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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TurdFondler said:
I remember in ye Olde days there were a few 99s registered, maybe even a 98 (someone fact check that) but they all got banned and left/re-regd in the 2000s. They were hold overs from the proto-sa, I think at one point it was a free forum with free sign up and waaay fewer rules. The paywall was added to stop the rampant sockpuppeting
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SA was free until late 2001.
 
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TurdFondler said:
I remember in ye Olde days there were a few 99s registered, maybe even a 98 (someone fact check that) but they all got banned and left/re-regd in the 2000s. They were hold overs from the proto-sa, I think at one point it was a free forum with free sign up and waaay fewer rules. The paywall was added to stop the rampant sockpuppeting
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What was the reasoning when people started actually paying ten bucks to be a goon? Because I was a tard on the Internet when they started doing that and actually paying to post struck me as absolutely insane, shit that I'd never do, and I was astounded people would actually pay to be a goon. It was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen.

My personal opinion, and maybe I'm out of my mind, was fuck you, you should be paying ME to be on your forum. I mean, seriously, that's still my opinion, but whatever.
 
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But lowtax has an account here, right? that's how he keeps referring to "those kiwifarm fucks and their slander" regarding his ex-wife's gofundme to afford a divorce attorney.
Anyway I lasted that long because I wasn't a posting factory or a high-flight celebrity. Just to give you an idea of the shit I remember:
0) the original operation "go away" when lowtax wanted to close the forums, first in 2000, again in 2001
1) tastyarmaggedon's quest to shit the forums so hard, ending in the original paywall
2) the 3 times the gaschamber changed music and then muted
3) sexkitten, the OG homegrown porn goonette and the advent of mass appeal forum drama™
4) the founding of the fyad circlejerks, the irc groups, the advent of helldump (zoe quinn included)
5) the coming of the worst posters (2004-2006) era coinciding with Ozma's ill-fated reign of terror
6) lowtax dates angela mason, breaks up. lowtax dates integral, breaks up, lowtax dates chinese woman, marries her, divorces, lowtax dates... etc....

I've seen the slow-motion decay that sjws and left nutjobs have wrought, and while I blame D&D and LF for attracting them, it's in the leisure forums like BSS, games and CD where they eventually took hold, especially after the 2016 elections, when all of twitter and tumblr descended upon the forums, and like plaque just got worse and worse with time. How on earth people still call SA "a haven for the alt-right" is beyond me, you literally have to appologize for not being gay or transitioning.
 
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It's been posted either here or in the LowT thread but the reasoning was:

a) stop shitting up the forum with your sockpuppet accounts you morons, seriously
b) forums were actually expensive to run. Hardware wasn't cheap, bandwidth wasn't cheap
c) content. Having the paywall very much helped police the forums and make sure your were trying to be interesting or funny. In the beforetimes threads would go on for pages with replies like a fag0t = yu0
 
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AnOminous said:
What was the reasoning when people started actually paying ten bucks to be a goon? Because I was a tard on the Internet when they started doing that and actually paying to post struck me as absolutely insane, shit that I'd never do, and I was astounded people would actually pay to be a goon. It was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen.
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Some people migrated from the arstechnica forums, which circa 1999 instated the yearly $50 paywall due to the owner being a freaking ivyleaguer asshole or somesuch. A similar fate befell the diaspora fleeing the anandtech forums purges from then.
 
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AnOminous said:
What was the reasoning when people started actually paying ten bucks to be a goon? Because I was a tard on the Internet when they started doing that and actually paying to post struck me as absolutely insane, shit that I'd never do, and I was astounded people would actually pay to be a goon. It was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen.

My personal opinion, and maybe I'm out of my mind, was fuck you, you should be paying ME to be on your forum. I mean, seriously, that's still my opinion, but whatever.
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There weren't many good alternatives for forums at the time. Yahoo's forums were huge, but retarded as fuck. GameFAQs was turning into... pretty much what it is today, and Fark was (still is) proto-reddit, except without the countless subs. Meanwhile, SA had pretty good moderation (compared to everyone else), and you were forced to put effort into your posts. They were building a reputation of having the internet's best and brightest.

