frap
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2021
Null even broke it down into 5 parts! Truly a classic 5 act Shakespearean tragedy.
(I'm still listening so someone may have already made this observation.)
"Mad at the Internet" - a/k/a My Psychotherapy Sessions
- Thread starter Null
- Start date
(I'm still listening so someone may have already made this observation.)
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2021
You’re right, the first thing that popped up in twitter when I searched Pooner was this
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2023
Most likely after the fallout of the Pantsu divorce arc and Ralph is left penniless even more
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2021
Josh stated that he is never doing a spotlight/person stream (CWC, Ethan Ralph, DSP and other major lolcows*) just because it's a lot of content to get through and their stories are still happening.
*I don't know the list I just know Moviebob is on it and Josh said he's just to gross to talk about.
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2022
I was listening to the stream, and one thing that I actually really appreciate is how Josh can explain how different forum rules changed things. Like no l33t speak, no hentai, ten dollar paywall, etc, it’s interesting to see how things as simple as those rules massively impacted the direction SA went.
You don’t really see that perspective a lot, but Josh being the head of this shithole gives some little details others might just not think about.
You don’t really see that perspective a lot, but Josh being the head of this shithole gives some little details others might just not think about.
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2023
A kids cartoon predicted the future!
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2016
I didn't know it was going to fucking happen.
So, there's a little skipped over and left out of Null's summary, and a few errors. I'll try to correct them, some of these are big omissions, others pedantic pedantry.
1. Planet Quake was a big deal. Before SA Lowtax was an article writer at Planet Quake. Fragmaster, the guy who announced his suicide, was another mainstay there and these sites were legit popular with PC shooter players back in the day. A lot of extremely early SA culture came out of that 90s PC gamer culture. Lowtax claims to have had massive fights with some catlady bitch there who "didn't understand" comedy or the site's audience but with the benefit of hindsight her real crime was probably asking him to show up to work on time and take things like payroll requests seriously.
2. Very early SA. As Null said, Lowtax launched SA in late 1999 and it took off very quickly, based on his already existing popularity. I do not think he was inspired by Maddox. That was just what gamerdude culture was like at the time. There were tons of websites like this, the Book of Gord comes to mind as another one that was big back then, along with ABS, hardocp, various shooter game websites, etc.
3. How the SA front page worked. While Lowtax is most famous as a deadbeat admin who ran from his problems, one thing he consistently did was write articles for his webpage. Within a year and a half Something Awful's front page adapted the format of having a single general interest comedy article, a special feature (like a Photoshop Phriday or Flash Tub) and an Awful Link of the Day and it would keep this format nearly until the end of Lowtax's ownership of the website. And just to be clear here, this was every day. It was a comedy mill but the articles were legitimately popular with lots of user interaction. SA's early userbase was a borderline pest in the same way that KF users might be unfairly painted as today. This was the days of limited website bandwidth and being an Awful Link might easily knock your shitty geocities page offline for the rest of the month. Goons were also massive weens who would do early versions of DDoS (just load the page a bunch) or goatse spamming the guestbook, etc. Though other writers came and went, Lowtax diligently maintained his own weekly article until damn near the end. And yes, there were some very funny ones. Lowtax is insufferable on film but can be quite amusing in text.
4. The truth behind the popular articles. Popular stuff like photoshops and Flash Tubs were huge drivers of traffic to SA but, unlike many claimed, they weren't really "stealing" content from forums users, per say. Almost everyone who submitted shops back in the day wanted them to be featured and people who were good and funny with them developed obnoxious cults of personality of their own. SASS/bantown, etc., didn't like this but their opinion was sour grapes, far from the norm. If it hadn't been you would have seen people stop posting images once the Photoshop mod announced a thread would be featured in Photoshop Phriday, and yet instead the opposite happened, people would pile in to get their shit shown. Flash Tub songs, like the Flip Top Box video linked were actually created in audio competitions, users would vote on them and the winning song would get a Flash Tub video made of it. I think there might have been very small prizes (like an account upgrade) offered to the winner. So, while Shmorky did do the animation that Null played, he didn't create the ear-worm music. Some other guy did and was credited with it in the original posting. I always thought Shmorky was a fucking hack, by the way, he'd go back to the well on his same old jokes time and time again. And while the fact that he was a diaper fetishist (and tranny) is what he's most creepily famous for now, he spent a long time hiding that stuff from the general goon.
