banned member.
 
729170
 
Lowtax has a problem so simple that anyone who has never tried to run a business should still get it: when you make something new that's cool and popular, a bunch of others will try to imitate you; it doesn't matter whether any succeed or not because in trying a bunch will spring up other cool new things that will drain your audience because they're similar enough, the market changes. You either adapt or fail.
 
Catgirl IRL said:
If you get talked into it that fucking easily you were already looking for an excuse.
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The story of that particular documentary basically went like this:

Cassie Jaye wanted to make a documentary about MRAs and thought to herself that she's gonna have to secure funding for this. Would-be financiers wanted direct control over the resulting product but Cassie told them that it's her film and she's make it as she pleases. So, the usual suspects tried to torpedo the project with some real shady shit which most certainly has ensured that she's gonna have a rather poor opinion of them.

Film comes out and because it's not a pure hitpiece that goes full Homer Badman on the MRAs, people are salty over it.
 
Nothing makes me laugh like seeing goons cry about doxxxxxxxing.

Every time a girl would do an Ask/Tell thread about anything even vaguely sexual, those creepy goons would set right to work trying to find her. Even if it was just mundane, non-lulzy shit. I know it happened to a stripper who made an A/T about exotic dancing, and a few others.

One goonette (username JUNIOR ANTI SEX LEAGUE) made an A/T about being a legal prostitute in Australia who worked from home. She had a 2-story house, cuck boyfriend played vidya upstairs all day while she sucked and fucked johns on the ground floor.

Was a fairly interesting thread though, I followed it until one day all her posts had been completely blanked and the thread locked. Goons had figured out where and who she was and were trying to book visits or some shit.
 
northstar747 said:
So Dark priest gets brought up again. He is an example of someone who used to be cool. But because "porn" is bad got ran off.

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I remember Stuntcocks post waaay back in the day.
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There was never an anti-porn moralizing force that ran that guy off.

It's funny people still act like he was an interesting and thought provoking content creator. His cult of personality just dried up when people realized he was a middle aged man plowing through multiple suicidal teenage brides with freddie kruger's dick. He didn't like the adoring adulation of horny goons turning into ridicule.
 
The average goon that has remained on the site most certainly doesn't mind doxxing political enemies or people that have made a statement they don't like on twitter. You can go to any thread about the culture wars and see them a-log people they don't like.
 
The Grognard said:
The average goon that has remained on the site most certainly doesn't mind doxxing political enemies or people that have made a statement they don't like on twitter. You can go to any thread about the culture wars and see them a-log people they don't like.
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In that case, doxing is suddenly no longer doxing.

When you're on the Right Side Of History (tm) doxing is called "Freedom of speech is NOT freedom from consequences" and you get to stalk them and harass friends, family, employers, etc. because they're subhuman chuds who committed wrongthink.
 
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