Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I'm not trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's certainly nothing to be celebrated.
Advocates for <insert thing you dislike> always seem to gloss over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I doubt that is a conversation that can really be had online by people who aren't pseudo-anonymous - measuring a thing's healthiness by the adherent's propensity to kill themselves at elevated rates...
Lowtax wasn't an advocate for unfettered free speech lol. He encouraged and enabled arbitrary and capricious punishment for pretty much anything the forum moderators didn't personally like.
Oh sorry, I didn’t realize that we’re talking about “unfettered free speech” which doesn’t appear in the article. Yes, it is true that he did not advocate for your flavor of “freedom” (forcing private entities to host and serve any and all content that you can possibly barf up in perpetuity)
I remember he would run threads that were something like “comment to get banned” (or account renamed on milder days). And of course everyone including me piled on
Yep, in fact the SA Forums entire business model was "arbitrary and capriciously" banning people so they would re-register and pay the 10bux. They had rules, but they were fungible enough so that intelligent and hilarious people wanted to see what they could get away with. Racism was strictly against the rules, but some people could post the N-word "because they are funny" (and friends with the admins).
Around 2007 or so, SA stopped being an "internet comedy forum" and started being "serious internet business" and that's when I lost interest.
I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but Something Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts leading to 4chan so unfettered free speech isn't something SA has ever really been known for.
Having rules on a private website is against the concept of free speech?
How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.
Having rules against certain content means you are not a platform for "unfettered free speech". That's not some sort of moralistic slur it's just a fact that runs contrary to the post I was responding to.
It's not "against the concept of free speech" to run a platform with censorship/moderation, it just means your platform isn't a place to practice it.
The phrase “unfettered free speech” only appears in the comments here and not in the article. I can also make up stuff he could have said but didn’t. As far as I know, he didn’t advocate for changing the name of Myanmar back to Burma, so that’s an indicator that he supported military-run governments?
That being said, if you’re not willing to host me and my friends’ tentacle porn libraries, you’re not an advocate for free speech at all, so what are we actually talking about here?
Here, I’m going to say “Lowtax was a huge fan of K-Pop”. Since now that’s been posted, you can accept it as fact and argue that you went through his post history and give me your thoughts.
I made an equally arbitrary comment to the one you responded to. To save time, Why are you responding to my posts? Do you have any personal opinions about Rich Kyanka? If so, do you care to share? If not, am I expected to debate your position? If so, (again because I don’t know why you’re responding) what exactly is your opinion on this topic aside from… not liking what I said?
You posted a bunch of flamewar comments in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. Would you please review the site guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit going forward? I'm not going to ban you right now, but you've been doing this repeatedly, unfortunately:
Posting like that will definitely get you banned if you keep it up, so please fix this. Btw, I suppose I should mention in a thread about SA that this isn't some sort of ethical or moral requirement. We just have those rules because we're trying to be a particular kind of website, and we need to do something about the sorts of posts that impede that.
What conversation do you think you're trying to have here?
You started out by getting very heated about a point that no one was actually discussing, and then proceeded to get very angry that people were responding to a comment chain in context with the first comment.
> I can also make up stuff he could have said but didn’t.
I think you're getting confused. pstuart was the one mentioning unfettered free speech, and tylersmith was the one saying it's not relevant to the article/SA.
I’m still waiting on your publicly accessible upload portal for tentacle porn. At this point, your reticence to give me access to your personal website’s storage has crossed from censorious to violating the non-agression policy. It’s quite telling that you’re aggressively anti-free speech.
>If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.
Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true.
I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote their ideas, as testament to his committment to "free speech". Told him no one should believe his committment to free speech if he wasn't willing to advocate for those most universally loathed by society.
Guess what I got? Downvotes.
But, that's the heart of it. At the end of the day, these people like the idea of "free speech" and they dislike the idea of speech they approve not being given the broadest possible platform. But, when it hits the fan, it's actually the latter that they're addressing with their platforms and pronouncements.
Well, feel free to substitute something legal or more abstract, like tentacle porn.
But, I did it exactly because it's a real-world example of near-universally abhorrent speech that I don't think they would support on their own platform.
But, the deplatformed and other types who are recently lamenting "the great fall of free speech" always offer the argument "who gets to decide what speech is acceptable?", which is a gratingly disingenuous position that pretends we don't have standards and laws, etc. as a society. And further pretends that they themselves believe there should be no limitations on free speech ("unfettered").
We've always had deciders. These people just don't like the recent decisions. But, if that's not the case, then the only way to prove it is to truly allow all speech on their own platform and telegraph that intention by openly supporting the speech rights of the most abhorrent people in society.
Yeah, these “free speech at all costs!!” folks really don’t think that individuals and private organizations should have the right to curate what appears on the platforms they own and pay for. Their version of “free speech” necessarily requires taking away others’ rights to property, which seems kind of odd because that same crowd is often going on about ~liberty~.
Every time I see people shaking their fists and yelling “MODS!!!!” at the sky it gives me a laugh because that person almost certainly has never actually tried to provide an open forum or image hosting service. They’re usually actually fully averse to the idea of doing so, hence why nobody has offered to host my collection of tentacle porn for free and in perpetuity.
It’s not an issue of what these people believe is morally right like is often claimed, it’s an issue of how they feel entitled to be treated as an individual regardless of how that impacts the freedom of others. There’s no ideological consistency of “freedom”, just a tantrum about not getting enough free services.
Because child porn is evidence of a crime and in of itself it shouldn't be a crime. Any more than owning snuff films, like the ones made by the Mexican cartels, should be a crime.