5. The hard years. So, Something Awful came about just in time for the first online crash and rather than being the immediate success mentioned, it had a few very, very, lean years there when the bubble burst. Banner ads brought in very little revenue, his web hosts were fly by night scammers and most of the writers were college aged guys living in shitty apartments- a good breeding ground for humor.
6. Ten bux. The ten dollar registration had the nice effect of keeping ten year olds with no credit card off the forum, but it was created specifically to discourage gimmick and alternate accounts. And while, yes, it helped keep out kids and retards this was lessened over time when mods and admins started giving free accounts (and, more importantly, free re-regs) to their friends. It undid the good the original system did of tying rule breaking to (small) financial harm and led to certain Wolftones getting banned and re-joining tens or even hundreds of times (in theory a thousand dollars spent to say dumb shit, but often scammed with chargeback frees or the secret help of a friendly mod.) Before probations were created there was a delicate balance where mods wouldn't want to unfairly take someone's account (aka money) away but also knew that rules had to be enforced. It was a good way of enforcing community standards without being abusive. Probations changed that and the mods became vindictive assholes who would temporarily restrict access to your paid for posting privilege "because it was funny" or for no reason at all.
-just an aside- Lowtax spent decades lying about stuff like keeping user financial information or being able to tie real names to user accounts through credit card transactions. It was later proven that he had access to this information, even if he generally did not use it. These days I think we all have better op sec than back then and know well enough to know that you literally are your credit card but whatever, just thought I'd put that to bed.
7. The overly monetized shithole. Charging for user access was a big success and, realistically speaking, probably saved Something Awful. Lowtax, it would seem, learned the wrong lesson from this. Basic services of the forum, such as having an avatar or using search or archives (the ability to see old threads) became paid for extras. And then, after taking money for them, would be down for years. More on this later.
8. The Fortress of Unfunny Solitude. As alluded to in Null's chat, in about 2006 or so, Lowtax stopped visiting most of his forums and unofficially handed off responsibility for them to trusted associates (read: thieves.) These associates were responsible for changing the site's culture in the ways Lowtax would later complain about, but it was his unwillingness to stand up for his users that allowed it to happen. There was one shitposting board, FYAD, that Lowtax liked and who's users he considered his friends. He retreated there, and only there, for about a decade and ceased to care about what occurred in the rest of the forums. Nothing short of an FBI visit could wake him from his slumber. (and :shh: that was an FYAD regular posting in LF, not an LF regular :shh: ) General interest topics? Fuck 'em. Games, what the site was founded on? Fuck 'em. That guy who says Aatrek is a pedophile? Fuck him specifically.
9. All of the other ways he lost money. Oh boy, uhh, Null might have understated Lowtax's financial ineptitude. In 2006 or so he brought a McMansion in suburban KC and I am pretty sure he did lots of dumb-shit refinancing on it. At this point SA was probably near its financial apex with well over 100k a year in profits. If Lowtax had, say, just paid for the house normally he would have been fine. But as is, he ended up underwater on it, underwater on his shitty rent-a-sports-car, etc and sold all of them off when the market was at absolute rock bottom. There was a lot of other stuff he wasted money on too, presumably including his shitty Xango mangosteen drinks and other such bullshit. Something Awful's monetization was never scale-able in the way that things like Reddit were, but there was enough for a man to live a more than comfortable life were he to take proper care of it.
