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

[Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0]

Also weird is how after letting the drama die down they kick it back up and make it worse.

Lowtax gon' Lowtax

 

[lightswitchdoll]

You'll sometimes see people say that they were brought in "by the front page, and then I saw the forums", and I've always wondered: of the people who were telling the truth, like... did they pass through some sort of membrane from another dimension? Is there an alternate timeline where both Hitler lived and Low-T was actually funny?

I think I found Jeff K first and I did actually enjoy the pranks and weekend web and the bad porn and terrible hentai reviews. And then I found the forums and eventually signed up and forgot the front page existed. I've got a really juvenile sense of humour though, so I assume it's that more than your alternate dimension theory.

I think the last time I read the front page it was mocking jeffree star back when he was on myspace so it's been a while. I honestly thought they'd just given up on it at some point.

 

[Fatal Cardiac Infarction]

The front page stopped being funny when Zach "geist editor" Parsons made it his verbal diarrhea dump. So, fairly early on.

 

[Ilmseil]

I can't fucking get over how he simply doesn't see how his vague promise of unspecified payment for over EIGHT WEEKS of work is getting called out as ridiculous and ghoulish.

 

[Toshiba]

Look goons this is my way of doing things. Once you've done your 2 months of servitude I will publish any shit you send me with NO QUALITY CONTROL and pay you for it. Hmm, an alternative way which allows me to handpick the best articles from any contributors and throw out the dross? I'm not running amazon here guys! Forget everything I've been saying about stakeholders and advertising revenue and my brand manager. I'm just a humble indie website with a style guide more prohibitive than any corporate publisher. You've got the freedom here to write anything you want as long as it doesn't go against the whims of whatever crazy minority group I'm pandering to on that day. Any questions? Well FUCK YOU for disagreeing with me, I'm the guy who ran his business and life into the ground who melts down in every thread he makes, who the fuck are you?

 

[Leonard Helplessness]

He has a policy in place guys! Sorry but his hands are tied, he can't possibly pay for content even if he wanted to because muh indie forums policy.

That bit is amazing. Logan was trying to placate the goons with "Yes I heard you I'll talk to him about this," and I can only imagine she tried, because as soon as she backed out of the thread, Richard punched a few holes in the wall and rushed to his computer to scream at people about a policy that he, as sole owner of Something Awful, cannot change. I imagine there were still bits of drywall dripping off his fingers into his keyboard as he typed, too.

The front page stopped being funny when Zach "geist editor" Parsons made it his verbal diarrhea dump. So, fairly early on.

Some of Zach's stuff was vaguely amusing, but he also used the front page as a platform for random political bitching about anything that offended him. Sometimes those posts were trying failing to be funny with twitter-style sarcasm and cattiness; sometimes they were just flat-out rants about President Bush or whatever.

There's literally no quality control except the SA's Front Page Discussion subforum, which is a few goons yelling into the void and might as well not exist because no one ever reads it, least of all the front page writers. Because Richard wants everything to be done for him for free.

 

[TurdFondler]

The front page was routinely not blocked by school content blockers for whatever reason, I know I got a few friends reading SA because of that alone. The B movie/awful hentai/porn reviews were actually funny and interesting. I can't think of anywhere else at the time that would offer so much weird content. Back in the old internet the front page offered hours and hours of entertainment.

 

[Silas]

I will confess that Cliff Yablonski Hates You was exactly my thing at the time it was being updated still

 

[Trip Chesterton III]

The front page was routinely not blocked by school content blockers for whatever reason, I know I got a few friends reading SA because of that alone. The B movie/awful hentai/porn reviews were actually funny and interesting. I can't think of anywhere else at the time that would offer so much weird content. Back in the old internet the front page offered hours and hours of entertainment.

I ended up discovering a frontpage Photo Shop Phriday, and following those for a few weeks before I discovered the forums.

The frontpage articles were almost always terrible and unreadable, but the frontpage content that was just "The Best of the Forums" stuff was usually pretty good.

