phonics
07-04-2017, 12:04 PM
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful
I'll just quote a few bits. It's quite interesting.
Kyanka: New people would come in and get hazed, but then it developed its own sense of humor, where instead of just being about flamewars it became about inside jokes.
Boruff: It was so weird and caustic that most people were intimidated by it or baffled by it or confused by it. Every day there would be some person who'd wander in and think they understood it and get torn to pieces.
Hendren: One thing that's different in a lot of ways from a lot of communities is Something Awful is very much a dictatorship. You had your main guy and then you had a couple lower main guys and you had five or 10 administrators under that and everybody followed everybody else up to the top.
Boruff: If someone was just a terrible, incoherent writer they would get run out. If someone was a racist or an idiot they'd get run out. There was never any desire to coddle people or hope they'd improve. You had to perform at a certain level or you were banned. Or, as a more amusing punishment, you'd be quarantined to a really bad forum with all the other idiots. There was a lot of that sort of thing and I think it helped improve the quality, but I think at a certain point when you had so many rules it also became kind of restrictive. You started to lose a lot of the spontaneity and randomness that made it interesting in the first place.
Boruff: I think ultimately it was just that a lot of the early people were leaving. They had moved on with their lives. You get a new crowd in, and they have different tastes, different interests. And in some ways we thought the people that were there then weren't as good as the ones we had before, but also it was probably the case that we were kind of burned out and were mad it wasn't the same as it had been.
I couldn't be bothered finding the longreads thread.
I'll just quote a few bits. It's quite interesting.
Kyanka: New people would come in and get hazed, but then it developed its own sense of humor, where instead of just being about flamewars it became about inside jokes.
Boruff: It was so weird and caustic that most people were intimidated by it or baffled by it or confused by it. Every day there would be some person who'd wander in and think they understood it and get torn to pieces.
Hendren: One thing that's different in a lot of ways from a lot of communities is Something Awful is very much a dictatorship. You had your main guy and then you had a couple lower main guys and you had five or 10 administrators under that and everybody followed everybody else up to the top.
Boruff: If someone was just a terrible, incoherent writer they would get run out. If someone was a racist or an idiot they'd get run out. There was never any desire to coddle people or hope they'd improve. You had to perform at a certain level or you were banned. Or, as a more amusing punishment, you'd be quarantined to a really bad forum with all the other idiots. There was a lot of that sort of thing and I think it helped improve the quality, but I think at a certain point when you had so many rules it also became kind of restrictive. You started to lose a lot of the spontaneity and randomness that made it interesting in the first place.
Boruff: I think ultimately it was just that a lot of the early people were leaving. They had moved on with their lives. You get a new crowd in, and they have different tastes, different interests. And in some ways we thought the people that were there then weren't as good as the ones we had before, but also it was probably the case that we were kind of burned out and were mad it wasn't the same as it had been.
I couldn't be bothered finding the longreads thread.