10. The scamming tech admin. Oh fucking God, for nearly 8 years Lowtax had a hired admin named radium, who's job was not only to keep the site online but also to make homegrown upgrades to it so that he could, for instance, have an automatic process for users to purchase emoticons, or purchase avatars for other users, or other stuff that regular vBulletin just did not have. And slowly but surely radium did such things. But he did them in deliberately obtuse ways, such that his code could not be deciphered, and simple tasks, such as implementing a search function (a default feature of vBulletin) took years to implement or spent years being down. It was only after firing radium that Lowtax learned that his forum had been given totally and irrevocably fucked-up coding, which was impossible to undo and which Lowtax relied on for his living.
11. Hostage to the tech admin. Radium's replacement was a cheap SJW who volunteered to do sys op work for him either for free or for a very low rate. He was okay, right up until Lowtax tried to undo the cultural rot and make SA more like KF. At this point the tech admin threatened to quit and, well, that was the end of that.
12. The whole pedophile mod thing. Yeah, okay, about Aatrek. In the late 90s or early 2000s a teenaged boy was hired to babysit his cousin and while doing so he molested her. As a child himself he was given only a juvenile's punishment and got out of his incarceration very quickly. This boy grew up to be the mod of Something Awful's, I think, music subforum. A segment of users hated him because he enforced site standards on grammar and punctuation long after most of the site stopped caring. They dug up dirt on him (his name was Aaron and he was a Star Trek fan community bigwig, just to help give the game away) and discovered his bad past. Naturally, word of this made its way to Lowtax but for three years or more he ignored it because the people who were saying so were "trolls." Despite the serious nature of the accusations and their expert documentation, Lowtax refused to look into them for a very long time because he was an irresponsible retard who didn't want to do his goddamned job. I think Null did a very good job outlining Lowtax's hatred of responsibility but there it is.
12. No way out. While Lowtax was on KF, Null -as he has mentioned many times- offered to do tech work to rebuild SA with a new code base. Lowtax of course said no. Null seemingly doesn't understand why but I think I do. So many of the features that would have had to have been scrapped were monetized features. Taking them away would have A) been somewhat equivalent to defrauding people who had paid for them (think, things like purchased big red text custom avatars which presumably would not have been carried over by hand) and B) would have immediately stopped the on-going monetization that SA needed. The perfect time to have done this would have been in 2008 or so, but Lowtax had missed the boat by a full decade thanks to being a lazy drunk retard who believed radium's lies. And come 2018 it was too late. I also think Null's proposal might have involved, you know, not carrying over the old forum at all and restarting from scratch. Thats what it sounded like anyway. This certainly would have killed Lowtax's control over the userbase. I do not doubt at all that they would have ditched "new SA with none of the old posts carried over" and went to an off-site with a more active and well liked admin. I just don't think Josh, at the time, understood how important the obnoxious, shitty, scammy paid features of SA were to Lowtax's financial health.
And now for a little errata. These are just minor mistatements Null made, sorry for my pedanticness.
1. Endless August. Null states that "endless summer" was caused by AOL. And it was, but its actually "endless August". Before AOL, American kids would arrive at their college campuses in August and every year some of the nerdy ones would log onto usenet, generally behaving with the retardation that any socially awkward 18 year old would in a new setting. This was normal and expected and over the course of the academic year those teens would learn to fit in with their communities and balance would be restored. In, I want to say '91, this changed and the retarded freshmen never stopped coming, "breaking" the 80s era Internet forever and leading to the AOL/Netscape era of the Internet. I don't exactly have all of Lowtax's history down pat but I think he came from this second era, and not the first one. Tangent in a tangent, for those who don't know, Vanderbilt is a prestigious university in the US and Lowtax was very lucky to have went there, though of course he pissed it all away pretty quick.
2. Leet speak. Josh is apparently young enough to not remember what leet speak actually was. He is very lucky. It wasn't related to phones, for one. You didn't get internet on your phone until long after leet speak had died. It was kids trying to look cool. You would use numbers wherever possible (example= leet was originally 3L1T3 as in elite) and if a child you would use interspaced caps LiKe ThIS oBnOxIoUs BuLlSiT hErE as a respectful way to show that you were a kid. All caps was a privilege reserved for adults. Its fucking dumb and smart people hated it. I can only wonder when the last unironic user stopped but if I had to hazard a guess, 2001 or 2 maybe?
