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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SA's the only forum on the planet with load-bearing slurs in the code, and a userbase that's perpetually triggered by them
 
Something Awful said:
My take: there is nothing really wrong with the SA forums software. It's antiquated and apparently difficult to modify without breaking random shit, but it doesn't matter.
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Nah, they're lying about that last part because they're lazy. It's old and annoying, but not truly difficult in most cases.

Sure there are messed up error messages, etc etc, but they act like it was put through an obfuscator.
 
Leonard Helplessness said:
You see a post and would like to express your reaction to it, and you have nothing else to add

  • XenForo: Select the most relevant Reaction icon. The Reaction then appears at the bottom of the post and a list of all reactions can be pulled up, so I can see everybody who left Autistic reactions on this post and fume impotently at them on their profiles.
  • Something Awful: Make another post that quotes the original and adds either nothing else (if you like the post) or a rude smiley (if you dislike the post). There is a rule against this type of posting, but that rule can only be enforced by banning the poster; the post itself stays in the thread forever and after. Particularly good and/or popular posts often get emptyquoted so many times that the rest of the thread becomes completely unreadable.
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Something Awful said:
My take: there is nothing really wrong with the SA forums software. It's antiquated and apparently difficult to modify without breaking random shit, but it doesn't matter. The problem is entirely the broke-brained management/mods, not the software. Being able to delete double-posts or upvote posts wouldn't change anything. In fact, lowtax's resistance to any kind of voting system is, imo, his singular good management decision. Now, the system here is more or less fine, but if posts actually get sorted/hidden based on votes, like on fucking reddit, it encourages hivemind groupthink like nothing else and destroys any kind of real discussion and community.
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Some disagreements that I have with this:

  • Better forums software would allow better hosting of images and other media in posts. Currently, the only way to post media is to upload attachments (a privilege for which you need to pay an additional $10 and which are fiddly and invisible to unregistered users) or to hotlink. The consequence of hotlinking is that every thread from the waffleimages era is now an empty husk, and most threads thereafter are riddled with "This image is unavailable" imgur placeholders and other shit. Even if archives weren't broken, most archived threads are no longer worth reading because any links or images they once contained are now gone. Once LPArchive goes down, half of Let's Play will neck themselves too because every LP'er hosts all their images from that site.
  • Deleting posts is important because no-content posts suck and do not cease to suck after the poster is banned. Whenever a goon fucked a flask or blew off his fingat or got murdered in Benghazi by Hillary Clinton, the relevant thread would instantly turn to shit because the only way to applaud and/or mourn the event was to post something that nobody wanted to read, until the original event vanished and was difficult to find again. Lowtax did implement a voting system, but you can only vote on threads, not individual posts, and there are no such thing as votes other than 1 and 5.
  • A better reporting system goes an extremely long way in my opinion. I'll give an example from this site. The other day I was reading a thread in which someone mentioned a particular anime and the thread instantly derailed as people started arguing over the virtues and ethics of said anime I will not name the anime here because I do not want this to happen again. It was fucking gross so I reported a particularly revolting post, noted in my report that it was part of an ongoing derail, and went to read a different thread. I received a notification a few hours later that posts that were part of the derail had been deleted. I checked the thread a bit after and normal posting had resumed; life went merrily on. When I posted on Something Awful I saw these kinds of derails sometimes involving the very same anime all the damn time, and they could lead to entire megathreads getting gassed because the tools that staff had available were (and still are) inadequate for stopping a derail. The staff could post in the thread telling people to cut that shit out, probate and ban people, edit out posts and change the thread title to "SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT RAPING 300 YEAR OLD BABIES" and some retard would still try to Make My Case One Last Time after he came off probation a week later, starting the whole shitstorm anew because there are no code-enforced threadbans. Also, if you haven't re-bought platinum after your last ban, you can't report posts so if a thread you like is getting shat up, all you can do is yell at the people involved in the derail and then get banned again for backseat modding.