Too bad the forums are not funny anymore, or that would be a nice option

 

[DuckSucker]

Kuuenbu would routinely sperg out about shitty bands like DragonForce too

Kuuenbu posted:

I kind of try not to be a hipster and once I turned like 20 I realized how douchey and stupid it is to judge others' tastes and shame them or look down on them for it, but metal is just one of those genres that really taunts me into laughing at it.

If you like metal insofar as, you like the music and like the scene, even if you make it a part of your personality, that's fine--I like jazz and hipster shit and a lot of people dont, so I get it. But metal in particular has this hilarious subset of fans who take it way too seriously, they're the ultimate soft boy reeing FUCK YOU DAD types, goony and nerdy and awkward. They seem to like it in kind of an immature way, not necessarily the music but what it throretically stands for, like tough, anger, edginess, rage, lashing out; like a moody hormonal teenager; the type of guy who shows up to D n' D night in a beat up Impala blasting generic power metal covers of pop songs so loud you can hear him across the parking lot with your windows up as well as his. The ultimate edgelord types. I roomed with this Asian kid in college whow did nothing but smoke weed and play Guitar Hero and he would try to get perfect on the DragonForce song and I remember if he missed a single note he would let out this primal FUUUUUUCK and thow his guitar controller at the wall and start slamming it against the wall. That dude was less embarrassing than the type of literal fedora wearing goony metal fan types like Kuuenbu are. (He also smoked me out so points there)

 

[Trip Chesterton III]

The metal where some fat dude just growls into the microphone is both awful and amazing at the same time. Like its awful in that it sounds like absolute shit, and amazing in that people actually enjoy it somehow.

 

[blablabla]

Nobody cares about the front page and the forums are terrible since tranny apocalypse put a bunch of fucking morons as mods. Also nobody should give a fuck about low t finances.
Also the troons made sure that nothing funny will come out of SA ever again.

 

[AmpleApricots]

jfc, he gets at least ten thousand a month combined from the forums and the patreon at the moment. He can't put aside a few hundred and say "ok, let's just try this out" and write the money off as loss at worst even if every single paid goon runs off? Why does this even surprise me, this has always been his business strategy. From his unpaid and terrible staff, to all the other talented people that wandered off over the years because lowtax is cheap as shit. Dude wouldn't risk even $20 and insist he should get the content for free. What an absolute idiot. This is why SA failed. This is also a primo example of addict shortsightedness, even at the danger of sounding like a broken record at this point.

Hey Lowtax, I'm reading about your shitty schemes falling apart and laughing my ass off, and it doesn't generate you a single cent. Thanks for the free entertainment!

 

[Fagnacious D]

Nobody cares about the front page and the forums are terrible since tranny apocalypse put a bunch of fucking morons as mods. Also nobody should give a fuck about low t finances.
Also the troons made sure that nothing funny will come out of SA ever again.

I care. I wanna see the troons get really pissed off at Lowtax when someone posts something slightly politically incorrect on the front page.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I can't fucking get over how he simply doesn't see how his vague promise of unspecified payment for over EIGHT WEEKS of work is getting called out as ridiculous and ghoulish.

It isn't an unspecified payment, he clarified the situation.

It's NO PAYMENT for 8 weeks, and then (if you are kept on and aren't branded as a "Nazi") you are paid $40 per article, per week. In addition to this, the payments are all manual and Lowtax does not have a stellar reputation among writers for paying on time. You are expected to do exactly $320 worth of free labor just to have a chance of proving you are worth of the ability to earn piles of money (which breaks down to ~$2,100 a year). You may ask "but @Lowtax, can't you earn way more money writing for literally anywhere else?" and his answer is "shut up, thread closed" lol.

It's cool that Lowtax is trying to revamp the site and all, but holy shit Logan and him are the absolute worst people at it I've ever seen. They don't have anything that resembles a plan and can't overcome the simplest of objections. They have all of these plans and ideas but never once stopped to think about the main issue "why would people give content to SA for little/no money when they could just own the content themselves and grow their own brands instead, like Yahzee or Mega64?" and the answer seems to be "*crickets*".

 

[Leonard Helplessness]

It isn't an unspecified payment, he clarified the situation.