3. Lowtax's first wife was Korean, thats why his daughter is named Lauren Seoul Kyanka. SASS dug up a page where her parents were bragging that their daughter had married a "successful American businessman" and mocked him for it relentlessly. Some of them refer to her as "chink wife" to this day, which is probably why Null thought she was Chinese.
4. The Eve guild that Vile Rat was a part of was Goonfleet, not "Goon Squad." And it wasn't actually important to the site's development, there were and are goon guilds in every online game. Goonfleet was infamous on SA for purchasing lots of banner ads to advertise itself on the forums, but lots of groups did that, and for having retards join SA just to get into it and then getting immediately banned for making stupid threads ("join 4 guild"= instaban.) Also, Vile Rat wasn't some sort of CIA agent or whatever, I mean, he had a security clearance, but he was an IT contractor. He helped fix their computers. He was actually on a Goonfleet call when the attack broke out, the call was recorded and you can famously listen to his live reaction to the start of the happening. Side-eye, within 3 to 4 hours enough information had been gleaned (specifically, that employees travelling to a safe house had attacked in an ambush) that even a member of the general public such as myself knew that it was an organized terrorist attack and yet the next evening in a presidential debate Barrack Obama blatantly lied to the American people about what had occurred. Mitt Romney told the truth and the debate moderators admonished him for it. I was an active Eve playing goon at the time (with an "in that field" college degree,) and was sickened by it but what can you. As you pointed out, Vile Rat was a Democrat and he certainly wouldn't approve of the things his mother did in his name after the fact. As Goonfleet's chief diplomat, he played the politics/security game in both Eve and real life and certainly knew how and why people lied about stuff.
5. LF was actually very popular. I personally hated LF, which a "political shitposting forum" but it would be a lie to say that it was anything other than extremely popular. It had more posts than practically any other subforum (maybe Games...), it attracted more new users than any other subforum and those users purchased avatars and platinum upgrades more than other users. Or, more accurately, mods gifted that shit to them constantly. While many users didn't like them, SA as a whole was already very left wing (they were fucking liars when saying it wasn't) and most of the site silently agreed with them on stuff that wasn't Maoism. LF is the birthplace of the leftwing of the modern day online culture war, in the same way that places like /pol/ were for the right.
6. Helldump, though remembered by people like Zoe Quinn (I like to call them "retards") as being a big bad super-vicious place was actually a blatant copy of various off-site communities that did similar work, such as Ban Town or the Something Awful Sychophant Squad. The difference, of course, was that admins, mods and wrong-think were all off-limits on Helldump. HD had a lot of overlap with LF and was leftwing, while the off-sites gradually turned to the right. A lot of SASS/SmyD/TNE/etc. people later became Kiwifarmers. I find it funny that people might complain about Helldump, back in the day we thought they were patsys.
Sorry for the sperging. Like a lot of us, I consider the good Lowtax to be a hero of mine. Immensely funny, loyal to a fault to his own idea of the Internet, willing to go against the grain and buck trends, the gamer, the non-grownup. But as the stream dictates, there was a bad Lowtax too. The womanizer, the crybaby, the coward, the bad judger of character, the non-fucking user of condoms, he who could not compel himself to be serious even when it involved things like other people's money or keeping promises made.
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- Joined
- Sep 9, 2016
And that is why don't want me to explain it.
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- Dec 31, 2018
Thanks for the lowtax stream. I created my SA forum account in 2000 and it was such a fun place for a while. Shame what lowtax’ laziness let it turn in to.
Schmeated Ted
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2020
@Null you've complained about running out of music and you're fond of weird music in general so I got something for you.Indian Folk Metal
It's some of the weirdest and cringe shit I've run across in a long time, and even if you don't like it, could be a good song if the poos end up joining the wars going on and starting up.
