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Insanitylad posted:I've been away from the forums for quite a long time but never forgot spending way too much of my teen years here. . . has there been any kind of vision or communication from the new site owners? Any plans to breathe new life into the site? There are still active threads from years ago...hell there is a thread in ask/tell with over 30000 replies. How is anyone supposed to catch up and be a part of the conversation in something like that? it slowly dies no one is willing to pay $10 entry fee for an internet forum in 2023 when there's so many free online communities available everywhere
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May 30, 2023 23:42
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 17:28 |
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Lady Radia posted:its population decline right now is pretty tightly correlated to "how would folks come here". SA doesn't have cultural influence it gained in the mid-2000s anymore but it also lacks any content generation that LED to folks joining in the mid-early-2000s, as well as the early 2010s when the curated and moderated LP's were popping off. the issue is that nowadays the way people access content is largely through video format rather than text which is what SA had being about. Text-based LPs have long being subhumed by twitch for instance. Maybe it's just me: but I notice that there's a tendency nowadays for newer online communities to coalise around YT personalities. [quote] Lady Radia posted:that's been the case for 25 years. it's always been the unique community SA is mostly unique as kind of a repo of mid-2000s internet culture frozen in stasis. Other than that it's just a chatgroup for people in their late 30s/early 40s at this point. Uniqueness isn't nessessarily a selling point by itself Typo fucked around with this message at 03:26 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 01:35
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Not Wolverine posted:Honestly, yes I have met people IRL who have said they know about Something Awful, but didn't like the general attitude of the forums. To be even more specific, I discovered these forums because I heard about SA's reputation on two different forums, SA was referred to as a hostile but knowledgeable place. Granted, that was forever ago (guessing 2007ish) but even today if I ask someone about SA they either have never heard of it and don't want to visit "some awful" website, or they will say they have heard about it, and that it is a bad place. A lot of people I know want some degree of anonymity online, both rap sheets and giving Jeffrey you credit card go against online anonymity. One nice thing about SA is the lack of obvious bots or burner accounts, but given the site's current lack of popularity I'm not sure that's entirely because of the registration fee. And the level of knowledge has gone way down over the years in some of the forums (you can prob guess which ones) The twitterization of SA has a lot to do with it, back in the days you had posters who wrote interesting stuff and it would at least be noticed and discussed. Nowadays for every one interesting/educational posts there's like 100x ppl just reposting hot takes from twitter randos telling said posters what they want to hear but which at times have less factual correctness than actual government propaganda. And those posts dominate discussions nowadays because tweets are by design easy to consume over longer form posts. And it doesn't help that the forums has being around for so long there's all sorts of weird drama between various groups of posters which ummmm....the less said the better really Count Roland posted:Well this is exactly the point, right? Someone new comes into a forum to post and is attacked for being some right wing racist because apparently even terms like culture war are loaded dog whistles. a term which was coined by Gramsci (pretty famous Italian Marxist) no less Typo fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 02:41
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Collateral posted:I bought my son an account, telling him was a funny place with lots of useful information and friendly people. \ why would you do this to him get him to introduce you to some discord servers or something lol The userbase on discord is much more international which if you are posting about politics makes it a much more interesting experience. Like when the Russo-Ukrainian War began I was on servers which had both Russian and Ukrainian posters living in their respective countries giving their perspective. I get to talk to Nepalese posters about their opinon of their Communist party or how this Indian poster's life is as a member of the untouchable caste, or eastern Europeans whose amazon packages got stolen by corrupt custom officials. Meanwhile back on SA you talk to the same group of white Americans whose entire experience with non-US world seem to come from reading twitter
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Feb 7, 2024 03:05
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Collateral posted:That is where he is. I just wanted to...broaden his social internet landscape and have a shared experience. It didn't work. yeah zoomers got this poo poo figured out a lot better than us lol
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Feb 7, 2024 04:38
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Griddle of Love posted:It's incredible how easy it is to forget that. here we see the noted nazi publication "Jacobin" using the term "cultural war" as a right-wing dog whistle  no seriously tho cultural wars is used pretty ubiquitously to refer to the fights over issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in the US politics today
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Feb 7, 2024 17:15
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Count Roland posted:Its these sorts of posts that keep me away from much of the forums. Righteously slaying strawmen, smugly mocking any potential critics. Hardly unique to SA, it is found everywhere online to some extent. But on SA there are threads that don't have this, which I attribute partly to the BBCode forum. When posts are algorithmically sorted or ranked by popularity these sorts of posts rise to the top because they invite aggressive agreement or disagreement. On this sort of forum it is at least possible to have long term discussions where actual ideas are presented and where others are engaged and willing to critique or contribute, etc. Actual discussions may not be common but at least they're possible here, as opposed to somewhere like Twitter where they are not. the sort of discussions that used to take place on BB boards have largely moved to Discord servers SA doesn't have algorithmic ranking for posts, but then again the posterbase/mods for some of the forums also don't have a great deal of tolerance for dissenting opinions either over the last couple of years. And the same people keeps arguing with each other in circles over the course of years have produced a lot of personal emnities which are...distracting to say at least. It's not really a good place to have discussions. Another disadvantage is that SA is almost 100% English monolingual, which means the information available are heavily limited especially when discussing international events. Typo fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 21:18
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