Bigot Brigade Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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@Lowtax formed the core of my sense of humor, along with a lot of other things, way back in the day. Been there since like 2003. So if I ain't funny you know where to direct your complaints.

But no seriously I understand that "burned out" feeling, I've had a few different projects that I hoped would outlive me, but eventually I just stopped giving a shit because this thing I'd poured so much of myself into was being trashed all the time. I can hardly imagine what it's like to have that happen on such a massive scale as SomethingAwful, but I'll bet it sucks pretty bad.

I don't give a shit if I'm like, breaking some unwritten rule about not pouring out emotions or whatever, but I don't fucking care: SomethingAwful used to be somethin that I really enjoyed. The fact that I no longer do has nothing to do with Lowtax, and everything to do with my evolution as a person. I like the Farms because it's a tighter-knit community, and because we're basically Helldump: The Website, but SA was my introduction to so many things that I currently enjoy.

So, thanks @Lowtax. When I was much, much younger (12 years ago, hot damn), I saw you posting in a FYAD thread and said I'd buy you a beer. Offer still stands.

Edit: Also, why Missouri? Closer to family? I mean, what cool shit is there? I'm kinda ignorant about it
 
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Lowtax, if you have any memory of it, what's the story behind not hiring people like Yahtzee (who went on to do ZeroPunctuation stuff), Welcome to Night Vale, the MDE guys (who are behind a ton of viral videos and leveraged an Adult Swim series out of it), and a few others I can't remember to produce content for SA? They were all SA people iirc who either approached you, or you them or were sorta doing stuff anyway but then found pretty mainstream success outside of Something Awful and I recall hearing that producing what went on to be their signature content for SA was initially being discussed, but fell through.

Did you feel they weren't a good fit for the rest of SA's content, not find them funny, couldn't pay them what they wanted, something else?

(btw I'm not an embittered ex-goon, I think it's actually kinda cool to get to ask you questions about stuff and am trying to not be a total dipshit about it).
 
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Lowtax, I've enjoyed Something Awful for years, but some of the moderators are, well, something awful, as are quite a few posters. It unfortunately seems that the forum is slowly dying. Will you pull the plug any time soon, or do you have other big plans ahead? Whatever you do, remember, Shmorky is far, far away and that's all that matters.
 
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PTNR 2.0 said:
Lowtax, if you have any memory of it, what's the story behind not hiring people like Yahtzee (who went on to do ZeroPunctuation stuff), Welcome to Night Vale, the MDE guys (who are behind a ton of viral videos and leveraged an Adult Swim series out of it), and a few others I can't remember to produce content for SA? They were all SA people iirc who either approached you, or you them or were sorta doing stuff anyway but then found pretty mainstream success outside of Something Awful and I recall hearing that producing what went on to be their signature content for SA was initially being discussed, but fell through.

Did you feel they weren't a good fit for the rest of SA's content, not find them funny, couldn't pay them what they wanted, something else?

(btw I'm not an embittered ex-goon, I think it's actually kinda cool to get to ask you questions about stuff and am trying to not be a total dipshit about it).
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None of them approached me to work with me or my site for any project; they simply used the forums as a springboard to popularity, and then left.
 
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sogdiananhero said:
you're charging people tenbux to be banned by ozma.
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I wasn't aware Ozma was still an admin. Regardless, please look up "pyramid scheme" because you still have no clue what one is.

Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0 said:
Lowtax, do you really feel that SA is a good community now? Better than it was a decade ago? How do you feel knowing it's been co-opted by a bunch of SJW who ban for wrongthink and hurt feels?

Full disclosure: I am the current owner of Something Sensitive. I am one of the pantshitters who was in your base, doxxing your mods. Also I'm a current member and poster on SA and have been for over 15 years...
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I feel disturbed that you've been a member for 15 years and still are, despite the fact you don't enjoy it. I don't care if you believe SA is a secret cabal of child porn and SJWs (I don't know how that would work but whatever), I just don't understand why, if you don't like a website, you don't just stop visiting it instead of running a forum dedicated to saying how bad it is.

I mean i know I'm in the minority here because I'm posting on a forum dedicated to hating shit, but my first reaction to a website that stops entertaining me or changes for the worst, is to remove it from my bookmarks and not visit it again. I honestly am not capable of understanding the whole rationale behind "I hate this website and by god I'm going to keep reading it and talking about how much I don't like it for decades."

Like I get making fun of me, Ambien, mangosteen, mail order bride, all that jazz, but I can't understand this deep seated and incredibly long lasting hate. Maybe it's because I'm old and have three kids and priorities change as you grow older, but I don't understand what benefit you receive from immersing yourself in an environment you do not like, and subsequently complaining about this environment you voluntarily chose to enter. What's the end goal here?
 
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I can sympathize with getting sick of dealing with bullshit and just pulling back, but if you do that, quit getting pissed off when people point out SA is currently shit. You know that yourself or you wouldn't have pulled back from dealing with the toxic waste dump it's become.
 
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Lowtax said:
I feel disturbed that you've been a member for 15 years and still are, despite the fact you don't enjoy it. I don't care if you believe SA is a secret cabal of child porn and SJWs (I don't know how that would work but whatever), I just don't understand why, if you don't like a website, you don't just stop visiting it instead of running a forum dedicated to saying how bad it is.

I mean i know I'm in the minority here because I'm posting on a forum dedicated to hating shit, but my first reaction to a website that stops entertaining me or changes for the worst, is to remove it from my bookmarks and not visit it again. I honestly am not capable of understanding the whole rationale behind "I hate this website and by god I'm going to keep reading it and talking about how much I don't like it for decades."