The more the evidence is hidden the more the criminals get away with it. The more public the crime is the quicker it is stopped.
Back in the dark days of 4chan you had child porn posted regularly on there and you would see people getting busted in real time from a bag of chips that was sold in one specific state. Today you hear about children who were abused for decades because no one from the general public saw the videos and did something about it.
The people who want it hidden don't care about children, they care about being holier than thou.
I can't host such a site because I'd get arrested. Sent from tor because society is insane enough that pointing something this obvious out will get you lynched.
Its interesting that you mention this infinite money problem. Have you ever noticed that the second a fully free speech site opens it is almost instantly crippled with CP? Do you really think that is just happening naaturally? How can something universally loathed also be so prolific that it needs to constanly infect venues to propogate? Its almost like its a tactic to suppress free speech but im just a nut.
This is a problem with the post-'60s post-Chatterly trial conception of free speech. Since then, amidst other developments, the concept of free speech has been conflated with a rabid opposition to any obscenity laws. The US and Great Britain have had a much longer history in which free speech had a meaning separate from the absence of prohibition against obscene material (with some small exceptions we have today like child pornography).
There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech. It's just our understanding of what free speech is has become deeply muddled. Depending on your understanding of free speech, the Comstock Law regime for example either contradicts the principle or fits within that principle.
SA is a good example of the limits of the post-60s conception of free speech and the problems associated with a fanatical dedication to an only recently established reinterpretation of the first amendment. James Madison would not have recognized the post-60s speech regime as something he was establishing in Bill of Rights. He would have seen it as an odd stretch of a relatively ancient and well established principle under British law and political culture.
> There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech.
Yes, there is. There is, in fact, a fundamental contradiction between the idea that the State can declare content “illegal” and “free speech”.
The obscenity exception turns free speech from “the government cannot ban content” to “the government cannot ban content unless both the judge [0] and a sufficiently large portion of the public sufficiently dislikes it [1] and it has to do with sex and/or excretion.”
That's not to say the founders wouldn't have agreed with it; the founders agreed that hereditary slavery had no conflict with the right of persona not to have life or liberty deprived without due process of law, so as a whole thet had pretty big blind spots in their conception of rights.
[0] the official prong being that the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
[1] that the average member of the community would find it appeals to a prurient interest.
These arguments take a form which implies that each right operates in a vacuum.
But, of course, if we were to allow any right without exception, then we would soon find that we have no rights. Not only would the limitless interpretation of one right eventually decimate other rights but, apart from that, it would also undermine society's solvency; hence its ability to enforce even the expanded right.
Rights, as ideas, have no utility. They must be layered onto the substrate of a functioning society. Hence, there has always been work towards achieving balance, as every right must be circumscribed to some degree.
This is why we have courts, reasonableness standards, etc.
So, sure, we could interpret these as "contradictions", but that becomes a meaningless characterization in any practical sense.
They don't operate within a vacuum: the historical context matters. Over the last 400-500 years, the Anglo-American elite mostly decided to support the free exchange of ideas relating to politics and religion to support vigorous debate and an open public sphere. That's the primary value that the first amendment is supposed to protect. It's also supposed to act as a sort of political safety valve that prevents civil war and that tends to privilege parliamentary procedure over arbitrary executive/royal rule.
The intention was not to enshrine a right to smut in the constitution, nor was it to legalize criminal harassment, threats, or defamation. That's something that was read into it by judicial activism.
>The intention was not to enshrine a right to smut in the constitution...That's something that was read into it by judicial activism
The phrase "judicial activism" has a bit of a pejorative tone to it, but I'm not sure that we can identify a single right enshrined in the Constitution that hasn't been so challenged or invoked in ways not initially "intended". There's no practical way to avoid that, and I don't think we'd want
to in any case.
But, this was anticipated and we have a system for adjudicating such questions.
So, I don't take exception to the idea that these things can be considered, tested and decided. In fact, I take exception to those who pretend that's not the case or that we have and must blindly enforce 1A and other rights.
For most of American history, neither the legislators nor the courts saw a contradiction between censorship on obscenity grounds and free speech. And in principle, we still recognize that principle: it's just we define the line arbitrarily and subjectively around things like snuff films and child porn. The current interpretation of free speech is a mutant interpretation of the concept as written by the founding generation.
> Do you really think that is just happening naaturally?
Yes, in the same natural way that water flows down a gravity gradient.
As water will be found at the bottom of wells because it can't generally flow uphill, content that is excluded from every other location will only appear where it is not excluded. And the speed at which it appears is the speed of communication on the internet, which is fast.
There's no conspiracy here, other than the very dedicated conspiracy that is the tiny minority of horrible people thirsty for a horrible thing desperate to find an outlet for it. It is, unfortunately, the natural consequence of not excluding them that they show up and do their thing (disproportionately more on a site that allows it because no other site will).
You didnt address my points at all. I'll be more clear. CP is actively used by state actors to shut down sites that are free speech oriented. It happens too fast and too frequently to be natural. CP has to come from somewhere either through the truly horrific creation at source or by saving a large amount then sharing it and exposing your illegal activity.
There is no reason to post CP on a public rather than a private place when it is so actively policed. Might as well just call the police and say you have CP to share.
CP = Publicly Everywhere and police do nothing.
CP = Is not actually everywhere something else is going on.
Hi! Have you ever been the owner of a free hosting service of any kind whatsoever?
A long time ago I was, and I can assure you that horrific child/animal abuse material does literally show up as an emergent phenomenon, necessitating moderation in 100% of platforms. I don’t think that it was the result of some complex conspiracy by the government to undermine my site since the only time I had contact with the police was when I reached out and provided the authorities with logs and whatever other relevant information I had on hand.