Good tools are important on any forum because staff have a shitton to do and are usually unpaid. Anything that makes the staff's job easier buys the forum a bit more time before the staff burn out and/or lose their minds. Readable threads are also good threads; nobody wants to browse through 15 pages of "omg that meat ship looks so delicious" to reach some actual content again.
 
lol

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No idea what the fuck happened here but it sounds hilarious. BYOB is extremely protective of their image as a chillax fun forum that posts about kittens and weed and shit all day.
 
I wonder how much longer SA will exist, given the covid-19 and Great Depression situation unfolding. How is Lowtax's patreon still at 8K per month? Not for much longer, I'd bet.

Unemployed troons dressing up as pretty ladies have fewer dollars to spend on anime avatars nowadays, no doubt.
 
Troons will give away their last dollar to SA, because they have nothing else in their lives except the looming promise of suicide.
 
Leonard Helplessness said:
No idea what the fuck happened here but it sounds hilarious. BYOB is extremely protective of their image as a chillax fun forum that posts about kittens and weed and shit all day.
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the anime forum of all places has a bunch of gay and trans people who thought the troon hysteria was a stupid over reaction. this led to a bunch of them being put on "the list" for being wrongthinkers because they were doing things like posting about neopets and not giving a shit about fyad instead of working themselves into histronics.
 
Holocaust Mansplainer said:
Can we get an update on how building ~the brand~ is going? Are professional comedy writers signing up in their dozens to work for free for six months?
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Let's see.

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/rani-goon-hero/ - an interview with a goon game home-brewer. It's a full text interview straight out of 2001. No audio or visual component to speak of. A game designer so in demand that they're begging for money on twitter.

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/tiger-king1/ - A seven part fake series about that it was like to work for the "Tiger King". If you haven't seen Tiger King, it's a documentary about what's it's like to work to the "Tiger King" and how ridiculous it was. It would be akin to writing a "comedy" article based on "The Office" wherein you also work in a wacky office filled with colorful characters.

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/fake-presidents/ - I don't know how to describe this besides woefully unfunny. The entire joke is essentially, and I'm quoting, "All in all, I fucking hate President Mountain with all my heart, butt, and ass." - Get it? PRESIDENT MOUNTAIN?! Because he doesn't know it's called Mount Rushmore because he thinks it's fake.

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/vote-floor-zombie/ - it's a political ad for a zombie (who's running against Resident Evil's incumbent Tryrant!).


I didn't read all of it, but the ones I did read all sound like one of those "I forced my computer to read X for 10,000 hours and write a comedy article, this is what it wrote" memes. They aren't even getting more than one article a day - frequently less (meaning days with 0 articles), meaning even if these were good (and they're fucking not) - the expected page engagement is 5 minutes per day at best.

It looks like it's going pretty fucking bad to me.
 
Fish Boss said:
the anime forum of all places has a bunch of gay and trans people who thought the troon hysteria was a stupid over reaction. this led to a bunch of them being put on "the list" for being wrongthinkers because they were doing things like posting about neopets and not giving a shit about fyad instead of working themselves into histronics.
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What amuses me is the implication that one or more people in BYOB was doxing minors and that you can be punished for mentioning that this ever happened. I doubt it stopped there either; every goon doxing I have ever seen was part of a direct attempt to personally fuck with somebody. Helldumping was synonymous with trying to find and contact the target’s employer; Abraham’s little Twitter stunt culminated in his friends attempting to get a child in trouble with his school for tweeting wrongthink about the definition of comedy; mod challenges eventually had to be clamped down on because mods loved to threaten people into posting full-body nudes that would follow them around the internet forever — the list goes on.

Every time a thread got posted on SA about a peculiar person, thing, or event worth laughing at, the end result was gay ops. Goons do not know how to stop at simple mockery; they always wind up trying to break shit and hurt people. I strongly suspect that they cannot distinguish being laughed at over the internet from being personally harmed.
 
We're off to the races again in C-SPAM, as Bernie inevitably endorses Biden.

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Bernie is truly an endless source of entertainment. I'm gonna miss him.
 
Holocaust Mansplainer said:
Can we get an update on how building ~the brand~ is going? Are professional comedy writers signing up in their dozens to work for free for six months?
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I'm imagining a perpetual state of "we're almost there". Where people will give updates to make it sound like things are happening, but really nothing is.
 
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