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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Learned Hand said:
I know this entire thread has been a slow-motion post-mortem, but I feel for the sake of posterity someone should write up the events of the past few years that lead to this point so that SA might be mocked for all of time.
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Past few? SA has been on the decline after 2007 and it merely had a constant but steady acceleration towards it's own oblivion thanks to poor management, user-base that's been mostly replaced with tumblr imports and Lowtax being a leader-in-absentee, letting the forum be run by people who have psychotic fits over people not liking what they like.
 
Learned Hand said:
I know this entire thread has been a slow-motion post-mortem, but I feel for the sake of posterity someone should write up the events of the past few years that lead to this point so that SA might be mocked for all of time.
Click to expand...
Lowtax's increasingly poor life choices become the forums only remaining humorous export.
 
The short and correct answer is that all is faggot.

A longer answer is a combination of things:
- Absentee owner who took his base for granted
- Declining quality of forum moderation and administration
- It was eventually easier to pander rather than telling faggots to fuck off
- Many other communities did SA’s job better so there’s no reason to do Let’s Plays or Photoshop Phriday anymore there
- People realized SA was never any good to begin with
- SA was at the right place at the right time from 1999-2003 and it never really deserved the little success it had

The only thing keeping it going is inertia: they’ve made it a routine in the last 10-20 years to visit and the sunk cost fallacy takes over. That is why SA will limp along for a while yet. That’s why Lowtax was so retarded to sell the site.
 
NeoGAF Lurker said:
The only thing keeping it going is inertia: they’ve made it a routine in the last 10-20 years to visit and the sunk cost fallacy takes over. That is why SA will limp along for a while yet. That’s why Lowtax was so retarded to sell the site.
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If that moron had just showed up every couple weeks to ban some troons and other degenerates and let the rest know it was the axe for them, too, if they kept shitting up the place with their insanity, and fire the shittiest of the mods and rotate them out for new people, he'd still have the site.
 
AnOminous said:
If that moron had just showed up every couple weeks to ban some troons and other degenerates and let the rest know it was the axe for them, too, if they kept shitting up the place with their insanity, and fire the shittiest of the mods and rotate them out for new people, he'd still have the site.
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Too much effort.
 
Learned Hand said:
I know this entire thread has been a slow-motion post-mortem, but I feel for the sake of posterity someone should write up the events of the past few years that lead to this point so that SA might be mocked for all of time.
Click to expand...

The problem with the enjoyment of SA's implosion is so much of it requires context. Its like an astrophyisics pun, where understanding the joke requires advanced degrees in quantum mechanics. But unlike degrees in quantum physics which actually have utility, its super gay and increasingly pointless internet drama you need to have read up on to really appreciate it.


here is a write up that is a length that is commisserate with Something Awful's current level of importance:
"All is faggot."
 
NeoGAF Lurker said:
The short and correct answer is that all is faggot.

A longer answer is a combination of things:
- Absentee owner who took his base for granted
- Declining quality of forum moderation and administration
- It was eventually easier to pander rather than telling faggots to fuck off
- Many other communities did SA’s job better so there’s no reason to do Let’s Plays or Photoshop Phriday anymore there
- People realized SA was never any good to begin with
- SA was at the right place at the right time from 1999-2003 and it never really deserved the little success it had

The only thing keeping it going is inertia: they’ve made it a routine in the last 10-20 years to visit and the sunk cost fallacy takes over. That is why SA will limp along for a while yet. That’s why Lowtax was so retarded to sell the site.
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I think Jeffrey was also a fool for buying it. He certainly isn’t going to make his money back, and first act as admin was to bring back something the troon/goon hivemind declared to be both transphobic and pro-Nazi. The front page is still dead, the site isn’t any better or more popular, and all Jeff did was hand six figures to a wife beater in exchange for a cardboard Burger King crown and full dominion over a piss soaked playland. SA will still make a money, but not nearly enough to justify what was spent on the initial purchase.


Emperor Julian said:
Stupidpol did an okay write up even if it's a little out of date

www.reddit.com

r/stupidpol - Lets talk about former internet sensation Somethingawful.com, a cautionary tale...

358 votes and 219 comments so far on Reddit
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Looking at it, it’s kind of impressive looking at all the Sisyphean effort (at least in Lowtax terms) Rich had to employ to navigate last year‘s drama over FYAD. He had to double down, betray his own values, turn on one of the few things he still liked about his own website, betray, lie, gaslight and deceive in one glorious meltdown to keep his Patreon tugboat afloat.

And it all amounted to nothing because he didn’t put in nearly as much effort in obfuscating his domestic abuse drama, and FYAD realized it would be better off kissing Jeffrey’s ass than Lowtax’s.

It really was the best ending to him that I could ask for. Meanwhile the dipshits still on his former website have to sheepishly claim that they only pretended to love and worship him after all these years, and that while they were okay with gangstalking his ex-wife to a domestic shelter and getting a gofundme for her and her daughter removed during a pandemic, it’s of course only ever because they’re deeply stupid rather than deeply cruel.

But we all know it’s both.
 
Humble Shitpost Merchant said:
I think Jeffrey was also a fool for buying it. He certainly isn’t going to make his money back, and first act as admin was to bring back something the troon/goon hivemind declared to be both transphobic and pro-Nazi. The front page is still dead, the site isn’t any better or more popular, and all Jeff did was hand six figures to a wife beater in exchange for a cardboard Burger King crown and full dominion over a piss soaked playland. SA will still make a money, but not nearly enough to justify what was spent on the initial purchase.
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It says a lot that Jeffrey was the only serious buyer for SA, but I can't even say that with any authority since the sale was done in such a closed, cloak-and-dagger kind of way. I don't even know how much Jeffrey paid for SA aside from some nebulous "six figures" estimate. That aside, SA is such a non-entity on the modern Internet that it couldn't draw spite bids from anyone wealthy enough to buy a website with pocket change and just fuck with it for shits and giggles. Hell, I'm sure moot had enough coin to do just that (and it'd be fitting in a sort of "circus circle of life" type way).