The factually correct statement is your first one. CP is publicly everywhere and police do nothing. The issue that you’ve maybe missed or chosen to ignore is that it’s indeed everywhere. It’s everywhere to such a huge extent that the police have to rely on private operators to self-report CSAM to them.
I’d suggest that you try making a website where people can upload images or videos for free, getting the word out, and counting the hours/days until you are contacted by your users about horrifying content that you’re hosting.
That would require actually putting money (and legal liability) into providing a free-speech-themed service though, which for some reason nobody wants to do.
Edit: Pedophiles do not necessarily act rationally, and tend to put a lot of effort into protecting their anonymity. They aren’t like you and I. They are fucking deranged.
The suggestion was not to support the speech itself, but the right to the speech. Big difference.
Many of those who've been deplatformed for disinfo, or hateful speech, etc. couch their victimization narratives in the loftier ideals of free speech, with the disingenuous pronouncenent "who gets to decide?"
My point is that society decides and must necessarily decide if we're to continue to have a society. And, if they disagree that anyone should have the right to decide, then they can demonstrate their committment to that belief by openly embracing the speech rights of those most universally abhorred.
Otherwise, they acknowledge the existence of and rationale for limits, and just want to be the decider.
So, how do I upload my collection of tentacle porn to your personal website? A true advocate for free speech would post their SFTP credentials in the open on this website.
No that basically all happend around the same time. If you look at the SAclopedia entries for ADTRW, they're all from early 2004 and you see things like "The fact that Lowtax hates makes it the forum whipping-boy."
Those were written by random goons which aren't any better of a source. It didn't seriously affect ADTRW until the Helldump era - one of Lowtax's worst ideas where he just turned the forums into a circular firing squad, then after people made him delete it, whined about it for the rest of his life.
Yup. Unmoderated forums are a sanctuary and a blessing. I would never have one - I would run a very offensive forum, but not one that annoyed me in any way or else I would brutally censor and crush it.
I honestly think the reason SA was so successful (other than the buy-in) is that the the only criterion for censorship was that you were annoying. That's an arbitrary and unfair criterion, though, so you had better be funny or interesting. It's certainly whatever the opposite of a free-speech zone is.
I took this news a little harder than I should have. It was like the kids from It found out Pennywise was dead except Pennywise wasn't real and was actually your cousin from another state. His death seems like a time to reflect on the internet of old and maybe even reconnect with old friends you pissed off in a flame war. So many mixed emotions and I'm still thinking about his death two days later.
That's right, amen. Too many people on this planet to deal with people you already know. Why bother going back when you can move forward. Burn all the bridges.
Yeah. SA's legacy is... complicated, and mixed, to put it mildly.
But SA was so representative of that era of online culture. If you have strong memories of that era, then Lowtax's passing has got to hit you some kind of way.
> can imagine just how anonymous the internet was then.
It wasn't that anonymous on SA though. Once you paid your :tenbux: then the site admins (incl. Lowtax) had your PII, assuming you used your own credit-card, ofc.
I don't recall Lowtax et al. ever doxxed any of their own forum patrons, at least not any in good-standing, but I assume fear from the possibility of being doxxed for being an asshat on the forums kept enough people in-line - not the fact it was $10 in 2001 (hmm, that's $27 in today's money, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ - but that doesn't seem right to me)
Lowtax wasn't anonymous either... My friend looked up his number and address with whois and we called him, then went to his apartment parking lot and bought t-shirts out of the back of his car. Sometime circa 1999.
You're correct, although I still get the parent poster's point.
You weren't anonymous on SA in the sense that law enforcement couldn't find out who you were, or whatever, unless you used a burner credit card and... never used your own wifi, or whatever.
But you were anonymous in the "Google search results" sense that nobody was expected to publicly share their real names or faces, and what you posted on SA and its ilk didn't necessarily follow you around for the rest of your life.
But the current article goes more into the history and influence of SA, and perhaps that is worth talking about? The sordid personal stuff has already had a thorough treatment.
Well that’s too bad. I had a lot of fun trolling D&D and participating in photoshop Fridays. I remember loading that up and watching 9/11 footage set to the Benny Hill theme practically the day it happened. The forums were just brutal, and hilarious for a certain kind of mind. And the impact on the internet is clear and widespread.
Lowtax was by all accounts a real piece of garbage by the end, but he undoubtedly created a place that changed the internet permanently.
I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though. For example, he was basically auto banned from Twitter by… somebody with the ability to make those decisions at their discretion. I’ve always wondered who that was. In my head, it’s always been a funny thought that Jack Dorsey is some embittered ex-goon that never got over losing $10. (I have no reason to believe this is the case, but it gives me a chuckle)
“Basically” was a modifier here, meant to indicate that he was not auto-banned in the traditional sense but rather quickly in a way that resembled being auto-banned.
Lot of ire for him getting banned from a private corporation's service, yet not much ire for him doing him doing nothing to stop people on his forums from harassing the shit out of dozens if not hundreds of people - criminal behavior in many jurisdictions.
Or the fact that he apparently planned his suicide out enough that he purportedly intentionally spent all the money in the joint account he had with his wife before he killed himself. Made sure his lawyer got paid, but left his kids high and dry.
Dude was a piece of shit in real life and online, through both his own behavior and what he enabled and willfully allowed to happen.
I felt real ashamed of the 10bux I gave Lowtax (years ago) after reading about how he treated his wife. There's a GoFundMe for her and her kids, and I sent them 10bux a couple days ago to make me feel better.
