
An Oral History of Something Awful - never-the-bride
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful
======
philipkglass
SA was great during the GWB years. The developer forum had really smart and
helpful users. The Photoshop challenges produced work that was significantly
better than what floats up to r/all today. The political arguments were
vicious _and_ pretty smart. The front page could almost always make me laugh.

Another brilliant monetization not mentioned in the article: you could pay to
customize your own user image and title. For twice the price, another user
could pay to anonymously choose their own title/image for you, usually to
insult. Want to change your appearance back? Pay again.

If you were banned you could pay to re-register and come right back. If you
were permabanned you couldn't. A funny pseudo-permaban was that sometimes a
user would get put on probation for a ridiculously long time like 9999 hours.

I'd love to find a modern SA: large enough to be always raucous and lively,
moderated well enough to keep out really poisonous users. On Reddit the only
good subreddits are locked down really tightly and the ones that aren't are
full of garbage and full of meh.

~~~
enraged_camel
The SA you describe still exists, and it still has those things you mention.

A lot of people (including SA posters) say it's not as good as it used to be,
but that may be the same phenomenon HN users complain about when they say HN
used to be better back in the day.

~~~
cloakandswagger
SA was the first forum I really got involved in and I posted there for years.
When I was there I thought it was the pinnacle of comedy; I'd never been
exposed to that brand of humor before it, and I thought it was genius.

When I look at SA today it just seems juvenile and try-hard. Really, painfully
unfunny.

I think part of it has to do with the stricter moderation; SA in the early
2000s was 4chan before I knew there was a 4chan, and I appreciated the
raucous, sometimes offensive humor.

Moreover though I think you're right, SA is still SA. My ideas about what is
funny have changed, but SA is still the same.

~~~
nyolfen
>When I look at SA today it just seems juvenile and try-hard. Really,
painfully unfunny.

this is how trends work. the originators are truly creative and interesting,
but over time the paths they forge spread across populations, and inspire
increasingly poorly executed knock-offs. eventually it becomes embarrassing
for earlier adopters.

------
xor1
The SA forums were so amazing from 2000-2004. I spent some of my most
formative years posting there (no regrets!). It's pretty crazy to think how
many people who were active on SA around then went on do Big Things:

\- CliffyB

\- moot

\- notch

\- deadmau5

\- llamaguy (guessing most people here don't know who he is, but he created a
Gamefaqs spinoff called Luelinks/EndOfTheInternet, and was one of the first
100 employees at Facebook and is now a 9-figure millionaire)

\- vilerat (aka Shawn Smith, one of the Americans who died in Benghazi)

\- garry (of garry's mod and rust fame)

\- Yahtzee

Stuff that can trace back to SA around that time:

\- 4chan itself

\- Memes ("image macros")

\- Let's Plays

\- Weird Twitter

\- That shitposting/shittexting ironic writing style that is now beloved by
modern middle/upper class American teenagers everywhere

Nearly everyone that I met as a teenager and still keep in contact with is
really successful.

Sadly, I think Lowtax is the most incompetent businessperson I've ever
encountered. It's frankly amazing how badly he mismanaged the SA forums, and
how much he took all of that amazing talent that was creating free content for
him for granted.

I think the best example is how he initially offered Yahtzee some insultingly
paltry compensation for doing Zero Punctuation. IIRC it was like $100 per
episode. Zero Punctuation alone could have kept SA relevant, I think.

The stuff that went down in 2005 and beyond drove all of the best posters
away, IMO.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Reading about all of those folks makes me feel like I wasted my time in the
early 2000's on BBS systems talking about prerelease Windows systems like
Neptune.

~~~
smoyer
I spent most of the late '90s and early 2000's building fiber networks across
the country-side and then helping with the technical aspects of increasing
Cable Modem speeds and reliability - I guess I missed most of the important
human aspects of the Internet at that time?

------
swang
Keep in mind SA forums hated "memes" unless you were really good at it. That
made the forums great because it also involved an element of risk so if
someone wasn't sure how good their stuff was they're at risk of getting
banned.

A simple example: There use to be a forums poster who posted just screenshots
from old NES video games that was always super relevant so he was never banned
(usually if you just post a meme with nothing else in the post you'd get
banned).

Another one: The whole concept of tricking users into reading a long fictional
story that started one way and eventually delved into some other topic
altogether. I guess you'd now call it a bait-and-switch (w /an anti-clamatic
ending).

That too was started (or at least popularized) on SA. A user named, "Hakan"
posted a lot of fictional stories that were pretty good and always had a twist
ending. Imitators who tried to copy him but sucked were told, "You're No
Hakan." Then that catchphrase became too memeish and was banned from the
forums (unless again your comedic timing of the phrase was hilarious).

Edit: Even the meme of, "Read post, then read saw username <username>" meme,
seems to have come from Hakan/SA which was a "meme" where you'd read a story,
get tricked by it and make a post just to specifically say you were tricked.
That got banned pretty quickly as well but it's so common in reddit and other
parts of the internet now.

~~~
Kallikrates
It's a shame that nearly all of gamequoter's history is gone.

