Quidam Viator posted:

I loving love this thread because I like to write in long-form, with paragraphs and punctuation. There was once a time where this was the most radical thing you could do on the internet: Go online and post like someone who speaks a language fluently, and so that's what we did here. I think the SA Forums are fundamentally based on opposition: The internet is loving stupid, it makes you stupid, and whatever we're doing here is always some sort of indictment of what "everyone else" is doing.

I recall the beginnings of Something Awful pretty clearly. For me, the story of SA begins over at PlanetQuake, where Lowtax stood up for the first time and really made something seriously hilarious and sarcastic happen. I'm not saying he was the first, but he caught on to a basic internet premise: giving everyone access means there are dumbasses everywhere, and the no matter what they think of themselves, the poo poo they make is worth finding and then making fun of.

Now that's just boring. We've been at it for 20 years. But Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse was a concept that had never been done before. Collecting lovely Quake 2 maps, playing them, then writing ridiculously terrible reviews, while including a download link to experience the awfulness of what people were publishing? It was brilliant in the day, and I laughed as hard at it as I did at Jeff K. Hell, I used to run a TFC clan, and loving RADIUM used to have a feature where he'd review user-made maps by setting up a server, and just allowing the first 16 people to get in with him and review it. Boring now, revolutionary then. I felt all special when I got in and he featured my quote, acting like a noob and saying "I want to be in a tfc clam".

In the early days of the internet, poo poo was insanely dumb, full of the worst ideas, the worst grammar, the dumbest people who managed to figure out how to upload pictures or video in the days before Google and Youtube and Imgur. There were so few people paying attention that anyone could get away with anything. We used to look forward to every Awful Link of the Day, because it took careful searching by our whole community as a team to find the absolute worst hidden poo poo. They were QUALITY.

The problem with comedy is that it is a thing of its times and that it wears thin. What was insanely funny two decades ago is now the bottom-tier garbage of the internet. It all moves too quickly here. In the early forums, your post count was something that mattered. There was a guy called Jeddite who had the highest post count. I remember him, the first to care about fake internet karma points. Back in the day, the Tossed Salad Man was the height of comedy. Now you can't escape the flood of fake and real people pitching a profane fit on the internet, and it's boring. It was amazing long ago.

These forums were a vital part of my life before 2003 or so. All the loving garbage with E-Front and Sam Jain and Lowtax's attempts to save the site, like the Korn backpack and the rest were real drama. Back in the day, they played games with the forums. The color scheme would go bonkers, or they'd act like the site had been taken over. We invented meta-humor.

I'm a Something Awful chauvinist in the old sense of the word, I guess. I have enough memory of this forum's growth to believe that we originated over 50% of the ideas that form the modern internet. This place itself may be a relic of older times, but everything we started is still very much alive. To be here for so long feels like having root access to the culture of the internet itself. So what does that teach us?

Perhaps the first lesson is that being the first totally contrarian site on the internet is a road to obscurity if you actually caught or set the mood of the internet as contrarian. It doesn't matter if we were the first; our offspring are far more contrarian than we were capable of being. As the internet becomes simultaneously more accessible, more contrarian, and more meta-comedic, it is inevitable that the source material for all of this bullshit will look ancient and decrepit. That's why I still visit this site every day, as I have for almost all of 20 years, but I get most of my edge off of the children and grandchildren and other descendants of SA.

I think another one is that the nature of our style here will always be a negative reflection of how we think people act on the internet. Back when people were really, really stupid, typing in bad leetspeak, we were the place with the grammar and punctuation. Now that the funniest things on the internet are careposts and serious, misguided rants, our style is to tell people like Prester Jane to get out of the McDonalds drive-thru, or tell me that this was a nice meltdown. It's weak, but it's the only way we can try to be contrarian. We've done everything else. Now we're simply anti-content.

Once upon a time, this actually used to be a genuinely cool place to be, like to the extent that vaguely famous people came here specifically, and we created content that crashed the whole internet. My favorite memory of the very early site and forums was Lowtax's Game Designer Survivor Island by Jeff K. I mean, here we were, with Lowtax writing this, and we had all these guys like Carmack and Romero showing up in our forums. As a collective, we made AYBABTU the thing it was, and JRR made the song. There were relationships. We used to attract all sorts of people who wanted to use SA as a springboard for being funny. Ancient stories of random people who came here to briefly tell their Bigpeeler stories, their stories about their dad being a big wheel down at the pork plant, to post their amazing photoshops and MS Paints. This used to be the place to gain the attention of the internet.

The very format of this forum is a thing that keeps it stuck in the past: Modern sites make threaded shitposts and loose moderation possible, with social media integration, etc. This forum was built in ancient days for the very kind of posts that Prester Jane and I are posting. You can go long-form here. You're not restricted to 10,000 characters.

I think the most important part of the history of the Something Awful forums is what all that contrarian attitude covered up: Our ability to be the smartest, most influential community on the internet. It's hidden in plain sight. By calling the internet on its bullshit for 20 years, we have developed a very fine taste for what bullshit is, how to mock it, and how, in our best times, to produce content that ISN'T bullshit. When we DO achieve that, it becomes part of the Internet's DNA, because it's gone through the most rigorous filter on the whole loving internet, (namely ourselves), and has actually been deemed funny and not worthy of just making GBS threads upon.