Something awful dot com was also blackholed by Google for many years because they did something to piss-off the internet overlords. (For most of the 2000s, you could google for "JeffK" and SA wouldn't show up until like page 20.)
I view Lowtax like Norm McDonald or many other people who provided me a lot of mirth years ago. I would rather not know if they turned out to be a terrible person or not. RIP internet funny man.
SA's sweep was so wide that it encompassed both ends of the spectrum. A lot of good stuff also originated there, including the Welcome to Night Vale podcast drama series.
I know Tom Scott, known now for his YouTube videos, was on the forums (I produced a remix for a charity single he made). He's turned out overwhelmingly wholesome and level-headed.
> I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though.
People have to deal with and react to abusive people years and years before big abuse happens and becomes public. That sort of behavior don't comes out of nowhere, but rather escalates over time.
> I just woke up after hearing a crash. There's a big-ass hole in the World Trade Center, and smoke's pouring out of it. My suitemates are freaking out! That kind of sucks . . .
Took about 4 posts for the first joke, something about a band called "I am the World Trade Center" playing their next show while on fire. 10 minutes for the first conspiracy theory: X-files using predictive programming. 22 minutes to pin it on Bin Laden. God I love the internet.
Dropsy the Clowns was a very unique Forum game in the pixelated style of Day of the Tentacle / Full Throttle. Collectively choose your own adventure, by incorporating posts and prompts from everyone. https://jaytholen.net/dropsy2.html
> “I'm obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be shitty back in 1999,” Kyanka told Motherboard in 2017. “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.”
Yeah, obviously not a visionary, otherwise we would have said that about "metaverse".
> the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale
No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings.
So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful.
Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
I mean, that filter had its benefits, but it is also a really bad filter in many ways. Plenty of people who are smart enough to set up Trumpet Winsock also took that to mean they knew everything, and at the same time, some of the greatest minds of the last generation struggle with email.
I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.
The Internet did no such thing. It just amplified human propensities. But if you see stupid people on the Internet constantly you should reconsider what for and how you use the Internet.
I want to hear the Moms' side of the story. An abusive man can wield power through domestic violence but an abusive women is far more insidious. An abusive woman does not have the strength to employ violence so she uses other means inflict damage. Manipulation, legal tactics, lies and other techniques are used. The key here is that most of these techniques are subtle.
I don't know what happened here, but I can almost guarantee that the full story hasn't been told by the ex-wife. This is not to say the ex-wife is wrong, but I am 100% sure that aspects of the suicide that she was a direct contributor to are deliberately not mentioned in her little comment there. Rarely is a story so one-sided.
One thing that really pisses me off is this:
"I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours."
Someone is dead. Some vitriolic wall of text from the mother of a person who just died is normal. You need to share private information just to feel better? That is not justification AT ALL. What the hell did she do to push him to put a bullet into his own skull without saying goodbye to his childen? What WAS on that vitriolic wall of text that she is deliberately not mentioning?
It's actually all very sad. Lowtax wrote funny columns about Uwe Boll's movies, and Uwe charged him to a boxing match. Lowtax got his manhood taken from him and never was the same. The domestic violence can be seen as him moving down in weight class. After a few he actually got pretty good at it for his weight advantage. And then this happens.
> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them
Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may be, will only traumatise them further than they may already be.
I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic relationship with your ex.
Source - based on all my research, and discussions with child psychologists, I tell my younger kids, when they need to hear it, that their Mom still loves them, she's just working through some stuff.
The reality is that her conduct indicates no love whatsoever, merely an interest in using our kids to further her narcissistic goals ("Winning" against me, even though it's not a contest, and garnering sympathy from her well meaning but somewhat naïve religious community).
And she definitely isn't working through any of her stuff. She's only allowed supervised access, and hasn't used it once in the nearly 4 years I've had sole custody - because she "did nothing wrong", and using it would imply she had.
But, my younger kids still need to hear that she loves them, from time to time. I admit that I dislike telling them she does, but it's not about me, it's about them.
Yeah, fair, it's ambiguous wording, although the "without saying goodbye" segues into "or that he loved them" You still have the option of fabricating a comforting lie around the latter part.
What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users that still post in the technical sections is incredibly high as a rule when most other communities tend to need a lot more attention to curate the content. So in an ironic sense, Something Awful is an irony to me in that it’s actually now some of the better community created content on the Internet.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.
> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now.
Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
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As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...).
I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
> Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0"
I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
I too consider the label “Web 2.0” to have arisen alongside AJAX, but the greater insight is that periodization of history in general is post-hoc, imprecise, and subjective.
> I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s.
> Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious.
Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that).
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Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
Funny, one of my first freelancing jobs about 20 years ago was working remote for a company that used "identity verification" for some god forsaken reason. It's long dead for other reasons, but at the time they did their research and the #1 reason this was narrowing the funnel was that users assumed the "identity confirmation" thing was a scam, or that the site was porn.
Changing to "service costs $1", Metafilter style, actually brought more money to the company and increased conversions.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more
Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s
a bit of a pity the business model never
really panned out at scale.
It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it.
By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route.
There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people.
One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well.
The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more
Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc.
I feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.
No, I don't think you can put Substack in that same bucket. Substack has raised a total of $82.4M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 31, 2021 from a Series B round. Their investors are gonna want to get that money back, and how do you think that'll happen? Substack is aiming to scale way beyond SA ever had the ambition to, and probably dreaming about ending up like Twitter, Facebook et al.
