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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I think the best thing about the new SA is how the admins limbs flail in ever gayer circles trying to get people to stop making fun of them, but permabans and such still won't do the trick.
 
So the state of the forums has been posted by Jeffrey of YOSPOS:

Time for another update on the forums, financial and otherwise.

Income:
January 2021:
Raw store revenue: $8,922.35
Processing fees: $627.44
Hosting cost: $1,156.97

February 2021:
Raw store revenue: $6,301.55
Processing fees: $480.14
Hosting cost: $1,026.24

March 2021:
Raw store revenue: $6,394.30
Processing fees: $478.02
Hosting cost: $1,096.97

The forums store is chugging along, with a spike in January. This corresponds possibly with the capitol riot, possibly corresponding with the previous State of the Forums. Our costs have stayed about the same server-wise, but are going to be higher for April as we have rolled out some new servers without taking down any old ones.

This quarter saw follow through on many of things promised last quarter. Astral is officially an employee of Something Awful and has been kicking ass, right out the gate. Together we've made great steps in modernizing our infrastructure. Astral is going to follow up this post with details about what's been going on, server-wise - I've had him take the lead on the project and it's best you hear it straight from him. This was first on the agenda for good reason. There is still much to be done - the site architecture will look rather different from where it started after we're through with it.

Gonna quote myself from last quarter:

quote:​

I think this has the potential to be a really good year for something awful. I intend to be proactive in growing this place, be it be enticing old users to return or attracting new ones, and I intend to do so without compromising the culture here. I think old-style internet forums are the best way to communicate online and I think a lot of people who have never posted on a forum would use them if they knew they were there.
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This very much still holds true. I've spent much of the past quarter getting a handle on the here and now, but the time is here. We already have a couple Photoshop Phridays posted, thanks to GRINDCORE MEGGIDO, and I intend to have the frontpage up for real in the coming quarter. I've reclaimed the @Something_Awful twitter account, which I can use to do outreach to goons, past and future. I want this place to be fun and happening as always and intend work out how to get new people to come look at our site.

Last time I asked about opening a Patreon to cover the cost of development. The money made by the forums store is being spent on development and there is a lot of room for more. In addition, I would like to pay artists and writers to contribute to our front page. Any money spent will go directly towards these things - namely paying for labor from goons to help the site! You can contribute here: https://www.patreon.com/SomethingAwful

Oh I almost forgot - one last thing. Not all the changes we've been working on have been under the hood. After so much time, I am super excited to announce DARK MODE. LITERALLY A BIRD and I have been working like crazy on this and we hope you enjoy it! Being such a long-awaited feature, we didn't want to half-ass or disappoint - thought and effort were put into every page, and we hope it shows. You can turn it on here in your forum options. Let us know what you think and see known issues, here in this feedback thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3965797
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With a follow up with just how shitty and on a knifes edge of crashing the last couple of years:

Everyone, thank you again for bearing with us during the various site maintenances of the last week or so. You might not be surprised to learn that there were some missing pieces in SA's infrastructure. Perhaps most appallingly among those, there had not been a database replica server running for several years. Further, if the site had a backup process in place before, it must have lived on that missing replica; there did not seem to be anything configured. You read that correctly—for many years, these forums were one malformed shell command, bad SQL query, or hardware failure away from vanishing in a puff of magic smoke.

Over the last week we've largely rectified this. We've taken backups, spun up three new database servers (2 live forums, 1 archives), imported all the data, set up replication (meaning changes to the main database server are sent to the replica database server), and after the cloud provider maintenance is behind us we'll work on migrating the forums from the old database servers to the new (timeline TBD). This will involve an easter egg hunt as we migrate all of radium's little cron scripts over, but thankfully Jeffrey already has a good handle on where these live. One of those new servers is already in production and handling database queries for things like displaying attachments, calculating the results for the "Who posted?" feature, as well as for various administrative tools.

With this work—and more—completed, we have the utmost confidence that we'll be able to recover from several potential worst-case scenarios, both in the upcoming downtime for cloud host maintenance and as we proceed onward into the future. Thanks for loving the forums.
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Which really tells me just how much of a useless fuck and scammer ZDR was before he bailed. Too bad all of this shit wasn't being done before the rot took over. Guess SA will survive for another 10+ years at this rate.
 
Jeffrey would have been better investing in Blockbuster stores. Probably more margin in it.

Actually looking at it, if he actually applied all the features he wants (and paid front page writers the going rate) and all the permabanned posters stopped attemping to re-reg he'd be in the red quickly. Assuming he's using this for part of his income.

Either way it's fucked. Nobody is going to pay $10 to get banned for saying a rude word in 2021.
 
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LOWERCASE LETTERS said:
Kind of amazing how many 90s webcomic authors managed to get their shit together, honestly.
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Not really. Most of the silver & golden age people have trooned out and/or are shadows of what they were. The collapse and consolidation of the Ad market post-2009 really killed off anyone who wasn't doing it as a hobby and not big enough to weather it. Pete Abrams is subsisting on essentially a private patreon system. Jon Rosenberg is still a bitter fart-huffer who continues to shock the world of physics by becoming an even more insufferable asshole every year. There must be something to the "anime is based" shit because some fucking how Piro hasn't Trooned out. Ditto for Alan Foreman.The RPGWorld kid got into actual animation, but the faustian pact he signed to make it happen made him marry Rebecca Sugar who is now cucking him in an "open relationship".

