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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3315 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’m reading about something awful. Namely, SomethingAwful.

They left an indelible mark on internet culture with afaik <50,000 register users. I actually can’t find the number of register users in 2008 so I’m estimating from a bad graph. Compare this to just how many registered users are on Reddit or Tumblr, but how little culture is actually created there (versus shared there).

The forum had a $10 cost of membership and strict standards of posting:

See, since its inception Something Awful was built around strict moderation. Even its $10 entry fee was originally implemented not as a way to make money but as a way to keep problem posters from endlessly re-registering or creating throwaway gimmick accounts.

How strict? Well: Not capitalizing the beginning of a sentence? Probation. No punctuation? Probation. Post a YouTube link without including a description of the video's content? Probation. Not properly rehosting and resizing images? Oh you better believe that's a Probation

Whatever happened to paid forums? They are actually not a bad idea.

Whatever happened to paid forums? They are actually not a bad idea.

Locals.com is a combination of paid forum and Patreon, it's doing fairly well. Usually there needs to be a reason they aren't just using Reddit. eg Ricochet.com, a community for basic boring boomercons who would face constant trolling and admin harassment on Reddit.

SA, though even before it and at the same time some other forums as well, basically taught me that a key to a good and lively forum is moderation (moreso than it being paid). Specifically, having intelligent, active mods committed to forums culture and who moderate less based on formal rules and more by just "playing by the ear"; offering warnings when some poster seems to be actively behaving badly and contrary to the purpose of the forum, offering probations/bans easily and basically instinctively reacting when something isn't right. Particularly in cases where someone seems to be purposefully obeying the letter of the law instead of its purpose.

Of course, all of that is easily lost if you get bad mods trying to do that, then you just have petty tyrants and everything ends up badly.

very important because it's an early rumbling of the kind of terminally online white male resentment that would eventually give us Gamergate and Trump.... And the primary focus on their ire was on the site's moderation. They complained about there being too many threads in GBS about current events. They complained about not being able to use slurs anymore.

I would love to hear a summary of this from someone not carrying water for the wokescolds who were... wow, banning nudity on the site as "problematic" while writing werewolf incest porn themselves?

On the other hand, it's fitting for an SA autopsy to be written by a "35M asexual panda furry from Jacksonville, FL."

banning nudity on the site as "problematic" while writing werewolf incest porn themselves

This was par for the course for them even back in the old days; their prohibition on loli was one of the catalysts for the site that would end up taking their crown: 4chan.

In the presence of alternatives, woke finds itself outcompeted.

On the other hand, it's fitting for an SA autopsy to be written by a "35M asexual panda furry from Jacksonville, FL."

A furry speaking positively of SA? Now I've truly seen everything.

I remember joining in 2002(?), then coming back in years later and being surprised and confused about the newer proto-woke posters holding court and power, with them signaling their disgust at something that would have been funny and interesting to the userbase previously. Couldn’t understand what they were at the time, now we’re talking about them all day on TheMotte. They ended up hating Lowtax the founder, and cheering his recent death.

I wonder if Stone Toss is secretly Shmorky. FYAD and its more lighthearted cousin (forget) were the best.

Whatever happened to paid forums?

Some Discord instances operate in this fashion; Patreon's infrastructure allows you to automate this in various ways (their bot can restrict the entire instance, or just grant access to specific paid-only channels).

It's my experience that this does generate a high signal-to-noise ratio around whatever the project's topic is, but I've yet to see one not completely ruined by its moderation (the people who run the project tend to treat keeping their jannies in line as a complete afterthought). As usual, fish rots from the head.

A monthly subscription seems to defeat the purpose. A single fee makes it more expensive for scammers and people who get banned and have to make new accounts, but almost trivial for good faith actors who pay once and then keep using the same account indefinitely.

I have a much less favorable feel for SomethingAwful than most of its advocates. The site sometimes had good stuff -- most notably, its Let's Play sections predicted a lot of creative and transformative New Media works, along with being a great way for smaller-visibility indies to get attention -- but the site's claimed observation-only focus never really survived the actual people involved being people, and original flavor General Bullshit was very far from being this innocent land free of bullying, spam, and insults. I tried to avoid anything coming from that whole hellsite, and I still heard too much about it. For all the successes it may have had, the more unique and memorable "mark" on internet culture from Goons was and is not that far removed from being dunked in phosphoric acid.

More broadly, I think people are a little too dismissive of culture from other sites. Reddit as a whole doesn't have (much of) a culture, but individual subreddits do. Tumblr culture is a wasteland in a lot of ways, but that deOnclerization is even a coherent concept means something.

I will never stop being nostalgic for the old internet. SomethingAwful included, despite Goons becoming a cult that decided to attack the entire rest of the internet later in it's life. Articles like ION Storm Begins Work on "Deus Ex" Sequel, "Deus Goatse Secx". Worry not, all the images are broken on that archive.org link. Or their evergreen review of the Water Closet hentai game. I never went to their forums, but sometimes stories would leak off them and go viral. Like a story about an insane college roommate who apparently had a psychotic break, and the POV narrator who essentially barricaded his door to ignore it, and came and went through the window. Or the guy who sniffed his sisters panties, and then a fellow goon doxed him and told his family.

I also have an intense fondness for Stile Project. Sure, there was the pornography. And terrible shock sites to trick my friends into viewing. But it was also funny, and kind of like Blues News... just with extra pornography. Basically my one stop shop from the ages of 16 to 25.

Then there were the random blogs that would blow up. Like The Misanthropic Bitch, Old Man Murray, someone even did a blog in the form of a scientist from Half-Life. Which funnily enough, is where I heard about KMFDM for the first time and decided to check them out.

There was just some different quality to the internet back then. When everything was word of mouth on small forums, IRC chatrooms, or game lobbies. Before the algorithm homogenized all internet consumption, and caused every aspiring content creator to develop schizophrenia simultaneously.

Looks like the main reason it died was the mods extremely bad behavior. We are blessed that our mods, while not perfect, are pretty solid all around.

I would absolutely pay $10 to be a member here, not even a question. I think right now the more likely failure mode is a lack of activity so I'd hold off for now, but if we started to get really big I'd highly encourage a fee for membership. Maybe grandfather in people that have been here a while.

Whatever happened to paid forums? They are actually not a bad idea.

Don't give our jannies any ideas

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