I agree with you. One reason you don't hear about this kind of company is the owners don't want competition. "Oh yes, my hobbyist website/forum is clearly struggling... no need to launch a new website in the same space. Ignore my 700k house and paid off Model 3."
Remember that SA was a one-time payment of a fairly nominal amount. The primary purpose was not revenue. It was a combination of giving the users a stake in the community, and making it expensive to post maliciously (since you would burn through accounts).
I like them both. The best part about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something there is a random yokel there to call them out on their shit immediately. And aside from a check mark I barely notice, the posts are indistinguishable.
I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.
I agree. Unfortunately, in my experience that person‘s criticism is buried in a sea of admirers trying to add to the point to grow their audience. I would love if twitter would embrace argument, instead of unconditional agreement.
I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
Also the worst thing about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something correct, there is a random yokel there to say they're an idiot immediately
SA was free and had advertisers, but they disappeared and because the site was such a shitstain on the internet, no advertiser wanted to touch him with a ten foot pole.
> terrible, low effort, low quality content
You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.
Internet brands bought up a bunch of v bulletin boards a few years ago. You could pay to be a "premium member" but you still had to deal with the free members and didn't get many benefits other than skipping ands and perhaps access to PM's
I don't totally disagree with the concept but have you actually been to SA in the last year or two? It makes reddit look like an academic journal. Some of ugliest forums out there.
Depends upon the context and subforums, I've been a fairly active member for like... 20 years now (I am cringing as I typed that out, yikes). It's not that different from Reddit in that respect but it's much more readable for longer posts in a BB format compared to Reddit without a doubt (Reddit always struck me as a more accessible form of old Usenet posting than forums software of the 2000s). The programming and hardware conversation culture is somewhere between the dry conversation on HN and the rapid fire drive-by snark-for-pay that is the common denominator for modern Internet commentary.
> Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I'm not trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's certainly nothing to be celebrated.
When I tried to reply, hackernews responded with:
"[flagged] Sorry, you can't comment here."
I curious why the system panders to the censorship-assholes who flagged a perfectly reasonable discussion point.
Heh, SA was a huge part of my formative years, spent a ton of time (years / many many hours) lurking there. Sad to see the spiral that happened with Lowtax. Feeling very melancholic...
Stopped reading and posting on SA when they started requiring members to pay to join. That was bullshit that went against the whole ethos.
Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it.
Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.
> In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc.
Someone on SA supposedly has access to the court documents (dozens and dozens of pages) and shared them, if you want to track that down and provide actual proof that isn't just hearsay. I haven't been on SA for nearly a decade now, and I intend to keep it that way.
Pockets of internet communities shaped internet culture which shapes how society exchanges information online. That's the impact of any large scale forum.
Your question is like asking what the lasting impact of painting is beyond paint on paper.
Well I don't think many paintings are talked about as "having shaped the painting world/art". They are just some nice pictures or whatever.
Sure - some pieces have shaped art - like first real use of perspective, or that one with the weird stretched skull etc (can't remember names, sorry). Those were pioneers that changed how artists and people thought about and created art. That is what I am wondering about - what happened there first that is now ubiquitous across the internet or changed how people do things from that point onwards? I don't feel like just being popular at the time really changed anything of note.
Things like digg and early Reddit for example did introduce some new things like the social voting of stories (although I am sure they were not necessarily pioneers there but helped popularise it). Likewise YouTube made video sharing and consumption super trivial. Wikipedia, Google maps, Facebook, Flickr. Those introduced/popularized ways that shaped how people use (and built) the internet ... SA and 4chan were/are just popular forums and as far as I can tell (just like any of the other popular forums) were popular in their niche but haven't generated anything of note on how people use the internet apart from a few threads or memes that you only know about if you know about them - e.g. what happened on SA that my grandmother now does when using the internet today? Does my grandmother know about a particular thread about 9/11 or some random Donal trump meme on there? Of course not - but she does use slippy-maps (google maps) and social media (Facebook) and instant in-browser online video (YouTube), online photo galleries (Flickr)
I'm not saying they didn't introduce anything noteworthy, I am just wondering what it was they did because I can't work what is different from any other popular forum?
I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.
Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on"
A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts.
The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and even briefly think about it) is that we would have avoided Donald Trump if lowtax had not banned hentai on the forums.
You're confusing "great" with "good". They are not the same.
Genghis Khan was a great man. You cannot unify a nomadic people and conquer a shitload of Asia and not be a great man. Given that under his leadership, the Mongols literally reduced the carbon footprint of the whole planet based upon the amount of people they killed, you could easily claim he was not a "good" man.
> I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.
4chan's influence is not good but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In fact it's so influential that a lot of the garbage on there bleeds into the real world e.g. Pizzagate, QAnon, the OK symbol means 'white power' hoax. Most of the terrible stuff that people blame facebook or twitter for spreading usually comes from there.
4chan hardly had any responsibility for Qanon. Q poster was banned very early after most recognised it as a larp. It is overwhelmingly the legacy of infinity chan.
This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.
4chan was influential in many other ways, from all of Anonymous’s ops, to playing a role at Occupy and other protests. SA led to the rise of the Dirtbag Left, to Brown Moses and bellingcat, to r/wallstreetbets culture.
Not to be overly dramatic, but SomethingAwful may have saved my life. I remember feeling rotten back in 2012 and doing a search and up popped a SA thread on keto. Probably one of the earliest threads on the new 'miracle' diet and lifestyle. I read through the thread recognized a bunch of truths and went low carb immediately. Sad to hear he's gone in such a grisly way.