Buckley and the Penny Arcade guys are a few of the rare success stories.


Back me up! said:
useless fuck and scammer ZDR was before he bailed.
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you mispelled "based and greenpilled". Why do actual work when you can instead lowtax's pitance checks and then collect a $20,000 bonus on your way out the door with a sobstory?
Not saying he wasn't a complete fag otherwise, but I gotta respect anyone who got Lowtax to part with money while also finally realizing that he has access to equivalent of a nursing home full of senile grandmas who never get visitors.

"Man how could any one fall for that Nigerian prince shit hahaha- Wait what? Lowtax's spine has crumbled again and he had to spend the money he collected last time on medical bills? Well! Better open up the old bitcoin wallet. I'll never get my MSpaint spaceship if SA goes under".

Fictional Character said:
The author of Real Life Comics trooned out recently and the comic ran an arc about how it drove his wife into a mental hospital.
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Deadnames he own self insert on the character page...a shameful nigga.
 
Vegansgotokfc said:
Actually looking at it, if he actually applied all the features he wants (and paid front page writers the going rate) and all the permabanned posters stopped attemping to re-reg he'd be in the red quickly. Assuming he's using this for part of his income.

Either way it's fucked. Nobody is going to pay $10 to get banned for saying a rude word in 2021.
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It looks like Jeff is averaging around 4700~ish a month in profit after hosting/processing cost. We don't know what kind of ad revenue he is getting but with the addition to the patreon to basically cover all the future upgrade cost to drive that hosting cost even lower I bet SA will turn into a smallish net revenue stream.

Now I don't think the frontpage is coming back any time soon and if it does it will be done mostly through volunteer effort. The last couple of photoshopes have been pretty lame but SNL is still on the air so maybe that is the humor a bunch of milquetoast millennials want?
 
Back me up! said:
It looks like Jeff is averaging around 4700~ish a month in profit after hosting/processing cost. We don't know what kind of ad revenue he is getting but with the addition to the patreon to basically cover all the future upgrade cost to drive that hosting cost even lower I bet SA will turn into a smallish net revenue stream.

Now I don't think the frontpage is coming back any time soon and if it does it will be done mostly through volunteer effort. The last couple of photoshopes have been pretty lame but SNL is still on the air so maybe that is the humor a bunch of milquetoast millennials want?
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SA isn't running ads anymore, it is zero.

I made the same mistake, because 7 or so years ago SA was still pulling about 30K a year in ad money, per Lowtax's ad guy on SoSe, but Jeffo has gotten rid of ads.
 
Vegansgotokfc said:
Open the forums for free, bring back ads, pray, pray, pray. Then fail as the brand is dead anyone googling it is only going to find Lowtax drama at this point or see it as a relic of history.
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Nobody new would join as ResetEra already attracts the kind of people who'd fit in at current-year SA with more recognizable branding. From the few people who create content I still follow that came out of SA the only recent comments about it have all been negative as well, likening it to a place too filled with drama and 'old history' to be worth engaging with nowadays.

It's just a dead, dying husk of a site doomed to spiral the drain for the rest of its existence.
 
Leonard Helplessness said:
People used various video streaming services other than Youtube back in that day. Google's own video streaming thingy was a shitty competitor; Viddler, Blip.tv, and Vimeo were others. Screenshot let's plays [56k catchphrase] were also common, and probably still are.

What made Something Awful's let's plays notable was quality control, at a time when quality control did not otherwise exist anywhere in the Let's Play world. You had people using terrible capture software or even camcorders to run their video Let's Plays, doing episodes where they literally just died fifty times in I Wanna Be The Guy and made no progress because the game crashed, doing episodes where the mouse pointer was clearly visible, providing terrible commentary about how their cat gets high off the smell of their sweat or whatever the fuck, responding with extreme hostility to any criticism, getting interrupted by moms and/or lumberjacks, and generally being unwatchable. SA had a brutal culture of critique, which was often counterproductive (the LP Sandcastle basically functioned like this site's Proving Grounds used to and was thus very good at making people reluctant to ever post any new threads at all) but generally meant that the Let's Plays that you clicked into weren't going to completely suck. That was that subforum's draw, as was Retsupurae, which existed to ruthlessly mock bad Let's Players on and off the site.

Lowtax made an effort to get into Let's Plays in 2013, by playing a fairly low-quality indie horror game called Cry of Fear and bringing Shmorky in to commentate alongside him. LP was becoming increasingly pozzed at that point, and the thread was full of people saying that shmorky sounds so cute he's like an adorable little teddy bear that you wanna snuggle uwu. This adulation very openly contributed to Shmorky's steady mental decline, which was observable as the LP progressed and as Lowtax and Shmorky began playing other garbage games together while Shmorky shrieked in an ever higher pitch.
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Most people fuck up their summaries of the SA LP Forum, but you did not. Good summary.
 