For me, our history has been one of slow and necessary decline. We started with one of the biggest bangs any non-corporate site has ever produced. We peaked, and tried to adapt for as long as we could. For a long time, our content was the freshest on the whole drat internet. Now we have been mostly eaten by our children, but that's ok. Even the conceit that we are still around, talking like this, is a gigantic middle finger to the whole internet of things that collapse after a month or two. I don't even post my craziest ideas about our effects on the world. I am just glad to feel like I was here in some part for the beginning of all internet funny, and I mean that seriously, in the most long-form way possible.

FistEnergy posted:

this is an interesting idea and I have a lot of interesting stories I could share but ehh it sounds like a lot of work

I will say that Howard Stern told me 9/11 was happening and I jumped right on the forums and you'll find me in that thread almost from page one so yeah, I guess you could say im a big deal

Kestral posted:

The SAcyclopedia is invaluable, but it's not a narrative, and narratives have a unique power to transmit history. I'll see what parts of our history I can dredge up - I've been here a long time, but if anything that's working against me here, since it all blends together.

Trollking posted:

I registered this account so that I could ask someone how to right click and save-as. I started lurking in ‘99 and pretty much only hung out in GBS and DPPH. When in DPPH I could only see the embedded photos and links, but I could never figure out what some of the posters meant when they posted a link and the text: “right-click; save as.” It was like some kind of code.

Eventually people started to move away from embedding 50 pics in one post and started just putting the first photo from a set and a link, so I was poo poo out of luck because I couldn’t figure out how to access the links. One day somebody posted a Jade Hsu teaser and a link and I finally registered an account rather than lose my mind wondering what she looked like naked. I think my first post on the forums was “‘Right click; save as’ WHAT THE gently caress DO YOU MEAN?” I think it was Stuntcock who very graciously saved my sanity without calling me a retard.

I haven’t gotten much smarter in the years since.



This was early Jade Hsu, not emaciated heroin addict Jade Hsu. It seems important to note that.

maskenfreiheit posted:

this split personality thing is a drag and i'm too cheap to make multiple accounts here so i mostly seriouspost on reddit which goes... poorly

Justin Godscock posted:

I ate so many downvotes on Reddit by simply posting like I do here.

maskenfreiheit posted:

sealioning them via modmail.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

What do these things mean

Grand Prize Winner posted:

What do these things mean

maskenfreiheit posted:

lemon-lyme disease posted:

I’m somewhat worried this is how I argue in real life. I’m pretty sure it isn’t? but I’m not sure enough.

mrfart posted:

Saw this today:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/21/slender-man-case-anissa-weier-sentenced

That poo poo started here, right?

Sorry if it's been posted before.

extra row of teeth posted:

Wetlegs was originally brought up by me as an example of Helldump actually doing good. It got that fucko perma'd

Helldump would never work these days for a multitude of reasons, and even back in the day it sometimes looked uncomfortably close to modern-day Kiwifarms, but it did serve its intended purpose for a while until it started to eat its own. It's a shame the good (dunking on people who actually deserve it, running pedos off the forums) can't be reconciled with the bad (doxxing, poop-touching, making fun of awkward but not outright terrible people)

lemon-lyme disease posted:

I’m somewhat worried this is how I argue in real life. I’m pretty sure it isn’t? but I’m not sure enough.

Who What Now posted:

The point of sealoining is that you aren't actually interested in having a real argument or discussion, you just loudly say that you are and loudly ask ignorant and annoying questions until someone tells you to gently caress off, at which point you declare yourself the winner because you were nice and calm and they said a naughty word.

The Glumslinger posted:

One weird, dumb piece of SA culture that is mostly gone was The Bad Thread in tbb, aka a thread about Game Of Thrones and bitching about GRRM. God, I read so many awful GRRM side projects from that thread, and they were soooo awful. Anyone else remember Pear-Shaped Man? That whole thread was fueled by him taking forever to release books, but now most have just given up and people don't care enough to be that same kind of angry. Also the time when they ironically wrote a novel length porn parody of it.

Stabbatical posted:

All the sealion does is confront anti-sealion prejudice. The sealion did nothing wrong.

let it mellow posted:

Yeah, slender man was a creation of SA. I think from one of the “tell your ghost story” threads

OXBALLS DOT COM posted:

Sadly, there now are cabals of users controlling discussion

FactsAreUseless posted:

The gently caress are you talking about you maniac

Bust Rodd posted:

Something Awful. Com has produced a number of demons

Bust Rodd posted:

Without taking the time to mega massive effort post I will say that the feeing of being on the ground floor of a thread that ended up producing something special is a truly unique internet experience.

Like I’m specifically thinking of the retard masturbator thread and like the 2nd post was “So you work from home, OP?” and then then just like 3 pages of empty quoting it because we were witnessing a nuclear burn in real time.

Slenderman was similar because nothing else in the thread got that much of response and even in the moment posters were getting severely disturbed by the images like right away.

Horseshoe theory posted:

The Sea Lion was illegally in their house, so he technically did something wrong.