I joined the SA forums when I was 10. I think it did more to mold my personality, sense of humor, and how I view the internet than anything else in my life. I was exposed to things I had no right knowing (it's a wedding band). I'm thankful.
I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Things I saw first on SA:
- Micro transactions
- Paid membership for content
- Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users)
- Image macros
- Let's play videos
- Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level
- Libertarian white men in engineering and technology
- Social justice warriors
Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.
184 comments
[ 652 ms ] story [ 2869 ms ] threadAround 2007 or so, SA stopped being an "internet comedy forum" and started being "serious internet business" and that's when I lost interest.
How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.
It's not "against the concept of free speech" to run a platform with censorship/moderation, it just means your platform isn't a place to practice it.
That being said, if you’re not willing to host me and my friends’ tentacle porn libraries, you’re not an advocate for free speech at all, so what are we actually talking about here?
Yes, and I responded to that comment and not the article.
Here, I’m going to say “Lowtax was a huge fan of K-Pop”. Since now that’s been posted, you can accept it as fact and argue that you went through his post history and give me your thoughts.
The analogous response would be "no he wasn't, what are you talking about".
You're going after the wrong person here.
Edit: it’s wrong of me for uh, responding?
While acting like the person that said that is the one that brought up 'unfettered free speech'.
You are wrong to do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970746
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969532
Posting like that will definitely get you banned if you keep it up, so please fix this. Btw, I suppose I should mention in a thread about SA that this isn't some sort of ethical or moral requirement. We just have those rules because we're trying to be a particular kind of website, and we need to do something about the sorts of posts that impede that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You started out by getting very heated about a point that no one was actually discussing, and then proceeded to get very angry that people were responding to a comment chain in context with the first comment.
I would love to hear your position on free speech
I think you're getting confused. pstuart was the one mentioning unfettered free speech, and tylersmith was the one saying it's not relevant to the article/SA.
Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true.
I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote their ideas, as testament to his committment to "free speech". Told him no one should believe his committment to free speech if he wasn't willing to advocate for those most universally loathed by society.
Guess what I got? Downvotes.
But, that's the heart of it. At the end of the day, these people like the idea of "free speech" and they dislike the idea of speech they approve not being given the broadest possible platform. But, when it hits the fan, it's actually the latter that they're addressing with their platforms and pronouncements.
I wouldn’t do that. I’m not sure why anybody would.
But, I did it exactly because it's a real-world example of near-universally abhorrent speech that I don't think they would support on their own platform.
But, the deplatformed and other types who are recently lamenting "the great fall of free speech" always offer the argument "who gets to decide what speech is acceptable?", which is a gratingly disingenuous position that pretends we don't have standards and laws, etc. as a society. And further pretends that they themselves believe there should be no limitations on free speech ("unfettered").
We've always had deciders. These people just don't like the recent decisions. But, if that's not the case, then the only way to prove it is to truly allow all speech on their own platform and telegraph that intention by openly supporting the speech rights of the most abhorrent people in society.
Every time I see people shaking their fists and yelling “MODS!!!!” at the sky it gives me a laugh because that person almost certainly has never actually tried to provide an open forum or image hosting service. They’re usually actually fully averse to the idea of doing so, hence why nobody has offered to host my collection of tentacle porn for free and in perpetuity.
It’s not an issue of what these people believe is morally right like is often claimed, it’s an issue of how they feel entitled to be treated as an individual regardless of how that impacts the freedom of others. There’s no ideological consistency of “freedom”, just a tantrum about not getting enough free services.
Because child porn is evidence of a crime and in of itself it shouldn't be a crime. Any more than owning snuff films, like the ones made by the Mexican cartels, should be a crime.
The more the evidence is hidden the more the criminals get away with it. The more public the crime is the quicker it is stopped.
Back in the dark days of 4chan you had child porn posted regularly on there and you would see people getting busted in real time from a bag of chips that was sold in one specific state. Today you hear about children who were abused for decades because no one from the general public saw the videos and did something about it.
The people who want it hidden don't care about children, they care about being holier than thou.
I can't host such a site because I'd get arrested. Sent from tor because society is insane enough that pointing something this obvious out will get you lynched.
There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech. It's just our understanding of what free speech is has become deeply muddled. Depending on your understanding of free speech, the Comstock Law regime for example either contradicts the principle or fits within that principle.
SA is a good example of the limits of the post-60s conception of free speech and the problems associated with a fanatical dedication to an only recently established reinterpretation of the first amendment. James Madison would not have recognized the post-60s speech regime as something he was establishing in Bill of Rights. He would have seen it as an odd stretch of a relatively ancient and well established principle under British law and political culture.
Yes, there is. There is, in fact, a fundamental contradiction between the idea that the State can declare content “illegal” and “free speech”.
The obscenity exception turns free speech from “the government cannot ban content” to “the government cannot ban content unless both the judge [0] and a sufficiently large portion of the public sufficiently dislikes it [1] and it has to do with sex and/or excretion.”
That's not to say the founders wouldn't have agreed with it; the founders agreed that hereditary slavery had no conflict with the right of persona not to have life or liberty deprived without due process of law, so as a whole thet had pretty big blind spots in their conception of rights.
[0] the official prong being that the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
[1] that the average member of the community would find it appeals to a prurient interest.
But, of course, if we were to allow any right without exception, then we would soon find that we have no rights. Not only would the limitless interpretation of one right eventually decimate other rights but, apart from that, it would also undermine society's solvency; hence its ability to enforce even the expanded right.
Rights, as ideas, have no utility. They must be layered onto the substrate of a functioning society. Hence, there has always been work towards achieving balance, as every right must be circumscribed to some degree.