The forum is just a hobby for Jeffrey so he likely doesn’t care to make some obscene profit. His first priority is running his goon fiefdom. After taxes and all that shit, it looks like he probably makes $40k a year off of it at most. Doesn’t really seem worth it to risk a computer touching career for that but he really wants to be King of the Troons 🤷‍♂️
 
White Devil said:
$200k is way more than I figured the forums were worth. Imagine paying that much to get screeched at by troons and the other mental defectives that still use SA.
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break these cuffs said:
I honestly thought Lowtax wouldn't go lower than $250k myself. Jeff got himself a bargain.
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Just a reminder for everyone:
We do not have solid confirmation that Lowtax is getting $200,000 or that it was from the sale or related to the sale of the assets of Something Awful, LLC. Both if these seem VERY likely, though.

Per the restraining order MapleWife's legal team filed, she believes Lowtax is getting $200K that has been released from escrow.

Escrow, for people who haven't had to adult, is where who people make an agreement to buy something and there is some risk of one or both parties not living up to their end. The buying party puts money into the account of a 3rd party, that 3rd party confirms to the selling party they have sufficient funds, and then once they buying party confirms they have the thing they bought (or conditions have been met), the escrow releases moneyfrom the escrow.
Its like when you do the hostage exchange and they have the people walk across the bridge.

It is very possible that Jeffo structured the sale of SA to give the money to lowtax in blocks to ensure he doesn't try to do something WACKY AND ZANY and try to fuck up the forums or rally his toadies for a coup. It is very likely, given the timing (lowtax's SA was just permabanned in March) and all the work that had to be done to make it happen, that the $200,000 was a portion of the sale price held back to ensure Lowtax would not seize control of the load-bearing Lowtax account or otherwise attempt to reek havoc.

I guess what i'm saying is the sale was concluded in August or September I believe. I can't see Lowtax waiting over 6 months for his money.
 
Screenshot 2021-04-24 at 14.54.02.png


SA considering going back to its roots. Time to flame some chuds and transphobes :evil:
 
Back me up! said:
So the state of the forums has been posted by Jeffrey of YOSPOS:



With a follow up with just how shitty and on a knifes edge of crashing the last couple of years:



Which really tells me just how much of a useless fuck and scammer ZDR was before he bailed. Too bad all of this shit wasn't being done before the rot took over. Guess SA will survive for another 10+ years at this rate.
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Looks like in Q4 20/21, the forums made about $15k in operating profit. That implies about $60k annually before taxes, but the excitement of the Taxman leaving and some fairly blatant begging during that period will have given the income a temporary boost. It also doesn't include the costs of fixing the forums hardware and software, which seems to have been substantial - didn't Null offer to Lowtax to migrate the forums to XenForo for about $20k? Let's assume that's the annual cost of big maintenance jobs and depreciation of any hardware. Let's face it, those kinds of expenses aren't going to go away, especially as SA's codebase gets more and more out of date each year. I reckon $20k annually to pay people to keep it updated and fix it, including admin salaries.

So that leaves a pre-tax profit of $40k a year. I've no idea what the tax arrangements are, but let's be generous and say that the income will continue at this level and/or that expenses will slowly drop as things are updated to be more cost-effective, and say that the forums are pulling in $30k for Jeff annually. Not something to quit a computer-touching job for.

Let's look at that as an investment analysis. If the 200k escrow figure is correct, that's the lowest possible price Jeff could have paid for it (it may be just one instalment, but let's be generous and say it's the entire thing). The investment will pay itself off in 6.67 years assuming revenues don't drop, an RoI of 15%. Now for a passive investment that's actually pretty good (bearing in mind this is a best-case scenario in many ways), but SA isn't a passive investment, it requires an enormous amount of time and effort from Jeff to keep the monkeys from flinging too much poo and trashing their enclosure. I'd be surprised if running SA isn't pretty much a full-time job for Jeff, at least at the moment, so his opportunity costs (what else he could be doing with his time rather than babysit troons, and what he could earn in that time) are immense, particularly, as seems the case, that he's a high level computer toucher. $30k a year is first-line tech support money. Not a great deal, especially as you had to sink $200,000 into an investment that gives you the equivalent of a $30k full-time job which is peanuts to Jeff's true earning potential (I don't know what he does, but you don't put away a $200,000 investment fund if you earn $30k).

tl; dr - Even with the most Jeff-favourable figures available, he's made something between a mediocre and terrible investment.
 
"I don't even want to say monetize - my goal would be more to find like-minded people who would fit in with the culture here, and show them the value of forums over social media once they are here. Frontpage articles are just way more linkable than random forum posts." - Jeffrey

Yeah you're fucked and think it's 2002. Please invest in J C Penney next, I heard they're a hot retailer.
 
You guys are really overthinking this whole Jeff “investment” thing. Jeff bought SA for the same reason Nic Cage bought a copy of Action Comics #1, because he’s a nerd who’s really into the subject matter. If it turns out to be a good investment, great, but that’s not either of their primary concerns.
 
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