Like I get making fun of me, Ambien, mangosteen, mail order bride, all that jazz, but I can't understand this deep seated and incredibly long lasting hate. Maybe it's because I'm old and have three kids and priorities change as you grow older, but I don't understand what benefit you receive from immersing yourself in an environment you do not like, and subsequently complaining about this environment you voluntarily chose to enter. What's the end goal here?
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You say that but the last time I was on the site (Which admittedly was a long time ago) you used to post on the Fyad subforum nearly exclusively which was often about making fun of dumb posts on the main boards.

Also this forum isn't about hating things (I don't know anything about the something sensitive forums), people are here generally because we enjoy reading about lolcows, people who actually hate the lolcows are typically made fun of and called A-logs after an infamous person who really hated Chris-chan, they often turn out to be similar to the lolcow because they're just projecting their insecurities onto the lolcow.
 
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Vaclav said:
In 2014 someone on 4chan posted a history of SA's takeover by the Safe Space Illuminati. Anyone care to confirm/deny this?



So according to this guy, the Secret Service scare kind of precipitated the whole thing by destroying the hive where all the SJGoons gathered and causing them to swarm through the other boards.
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I know I'm late on this, but another factor was that Obama got elected in the first place. All the goons who gave enough of a shit to tox themselves for McCain (and later Romney) got banned, which made the site overall more left leaning.

As far as infesting other forums, I only ever noticed it in Games and Let's Play. Games had it its own thread (in 2011 I think) for a while ("Minority Representation in Video Games" or something like that) and people from that thread sometimes hopped into others to discuss shit only they cared about. The Duke Nukem Forever thread got especially bad.

In Let's Play, people were already used to criticizing others for every little thing, which is fine when it's about technical stuff, but after they got enriched by DnD, some people also started bitching about perceived sexism, racism and such. I remember the first few pages of an Ocarina of Time LP being a huge clusterfuck because the OP titled it something like "Navi is a bitch", which caused some feminist goons to chimp out.
 
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Intelligent Calcium said:
I know I'm late on this, but another factor was that Obama got elected in the first place. All the goons who gave enough of a shit to tox themselves for McCain (and later Romney) got banned, which made the site overall more left leaning.
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Once a site starts banning people just for which political candidates they support, it's a short sharp drop to total irrelevance. It's not a discussion site at that point, it's a hugbox.
 
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AnOminous said:
Once a site starts banning people just for which political candidates they support, it's a short sharp drop to total irrelevance. It's not a discussion site at that point, it's a hugbox.
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To be fair here, a 'Toxx' clause is basically waging your account over an outcome, basically they were gambling with their account, admittedly there was no payout for this.
 
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Lowtax said:
I feel disturbed that you've been a member for 15 years and still are, despite the fact you don't enjoy it. I don't care if you believe SA is a secret cabal of child porn and SJWs (I don't know how that would work but whatever), I just don't understand why, if you don't like a website, you don't just stop visiting it instead of running a forum dedicated to saying how bad it is.

I mean i know I'm in the minority here because I'm posting on a forum dedicated to hating shit, but my first reaction to a website that stops entertaining me or changes for the worst, is to remove it from my bookmarks and not visit it again. I honestly am not capable of understanding the whole rationale behind "I hate this website and by god I'm going to keep reading it and talking about how much I don't like it for decades."

Like I get making fun of me, Ambien, mangosteen, mail order bride, all that jazz, but I can't understand this deep seated and incredibly long lasting hate. Maybe it's because I'm old and have three kids and priorities change as you grow older, but I don't understand what benefit you receive from immersing yourself in an environment you do not like, and subsequently complaining about this environment you voluntarily chose to enter. What's the end goal here?
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Thanks, I appreciate your responding to me. Keep in mind as I say this I can't speak for everyone on my forum, just me...

I wouldn't say I derive zero enjoyment from SA. I still read in and post in an increasingly dwindling number of threads in a handful of subforums. But that's a far cry from the hours I'd spend on SA in the past.

A second reason, sadly, is the site is such a shit show and the mods and dominant personalities so terrible that it's amusing to mock. Mocking dumb shit online is what a lot of my site is about, it's what this place is about, and it used to be what SA was about.

I don't think SA is a haven for child porn or anything like that, but I do think you've made some bad choices in community managers and allowed unfunny far left moralizing college communists, SJWs, and Cat ladies to become the personality of the site, stifling the humor I used to love.

I find it disturbing that as a business owner and ostensible leader of a community, you are so willing to show the door to long term members who dislike these changes instead of trying to return the site to what you started it as. There's been an exodus of talented, funny people from your website for a decade now and your response seems to be "Fuck you, get out then!"
 
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I suspect something like the boiling frog anecdote comes into play here, where, supposedly, if you drop a boiling frog in water it'll jump out but if you slowly heat it up it won't. I've never found that to be a particularly likely story but whatever.

I could see putting up with SA getting more and more shit (sort of like Shmorky got more and more shit as time went on) but if Lowtax had been actually shown a vision by the "Spirit of SomethingAwful Future" some dark night, before it happened, he'd have been utterly horrified.

I rarely ever visited more than the featured stuff on SA when it was in its prime, but it was such a formative influence on 4chan that I got a lot of respect for the site secondhand (although my source of sick fucked up Internet shit after Usenet was more Stile Project before it just got into boring porn and eventually sold off entirely).

So when after several years of not paying much attention to it, I went to SA and actually saw what it had become, it was horrifying. It has only deteriorated since.

Stile actually just flat out sold out to a porn company and, sadly, that might have been a more dignified death than the ongoing SJW degeneracy at SA. And I mean "degeneracy" in its literal dictionary sense.
 
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