~~~
Nition
Not sure if this applies to Gamequoter's posts specifically, but for a while
there was a site called Waffleimages that was created basically for SA in the
same sort of way Imgur was created for Reddit when all the other image hosts
sucked. Just about everyone used Waffleimages for a while and when it
eventually went away, tons of images went with it.

------
mabbo
Something Awful really set the stage for a lot of what followed in internet
culture. "Let's Play" spawned from it. The template of the modern meme.
4chan's culture was really seeded with a lot of people kicked out of SA, which
steered it in an interesting direction.

But it maintained quality via community, and through a simple $10 barrier.
Rules were followed because they were simple and mutually agreed with.

I don't think anything like it could happen today.

~~~
edkennedy
Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things.

But it's funny, I sort of have the opposite opinion of SA in regards to its
content. Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the
quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own
good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to
entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it. Slowly.

A really interesting comparison of Reddit and SA takes place in Eve Online,
where massive fleets clash on the regular. SA has a huge history there, and
tons of political heroes (vilerat! rip) but they ended up sort of being the
exclusionary bullies of the Eve universe. TEST/Dreddit (Reddit's corporation)
ended up having that easy entry and encouraged a lot of growth from the people
other companies in Eve were ignoring - the new player. This resulted in a lot
of good fun and chaos. Now there are whole companies devoted to new players
(Brave Newbies)

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I
understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good.
However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a
lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it.

Quantity went down, but quality increased.

I mean, that's what barriers to entry are about: they keep out the lowest-
common-denominator trolls, while those who actually care about the community
have no issues paying the entry fee (sometimes several times, as they get
temp-banned).

~~~
zardo
The $10 entry fee and heavy use of bans made the topic subforums the best on
the web. While FYAD may have given birth to the shitpost, shitposting is only
allowed in the designated shitposting zones.

If you want to talk or read about a massively popular topic: cars, guns,
motorcycles, games, money, pets, health, houses, coupons... it's nice to go
somewhere that weeds out low quality posting. How ever quality happens to be
defined in that particular forum.

------
Scuds
I have all sorts of conflicted feelings about my time with SA during the Bush
years when I was a college student. It was fun, but I think the time I spent
there cost me a point or two off my GPA. The people I knew of that went off to
the Microsofts, Googles, Apples, and various startups of the world were more
focused in their studies and their technical passions and didn't pay too much
attention to many of the things that concerned Goons (video games, politics
chatter, the ongoing internet popularity contest).

In the end, SA's culture was something I should have put down earlier if I
wanted to get ahead. Message boards are not where the 'A' players of the world
spend their time. Caring about the fans of your stream is not exactly of the
list of 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'

~~~
astrange
I know many successful people (PhDs, government employees, "popular twitter
users", SW engineers) who used SA to make weird jokes to get over boredom in
college.

The most successful people either became mods or were permabanned. SA admins
liked to take their life problems out on the forum by breaking it, a kind of
self-harm, and then ban you if you complained.

Also liked to claim anime forum posters were "child molestors" and ban them as
a joke, one of the sources behind 4chan's growth.

By the way, all of the least successful people I know identify as "gamers" and
keep trying/failing to become pro Twitch streamers instead of applying for
jobs.

~~~
njloof
Those guys can be amazing game QAs if they make the leap to trying to make a
good game great by trying to find all the weird corner cases that can ruin
someone's experience of the game.

As one described it to me, he's trying to protect the reputation of games as a
creative medium by pushing back against bad works of the craft.

------
xenadu02
The best times were when the internet was rapidly spreading but old people
didn't understand how easy it was to fake thing. So many local news broadcasts
punked. A lot of those early dot-com memes and hoaxes got their start on SA.
It was way too easy back then and a bit more innocent. Goatse'ing a live on-
air broadcast is gross but doesn't undermine democracy.

------
ilugaslifg
Short 3rd-party addendum on SA's defunct politics subforum "Laissez's Faire",
the secret birthplace of many parts of internet leftist political culture.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/64oqth/a_sh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/64oqth/a_short_history_of_lf_the_original_dirtbag/)

------
lljk_kennedy
There's a strange graduation you end up going through as a mid-term denizen of
the internet (i.e late 90s), for me it was SA rather than Slashdot etc, even
before Digg, 4chan and Reddit. Lots of high quality threads in the specialised
forums like Debate & Discuss, dedicated games threads etc. Very fondly
remembered. I do still prefer the threaded format rather than the subtree
style of Reddit et al.

------
Nition
A big part of Reddit's success has been the ability for any user to create a
new subreddit for any topic. And a big part of the SomethingAwful forums'
success has been having subforums for a whole lot of different general topics.

I wonder why no-one's made a forum site where anyone can create subforums the
way reddit does subreddits (or have they?). There are still major benefits to
proper chronological forum-type discussion, but forums for different things
are spread in small groups all over the Internet and you have to discover,
learn the interface, and sign up for every one separately.