I don't even know what Jeffrey's finances are like aside from him getting rich off of Bitcoin, maybe, so maybe he has enough cash to just let SA coast along in limbo without cutting too deeply into his wallet.
 
I still think Lowtax could have made more money selling to a random Chinese malware/ botnet creation/ questionable porn site for crypto and cashed out in the shittier parts of the Caribbean to avoid higher taxes and just retired in obscurity.

Plus watching the entire base meltdown on social media when their countless gigabytes of whitenoise troon posts melted in to the ether only to be greeted by Chinese malware browser extensions and having their emails and passwords stolen
 
Double posting to offer life advise irt that last post

Always have an exit plan when you start making decent cash, and make sure it would be one John McAfee would nod in agreement with when read aloud
 
NeoGAF Lurker said:
- It was eventually easier to pander rather than telling faggots to fuck off
- People realized SA was never any good to begin with
- SA was at the right place at the right time from 1999-2003 and it never really deserved the little success it had
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I disagree with these three points. It was far easier to tell them to fuck off back in the day but SA was forced by Ozma, Fistgrrl and Zack Parsons into adopting this ideology and vocal opposition got kicked off to other places. Admins and mods were selected out of purely political reasons after 2008, resulting in those who virtue-signalled the hardest being selected. As for was SA good ever, I'd have to say that it absolutely earned it's reputation for plenty of quality funny shit from 2000 to 2008ish. Lowtax was present and active until the Mangosteen incident in 2006. It's success wasn't just a matter of right time and place, the audience itself was one of the all-time great internet communities during that time. Troll-shielding is the main reason a lot of troons and other assorted degenerates got attracted to it especially after taking down the r/jailbait thing and over time, all the olds got replaced by people who had nothing but contempt for the original culture of the site.

These days, the remains of this culture exist on obscure off-sites with a bunker mentality since the cancel-culture types are still pissed off that people on a forum that doesn't allow lurkers or even people without being vetted by like 3 others occasionally say that Zoe Quinn is a dumb bitch.
 
I wonder how Zack Parsons feels about SA’s front page basically dying. For such a woke motherfucker all he had to say is that he’s no longer affiliated with SA and keeping his mouth shut.

He probably knew, but SA was his only steady gig.
 
And while we are talking about SA's history, let's examine a TGRS thread about this exact same subject.

The OP, containing a whiny post about Fursecution from a Danganrompa reg-date poster
SAselfloathingthread1.png

Some people agreeing to everything, because disagreement is verboten

SAselfloathingthread2.png

"SA is totally better than everything else"

SAselfloathingthread3.png

People of course, are now glad that it's no longer the place it used to be because disagreement is still problematic

SAselfloathingthread4.png

A pair of old posters show up to present how much they love the big brother, along with some old furry shit

SAselfloathingthread5.png

Some more Furry shit, now with some guy waving his debt millstone around

SAselfloathingthread6.png

Somebody actually talks a little bit about SA being all about throwing other posters off, though the game's just now "Find the CHUD"

SAselfloathingthread7.png

Of course, this conversation is not complete without at least one Gamergate discussion. Also, "we should love juggalos and furries because they dislike the same groups we do."

SAselfloathingthread8.png

Gamergate mentioned, time for a bunch of people to still have Vietnam-tier flashbacks to it.

SAselfloathingthread9.png

It's still amazing how it lives rent free.

SAselfloathingthread10.png

"The real problem was that SA didn't harass people talking about ZQ vigorously enough"

SAselfloathingthread11.png

Tl;dr, the usual suspects are still displeased that people not like them exist.
 
The Grognard said:
plenty of quality funny shit from 2000 to 2008ish.
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That reminds me, sometimes I do wish I could've experienced the CAD mockthread around the time Loss.jpg came out cause I get the impression it would've been genuinely funny to be there as it was unfolding in real time. It's like how I wish I'd been here around the time Chris' house burned down or as the unclit situation happened in real time.
 
Vapewizard said:
That reminds me, sometimes I do wish I could've experienced the CAD mockthread around the time Loss.jpg came out cause I get the impression it would've been genuinely funny to be there as it was unfolding in real time.
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Even the tail end of the mock thread was a hell of a ride, right until the end.

 
How the hell do you age a decade and go from correctly thinking adults with a Winnie the Pooh fetish are repulsive to it being perfectly reasonable and acceptable? Goons are so disgusting.
 
Baggywrinkle said:
How the hell do you age a decade and go from correctly thinking adults with a Winnie the Pooh fetish are repulsive to it being perfectly reasonable and acceptable? Goons are so disgusting.
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It's already been talked about here -- but a very disturbed group of people with a very narrow window of thought took control of site moderation. Anyone genuinely funny was banned or left long ago -- anyone who stood out was banned for wrongthink.

I posted for years in the games section only without incident, I then was slapped with 5 or 6 suspensions/probations in a row when I posted in D&D and elsewhere, and I didn't even consider my opinions outside of mainstream thought in my country.

Many people here talking about 2008 being the beginning of the end for SA, but up until 2015, you could still get a lot of people to play games with and do offsite things with. 2015 is when a hyper-polarization occurred on SA (and everywhere else I suppose) along political lines, and if you look at a graph, permabans began accelerating within the active userbase exponentially.
 
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