This is why we have courts, reasonableness standards, etc.
So, sure, we could interpret these as "contradictions", but that becomes a meaningless characterization in any practical sense.
The intention was not to enshrine a right to smut in the constitution, nor was it to legalize criminal harassment, threats, or defamation. That's something that was read into it by judicial activism.
The phrase "judicial activism" has a bit of a pejorative tone to it, but I'm not sure that we can identify a single right enshrined in the Constitution that hasn't been so challenged or invoked in ways not initially "intended". There's no practical way to avoid that, and I don't think we'd want to in any case.
But, this was anticipated and we have a system for adjudicating such questions.
So, I don't take exception to the idea that these things can be considered, tested and decided. In fact, I take exception to those who pretend that's not the case or that we have and must blindly enforce 1A and other rights.
Yes, in the same natural way that water flows down a gravity gradient.
As water will be found at the bottom of wells because it can't generally flow uphill, content that is excluded from every other location will only appear where it is not excluded. And the speed at which it appears is the speed of communication on the internet, which is fast.
There's no conspiracy here, other than the very dedicated conspiracy that is the tiny minority of horrible people thirsty for a horrible thing desperate to find an outlet for it. It is, unfortunately, the natural consequence of not excluding them that they show up and do their thing (disproportionately more on a site that allows it because no other site will).
There is no reason to post CP on a public rather than a private place when it is so actively policed. Might as well just call the police and say you have CP to share.
CP = Publicly Everywhere and police do nothing.
CP = Is not actually everywhere something else is going on.
Choose one.
A long time ago I was, and I can assure you that horrific child/animal abuse material does literally show up as an emergent phenomenon, necessitating moderation in 100% of platforms. I don’t think that it was the result of some complex conspiracy by the government to undermine my site since the only time I had contact with the police was when I reached out and provided the authorities with logs and whatever other relevant information I had on hand.
The factually correct statement is your first one. CP is publicly everywhere and police do nothing. The issue that you’ve maybe missed or chosen to ignore is that it’s indeed everywhere. It’s everywhere to such a huge extent that the police have to rely on private operators to self-report CSAM to them.
I’d suggest that you try making a website where people can upload images or videos for free, getting the word out, and counting the hours/days until you are contacted by your users about horrifying content that you’re hosting.
That would require actually putting money (and legal liability) into providing a free-speech-themed service though, which for some reason nobody wants to do.
Edit: Pedophiles do not necessarily act rationally, and tend to put a lot of effort into protecting their anonymity. They aren’t like you and I. They are fucking deranged.
Many of those who've been deplatformed for disinfo, or hateful speech, etc. couch their victimization narratives in the loftier ideals of free speech, with the disingenuous pronouncenent "who gets to decide?"
My point is that society decides and must necessarily decide if we're to continue to have a society. And, if they disagree that anyone should have the right to decide, then they can demonstrate their committment to that belief by openly embracing the speech rights of those most universally abhorred.
Otherwise, they acknowledge the existence of and rationale for limits, and just want to be the decider.
According to people who weren't there at the time, yes. (That mostly happened several years later on SA.)
I honestly think the reason SA was so successful (other than the buy-in) is that the the only criterion for censorship was that you were annoying. That's an arbitrary and unfair criterion, though, so you had better be funny or interesting. It's certainly whatever the opposite of a free-speech zone is.
But SA was so representative of that era of online culture. If you have strong memories of that era, then Lowtax's passing has got to hit you some kind of way.
It had its advantages and disadvantages.
Although I'd still rather live in the future of that world than our current identity-everywhere one.
It wasn't that anonymous on SA though. Once you paid your :tenbux: then the site admins (incl. Lowtax) had your PII, assuming you used your own credit-card, ofc.
I don't recall Lowtax et al. ever doxxed any of their own forum patrons, at least not any in good-standing, but I assume fear from the possibility of being doxxed for being an asshat on the forums kept enough people in-line - not the fact it was $10 in 2001 (hmm, that's $27 in today's money, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ - but that doesn't seem right to me)
You weren't anonymous on SA in the sense that law enforcement couldn't find out who you were, or whatever, unless you used a burner credit card and... never used your own wifi, or whatever.
But you were anonymous in the "Google search results" sense that nobody was expected to publicly share their real names or faces, and what you posted on SA and its ilk didn't necessarily follow you around for the rest of your life.
The thing is, this is subculture and past of some people. But not all people at the time nor likely majority of us.
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 - Nov 2021 (304 comments)
But the current article goes more into the history and influence of SA, and perhaps that is worth talking about? The sordid personal stuff has already had a thorough treatment.
This is an amazing word. Thank you.
I don't want to know that there are people with that kind of mind.
I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though. For example, he was basically auto banned from Twitter by… somebody with the ability to make those decisions at their discretion. I’ve always wondered who that was. In my head, it’s always been a funny thought that Jack Dorsey is some embittered ex-goon that never got over losing $10. (I have no reason to believe this is the case, but it gives me a chuckle)
Yeah, I heard his ex-wives had to carry the body outside in multiple garbage bags. Fitting.
Sounds like a remarkable suicide
Or the fact that he apparently planned his suicide out enough that he purportedly intentionally spent all the money in the joint account he had with his wife before he killed himself. Made sure his lawyer got paid, but left his kids high and dry.
Dude was a piece of shit in real life and online, through both his own behavior and what he enabled and willfully allowed to happen.
I view Lowtax like Norm McDonald or many other people who provided me a lot of mirth years ago. I would rather not know if they turned out to be a terrible person or not. RIP internet funny man.