It's some of the weirdest and cringe shit I've run across in a long time, and even if you don't like it, could be a good song if the poos end up joining the wars going on and starting up.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2021
Jersh in New York
Jersh in Florida
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Britbong boomer copes and sneeds over having one of his videos removed by YT shortly after posting.
The video in question:
The video in question:
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- Jan 28, 2023
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- Oct 28, 2021
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This looks more like a really good 3d animation than a real human
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- Dec 15, 2015
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- Jul 7, 2020
Haven't seen this anywhere on the farms, probably because New Zealand is small and isn't well represented in forums, but the ruling Labour party—left wing "social democrats", the party in power during Christchurch and which Null had indirect dealings with as a result—got shellacked in the national elections this week.
The left wing Labour party went from 63 seats to 29. The conservative National party (led by a religious Christian businessman with appreciable wealth) went from 34 to 50 seats. ACT, which seems to be a classical liberal semi-libertarian party, went from 10 to 11 seats. And NZ First, a real right wing populist party—anti-immigration, anti-globalization, etc.—went from 0 to 8 seats. The Green and Maori parties also gained seats at the expense of Labour.
Effectively, the New Zealand left wing got demolished which is leading to the first right wing government in the country in 6 years. The National party seemed to run on a platform of law and order, rectifying the economy, and some other NZ specific issues that I as an amerimutt don't really have the context to understand. The surprising rise in Hamas support amongst their culturally enriched populace seems to have contributed as well. Lots of cringe cope on places like reddit about how voters are stupid and the conservative politicians are evil, which might be fun to mine for screenshots.
The farms has outlasted another one of its assailants, congrats Josh!
edit: Also in Australia/NZ news, Australia heartily rejected a referendum to create a sort of council of aboriginal elders that would be parallel to their legislature, with ambiguous powers concerning the passing of legislation. That also caused major cope spirals among the left wing of the Internet, but there's a whole Australia thread in Happenings with Australians talking about it that probably has better info than I can scrape together.
The left wing Labour party went from 63 seats to 29. The conservative National party (led by a religious Christian businessman with appreciable wealth) went from 34 to 50 seats. ACT, which seems to be a classical liberal semi-libertarian party, went from 10 to 11 seats. And NZ First, a real right wing populist party—anti-immigration, anti-globalization, etc.—went from 0 to 8 seats. The Green and Maori parties also gained seats at the expense of Labour.
Effectively, the New Zealand left wing got demolished which is leading to the first right wing government in the country in 6 years. The National party seemed to run on a platform of law and order, rectifying the economy, and some other NZ specific issues that I as an amerimutt don't really have the context to understand. The surprising rise in Hamas support amongst their culturally enriched populace seems to have contributed as well. Lots of cringe cope on places like reddit about how voters are stupid and the conservative politicians are evil, which might be fun to mine for screenshots.
The farms has outlasted another one of its assailants, congrats Josh!
edit: Also in Australia/NZ news, Australia heartily rejected a referendum to create a sort of council of aboriginal elders that would be parallel to their legislature, with ambiguous powers concerning the passing of legislation. That also caused major cope spirals among the left wing of the Internet, but there's a whole Australia thread in Happenings with Australians talking about it that probably has better info than I can scrape together.
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- Sep 22, 2021
I think it dates to the early 80s hacker / cracker culture. The first home computers capable of dialling up BBSs (C64, TRS-80 etc) tended to only give you all caps. That had an aesthetic by itself. The 1337-speak grew out of that, as the systems got more capable kids used the character set creatively.
Certainly it was big when I was on pirate BBSs in like 1992, and for sure it carried over when those kids got to college or joined AOL.
TXT-speak, as in SMS messaging was similar but different. That’s where all the very shortened slang like “u” came from, and it wasn’t through people using the internet on their phone, it was just a habit that carried over, which I think is what Null was getting at.
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- Oct 11, 2021