I don't know if you could also make it a paid service like the SA forums in
this day and age, but the $10 entry sure kept the site running and kept the
spam and some of the idiots out as well (particularly since if you got banned
you had to pay another $10 to come back).

~~~
xor1
They have, it's a private gamefaqs spinoff that's slowly dying ever since
Megaupload shut down, since all of the site's content was hosted there. There
are less than 300 active users at any given time when it used to peak at 10k.
I'd be surprised if people are still posting a year from now. I hope the
software gets open-sourced by the creator because it's the best forum I've
ever used UX wise. I personally stopped using it a year ago.

~~~
csydas
Llamaguy:) already did source the core of it. I don't know if tags were
included, but a large majority of it was there, and Tiko was working to
replicate the other functionality awhile back too; not sure what happened with
it though. He had a prototype where you could have a board up and running and
make your own tags, etc. I think livelinks still didn't work at the time.

------
emmelaich
The SA forums had predecessors on Usenet in the form of alt.flame,
alt.tasteless and others.

alt.tasteless, in particular, promoted high quality and originality. Using
catchphrases and hackneyed meme-like sentences resulted in humiliation.

There was the occasional real gem. It was quite a feat considering the lack of
moderation.

Not that I would suggest reading it unless you have a stomach for actual
(occasionally extremely) tasteless content.

~~~
nailer
alt.sysadmin.recovery was Slashdots precessor

------
lobo_tuerto
Wow that site feels slugish on a Core i7 + GTX 970 with 16 gigs of RAM.

~~~
hashhar
I'm amazed. What browser do you use? Firefox is flying by really well (that
too on a Core i3 5th gen + NVIDIA 920m with 8GB RAM).

This sounds nuts.

~~~
lobo_tuerto
I'm on Ubuntu with Google Chrome.

~~~
hashhar
I think it could be some issue with hardware acceleration then? The link is a
bit old so I don't know if things are still the same, but I used this long
ago.

[http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/enable-hardware-
acceleration-...](http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/enable-hardware-acceleration-
in-chrome.html)

------
kalleboo
SA really had an amazing culture. I ran GBS FM (a 100% user-contributed online
radio station for Goons) and some of my best friends to this day (offline and
online) come from that project.

~~~
xor1
I remember GBS FM :)

I'm actually really surprised to see this on the front page of HN today. I
wonder how many people who actively read/post on HN were also on SA back in
the day, or still hang out in Cavern Of Cobol and/or YOSPOS.

~~~
mercer
I'm one of them. I didn't post much, but I was on SA as much as I am currently
on HN and this is all a huge blast of nostalgia for me. I just read through
the whole 9/11 thread and logged in an explored what's currently going on.
Very strange feeling.

------
paulmd
Kyanka also gave several presentations over the years.

UIUC:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gvo1uWAhHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gvo1uWAhHc)

MTU:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM4D4wrk6Vs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM4D4wrk6Vs)

A lot of the same content as this, he previously defined the tendency for the
internet to form niche communities as the "parrot-ass club".

------
minimaxir
Despite Something Awful's notoriety for shitposting as noted in this article,
the Let's Play forum (the concept of which was incidentally pioneered by SA)
is the highest-quality forum on the internet for video game playthroughs, due
in part to the registration paywall, chronological ordering of posts, and
_very_ heavy moderation.

I do think the older BBS architecture could still work in the 2017 for new
discussion forums (e.g. Discourse), although it likely would not be very
appealing to venture capitalists who want to see explosive growth metrics.

------
mrbill
I read this about a week ago and it is very well done. I've not logged into SA
(I only used the forums) in a couple of years at least, glad to see they're
still existing.

I still use a torrent site that was a SA spinoff.

~~~
subway
Spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off...

Edit:Wow, downvotes for making an oblique reference to the fact the SA
offshoot torrent sites have disappeared and reappeared under new names a half
dozen times in the last decade.

~~~
partiallypro
Yeah, I believe Demonoid had its beginnings rooted in SA (or at least some
connection,) which was definitely the most popular.

Dreamhost also had beginnings on SA, they used to give steep discounts to SA
members.

------
jtmcmc
I found out about SA via playing a norwegian real time browser strategy game
planetarion. I remember the day AYB was discovered in much the same way I
remember 9/11.

------
BadassFractal
Is there anything as relevant today as SA used to be back during its golden
years? What's the site that gets the closest to that in 2017?

~~~
mercer
Reddit

------
LoSboccacc
Is this oral history written?

~~~
RickHull
Transcribed, thankfully

------
unixhero
I am surprised nobody mentioned
[http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums](http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums)

It was massive! Well still is!

------
Pica_soO
Derek Smart Derek Smart Derek Smart?

------
jstimpfle
"fuck you and die". My CPU took this literally when it visited the site.

------
jack9
I'm not sure it's worth remembering. Being funny wasn't unique to SA. Fark and
Random Drivel and a bunch of sites existed with different allowed formats. SA
as a 4chan lite was even less interesting. I did meet Kyanka a couple times
when I was out and about.

