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Fuck You And Die: An Oral History of Something Awful

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Mar 4, 2019.

  1. Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    Taylor Wofford. writing at Motherboard:


    I find Twitter’s situation to be of their own making. They never concretely set out a set of rules. When I first started the forums, I wrote four pages of rules and a catch-all at the end: If there’s something else we don’t like, we’re going to ban you. We have every right to ban you and that’s it. With Twitter, they never defined anything. They never said what’s allowed, what isn’t allowed, what will happen. They just kind of floated around. If something got really out of hand they would get rid of it, but since they had no concrete rules, they had no active moderation, people didn’t know what was or what wasn’t allowed. They dug their own grave and now they’re way too far into it to dig out.[…]

    It was an insane amount of work. You’re trying to do your best to make the place better and you’re getting shit on constantly. There’s just no way to win, so you just do your best to enforce the rules that everyone agreed on and hope that some lunatic who got banned doesn’t try to post your address, which has happened to most of them.

    I’m not sure how many of you remember Something Awful or the internet in the early 2000s, but as someone that ran a website and forum during that period, I related to a lot of this article. I never spent much time around these specific forums, but faced many of the same challenges at AP.net.

     
  2. ManchesterOrch8

    Motel. Money. Murder. Madness.

    Jesus, I completely forgot this site existed.

    I remember at one point they posted the 'Completely Real Episode III' script, a year or so out from the release date. I don't even think it was very clear if it was a joke or not. My 12 year old mind was blown that it was online regardless.
     
  3. Arry

    it was all a dream Prestigious

    how fucking insane that site was. newgrounds, ebaums world and something awful were my childhood trifecta
     
    Mr. Serotonin and dubey like this.
  4. dubey

    Regular

    Haven't logged into that site in probably a decade. But what a time that was lol
     
  5. Stephen Young

    Regular Prestigious

    those 3 + wimp.com for that pre-YT dumb video content lmao
     
    Arry likes this.
  6. Arry

    it was all a dream Prestigious

    oh god i forgot about wimp. and there was ytmnd too
     
    Stephen Young likes this.
  7. SuNDaYSTaR

    Regular Prestigious

    Break.com had its moments, too. Just found out they shut down three months ago.
     
  8. David Marshall

    Pilot of the Grand Anselmo

    Their office was in my hometown. I never knew what they were until a few years ago. I just remember the building being an eyesore, for the most part. Never did go to the site.