It's NO PAYMENT for 8 weeks, and then (if you are kept on and aren't branded as a "Nazi") you are paid $40 per article, per week. In addition to this, the payments are all manual and Lowtax does not have a stellar reputation among writers for paying on time. You are expected to do exactly $320 worth of free labor just to have a chance of proving you are worth of the ability to earn piles of money (which breaks down to ~$2,100 a year). You may ask "but @Lowtax, can't you earn way more money writing for literally anywhere else?" and his answer is "shut up, thread closed" lol.

Is it only one article per week for the first two months, or does he plan to pile on the deadlines and requirements during that time out of sheer spite and Judaism?

 

[blablabla]

Lowtax should use the money he collects and upgrade the forums to the 21 century

 

[Tanner Glass]

Is it only one article per week for the first two months, or does he plan to pile on the deadlines and requirements during that time out of sheer spite and Judaism?

That hasn't been expressly clarified (that I saw) but SA has been using the weekly format for a long time (Weekend Web, Photoshop Fridays, etc). I would suppose it's possible to have one person write two separate articles per week, but they're likely looking for a series of articles from a variety of writers.

If a hypothetical person wrote an article per day for SA, they would only be making $14,560 a year - lol.

Lowtax should use the money he collects and upgrade the forums to the 21 century

He already collected money for this exact reason and didn't upgrade the forums.

 

[Ghostse]

It was funny in the early 2000s. Just like Seanbaby was funny. Now that style of humor doesn't work anymore and they couldn't do it even if it would since it's "problematic."

Lowtax is basically the aging wolf whose teeth fell out and the rest of the pack is just wishing he'd wander off into the woods and overdose on Ambien like he's supposed to.

I'd say that its funny today, but now you have to have talent and put in effort because the low-hanging fruit is gone.
In the 90s/aughts, this was the new frontier of comedy. The article "Interview with a man who can only say 'Nigger'" was side-splitting hilarious just on its face because no one had done that before, no one had done anything like that before. But it probably wasn't really that funny, just amusing and novel. I hate Tim& Eric style non-humor, but I understand where it came from and why otherwise sane people liked it.
The novel aspect expanded into things that not only didn't exist to the audience but hadn't existed before, period. Rodney Dangerfield never did a bit about furries because until the internet he was probably blissfully unaware of their existance. You could be the first person to do comedy about people in fursuits, and your comedy would be the best because no one had done it!

But that's over now. Its no longer novel, no longer inventive,no longer something you've never seen before. Making the two handed fart noise in class in first grade is ungodly hilarious the first time because, well firstly Farts have been provably funny for nearly all of recorded human history, but mostly because no one had done that before. You don't need any context or timing, just a loud brrrrrrrrrrwp! and everyone's in the aisles. But after a few days, its old hat. Now you need to start considering timing and context.

Look at the difference between, say Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay. On the surface, both had the same schtick: Unreasonably angry.
Sam Kinison yelled a lot, but he wasn't actually that angry, and put in a lot of time into his material and timing. ADC just showed up and ranted - which was funny at the time because it was novel. And its still funny, but it has to be executed by someone with talent now.

Which is the problem with Lowtax. Lowtax, when he's reasonably sober, show's he's got at least some intelligence. But he's put no effort into expanding his comedy craft. ITs not even lame dad jokes, its lame "No you shut the fuck up Dad!" Jokes.

But metal in particular has this hilarious subset of fans who take it way too seriously, they're the ultimate soft boy [...] blasting generic power metal covers of pop songs so loud you can hear him across the parking lot with your windows up as well as his.

That bolded part. The metal pop cover should require everyone: Band, producer,studio recording staff, to be sent to 6-month manditory immersive retraining about why this should never be done.

I will never judge anyone for their taste in music. But I will judge people for trying to defend their taste with anything other than "its just my jam", shitting on music for anything other than some variation of the negative of that statement or "it gets way over played". I will also judge them if their taste in music seems to indicate unsavory personality traits that they were exhibiting before I discovered they liked Enya.

 

[Intelligent Calcium]

Also the troons made sure that nothing funny will come out of SA ever again.

Nothing intentionally funny maybe, but troons themselves are hilarious.