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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3314 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.

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.

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