- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
I've not really much SA watcher, but I would like to know: how much of Something Awful's, let's call 'left-wing turn', came from either:
Just wondering, since many people talk about how (1) occured and it was Lowtax's fault, but I feel like (2) is more likely than people give credit for.
- Outsiders coming over a 'take over' the site.
- An organic evolution of the SA userbase and consequently it's moderation team.
2.
People always quote the Danganronpa influx but if you take a look at any SASS thread you'll figure out pretty quickly that the rot was always there
SA for a while was cool because you had people all accross the political spectrum. And various functioning on the autism and mental illness spectrums.
There were several events, and natural pressures, that caused SA to go to shit (I'll detail an example to have thunk about below). The Tipping point was a one-two blow. The first was the Obama campaign and Zach going full obamatard. The mods and admins, to brown nose, followed suit for the most part. So in the run to the election you had the jannies moderating heavily to the left, letting leftoids and commies skate while looking for any excuse to punish anyone right of Mao. So when McCain lost and the election toxxes hit, most of the banned posters didn't return. This shifted the balance to the left by removing most of the hard core & vocal right wing element.
Then Dangan Rompa LP hit, paywall went up, and the Tumblr influx started. This imported more deranged SJWs, sending things to the performative left. And that was what started the death spiral. No one with any sense was signing up at Something Awful. With no counter outcry, you saw more and more SJW policies put in place until you have people being banned for 're'tard'.
Natural Pressures: an example
So tl;dr is that if you are successful, you have better things to do than post on SA. IF you are sad brains, SA is your life and you make 500 posts a day while sucking up to the leadership. Its like the Peter Principal, only everyone remaining becomes an insufferable faggot.
Take for example the WoW goon who got his kids taken by CPS. Initially a very active poster. Then vanished, only to return to tell the tale of getting his kids back, stopping WoW Raiding, and getting his life together and being much happier and healthier. Anyone functional eventually has something better to do than SA.
The insane commies who grow up and realize that maybe Third World Maoism is a shit ideology just stop showing up the Mao chats, and get bullied to silence as soon as they start deviating from approved group think. If you are not a complete faggot loser, you leave the toxic commies and go make mostly normal friends doing hobbies or drinking. Only people who are too socially maladjusted to leave hang around and if they don't leave they drink the koolaid.
So what ideologies do these social mutants lean towards? "Free money to let me eat cheetos and play videogames all day"; UBI, universal health, 'I put on a dress so now lesbians who won't fuck me are bigots'. Even if you are a functional human being who just wants to forum around for a few hours after work, you don't have anywhere near the time and energy these human deadweights have to hammer out posts and try to organize a brigade of fellow human detritus to dig through your post history for an excuse to get you banned.
So it is both. The normal user base slowly became non-functional faggots because anyone who wasn't eventually stopped posting, then add in external events like the Tumblr invasion that accerated the process.
People blame Lowtax because he was entirely to blame. It was always Lowtax wanting jannies who would curate his forums for him like a full time job while paying them below minimum wage (starting with Fistgrrl). This eliminated everyone from the pool of potential moderators except for people entirely dependent on leftist social programs like welfare and disability payments, as well as exceptional college students. When they started to act on their political sensibilities and slowly purge anything right of center and then right of left, Lowtax did nothing. Once political opinions were quashed, the next step was humor that offended their politics. This took several years of sniffing out people and purging, but gradually not just the moderator team but the entire user base was culled to people who showed sufficient groupthink. Lowtax was warned this was happening, but out of laziness chose to do nothing over anything for over a decade, and eventually they succeeded in purging him as well.
Good riddance.
He could have stopped it, but was too much of a lazy pillhead do to so since the checks kept coming.
Again, just imagine a different world where he didn't think only with his dick, and hadn't abandoned his wife over the holidays to fuck a clearly BPD thot. He'd still be collecting 10,000/mo in patreon + 3,000 from the forums. Doing literally nothing other than putting up with being called a faggot by some strangers.
He might have still have had a costly divorce with Maplewife, but having not literally abandoned her with no drivers license to baby sit their kid for a month while he fucked a mormon cokewhore, she might have been a little less eager to squeeze his scrote in the waffle maker and might have settled for the $350/mo in child support and some token alimony.
(Also if he hadn't held her passport and deliberately fucked with her resident application, the Judge probably wouldn't have destroyed him on allimony. He also might not have needed to shell out for the legal representative for their kid)
IF he had not chased wall-hitting BPD pussy, he'd still be doing pills and box wine and making 6 figures.
DO NOT STICK YOUR DICK IN CRAZY
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