2004 also saw a huge surge of signups because of Bittorrent Barnyard, but was shut down at the end of '04. This was a huge draw because of all kinds of fears about the RIAA kicking down your door and fucking you in the ass if you dared download a single Britney Spears song, so the paywall helped add a layer of privacy.

I guess it's also worth mentioning that online commerce hadn't really taken off in the early 2000s, as Paypal was still new and a lot of people still weren't comfortable with putting their credit card info online. I heard about people mailing Fistgrrl $10 and having her set you up, but that paywall doubled as a filter to prove you were either an adult, or crafty enough to get ahold of your parent's credit card.

Early SA was a lot of fun. Interesting threads as far as the eye could see. I personally gave some feedback and had a back-and-forth with Rocco of Mega64 fame on one of their earliest videos, and I even remember reading Moot's thread on ADTRW where he talked about opening 4chan.
 
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Before online shopping and payment processors and a million local buy/sell sites SA Mart was actually kind of handy. I never used it but a buddy of mine did and he was always finding crazy/weird deals on stuff not available locally
 
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Pissmaster General said:
Meanwhile, SA had pretty good moderation (compared to everyone else), and you were forced to put effort into your posts.
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Most of the time, the mods didn't really have to do anything- if someone made a bad post there would be a half dozen or more people trolling them off the forum within a short period of time.

TurdFondler said:
Before online shopping and payment processors and a million local buy/sell sites SA Mart was actually kind of handy. I never used it but a buddy of mine did and he was always finding crazy/weird deals on stuff not available locally
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SA Mart/Coupons really was nice before Dr. Eldarion turned it all into his personal referral farm.
 
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Why do troons get their own threads in other forums?
 
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ReformedGoon said:
I wonder how much money I could scam off goons if I were to pretend to be trans and say I got kicked out of my apartment. I'm assuming they surely have some way to verify where the money goes and to who, right?

I'm not actually gonna do this but the grift's right there for the taken for anyone else who wants to try.
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Perhaps you could claim to be a black transgender muslim coder who needs new pants? Goons gave Brother Aziz a ton of money using that scam. maybe it's been long enough it'll work again.
 
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Manah said:
The TFR and wrestling ones are especially ridiculous imo.
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I was a bit ambivalent on autogynaephilia when I first heard of it. Although I can entertain the idea of pretty much anything being a fetish, most fetishes are pretty niche (thankfully), and would lead to an incredibly small number of people upending their lives in pursuit of their sexually deviant ends. However, as I've gone on and read quotes from Reddit of dudes talking about people getting off on the idea of themselves as a woman, and as I and others have noticed a pattern of it being dudes who were in traditionally male fields like the military and computer touching, I now think there's something to it... Sadly, the threads in TFR and wrestling make complete sense with the patterns of AGP.
 
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agility_ said:
1) tastyarmaggedon's quest to shit the forums so hard, ending in the original paywall

3) sexkitten, the OG homegrown porn goonette and the advent of mass appeal forum drama™
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Holy shit, these are some fucking memories, I hadn’t thought about tasty in years. And the whole homegrown drama shit was something I was there for, there was a night that a goonette named Argenta was live streaming with some goon dude (Tom, I think?) and showing her tits and there was a DPPH thread where it was happening, a GBS thread where they were discussing it, and an FYAD thread where they were shitting on her and calling her a whore, and the three threads were cross posting with each other (this was way before “forum containment“ existed, there were like 5 forums and everyone posted everywhere) creating an insane forumwide drama storm. I think Lowtax even had to step in at one point.

I want to say this was mid-late 2001, but maybe it was 2002

Edit: No, it had to be 2001. Fuck me, that was a long time ago.
 
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