Not in a particularly positive way. It seems like every truly awful person I've interacted with online has roots back to SA.
People have to deal with and react to abusive people years and years before big abuse happens and becomes public. That sort of behavior don't comes out of nowhere, but rather escalates over time.
> I just woke up after hearing a crash. There's a big-ass hole in the World Trade Center, and smoke's pouring out of it. My suitemates are freaking out! That kind of sucks . . .
9/11 as it happened http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html
Took about 4 posts for the first joke, something about a band called "I am the World Trade Center" playing their next show while on fire. 10 minutes for the first conspiracy theory: X-files using predictive programming. 22 minutes to pin it on Bin Laden. God I love the internet.
May he forever have stairs in his house.
Corn_Boy - AM what are you saying robot, plese stop it I do not like you. turn yourself off robot!
Corn_Boy - are you there MR lowtax??
Corn_Boy - mr lowtax are you alright??
Corn_Boy - are you there lowtax?????
https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-spa...
> Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.. And I thought my morning had sucked so far!
And, the collective scam baiting, with the p-p-p-powerbook. http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf
I still shiver at the words "keyboard goop".
Yeah, obviously not a visionary, otherwise we would have said that about "metaverse".
At the very least, the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale, and enabled the rapid spreading of ideas not backed by facts across borders.
As evidenced when people turn out to protests in my country with signs referencing political talking points from a nation 12500km away.
No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings.
So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful.
Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.
I don't know what happened here, but I can almost guarantee that the full story hasn't been told by the ex-wife. This is not to say the ex-wife is wrong, but I am 100% sure that aspects of the suicide that she was a direct contributor to are deliberately not mentioned in her little comment there. Rarely is a story so one-sided.
One thing that really pisses me off is this:
"I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours."
Someone is dead. Some vitriolic wall of text from the mother of a person who just died is normal. You need to share private information just to feel better? That is not justification AT ALL. What the hell did she do to push him to put a bullet into his own skull without saying goodbye to his childen? What WAS on that vitriolic wall of text that she is deliberately not mentioning?
> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them
Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may be, will only traumatise them further than they may already be.
I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic relationship with your ex.
Source - based on all my research, and discussions with child psychologists, I tell my younger kids, when they need to hear it, that their Mom still loves them, she's just working through some stuff.
The reality is that her conduct indicates no love whatsoever, merely an interest in using our kids to further her narcissistic goals ("Winning" against me, even though it's not a contest, and garnering sympathy from her well meaning but somewhat naïve religious community).
And she definitely isn't working through any of her stuff. She's only allowed supervised access, and hasn't used it once in the nearly 4 years I've had sole custody - because she "did nothing wrong", and using it would imply she had.
But, my younger kids still need to hear that she loves them, from time to time. I admit that I dislike telling them she does, but it's not about me, it's about them.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.
Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
----
As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...).
I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s.
> Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious.
Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that).
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Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
Changing to "service costs $1", Metafilter style, actually brought more money to the company and increased conversions.
I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.
By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route.
There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people.
One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well.
The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue.
I feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.Substack is a good idea, but venture capital will ensure they devolve into another Twitter, Facebook, etc... which is not good....
I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.
I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
> terrible, low effort, low quality content
You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.
Stamp is pay-to-post, and the proceeds go back to the entire community.
https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum
> Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I'm not trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's certainly nothing to be celebrated.
When I tried to reply, hackernews responded with: "[flagged] Sorry, you can't comment here."
I curious why the system panders to the censorship-assholes who flagged a perfectly reasonable discussion point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198
Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it.
Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.
Was he convicted? It’s very easy to file a domestic violence police report, and that does not remotely mean that the accused was guilty.
> In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc.
[1] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
Meanwhile, he’s dead and can hardly defend himself.
Being convicted in a criminal court is just one of the more egregious ways to meet the bar for being a shitty human being.
No civil court finding on this accusation has been presented.
What has been presented is a web forum post from the complaining party, who had a great deal of incentive to paint the guy in a poor light.
Is he a shitty human being? Quite possibly, but the mere existence of an accusation filed with the police is not evidence of it.
The GoFundMe for his children is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding
Beyond a few meme templates or abbreviations or whatever, what has the actual lasting impact been?
People say this about 4chan as well, but beyond passing meme fads I have yet to see anything convincing?
Your question is like asking what the lasting impact of painting is beyond paint on paper.
Sure - some pieces have shaped art - like first real use of perspective, or that one with the weird stretched skull etc (can't remember names, sorry). Those were pioneers that changed how artists and people thought about and created art. That is what I am wondering about - what happened there first that is now ubiquitous across the internet or changed how people do things from that point onwards? I don't feel like just being popular at the time really changed anything of note.
Things like digg and early Reddit for example did introduce some new things like the social voting of stories (although I am sure they were not necessarily pioneers there but helped popularise it). Likewise YouTube made video sharing and consumption super trivial. Wikipedia, Google maps, Facebook, Flickr. Those introduced/popularized ways that shaped how people use (and built) the internet ... SA and 4chan were/are just popular forums and as far as I can tell (just like any of the other popular forums) were popular in their niche but haven't generated anything of note on how people use the internet apart from a few threads or memes that you only know about if you know about them - e.g. what happened on SA that my grandmother now does when using the internet today? Does my grandmother know about a particular thread about 9/11 or some random Donal trump meme on there? Of course not - but she does use slippy-maps (google maps) and social media (Facebook) and instant in-browser online video (YouTube), online photo galleries (Flickr)
I'm not saying they didn't introduce anything noteworthy, I am just wondering what it was they did because I can't work what is different from any other popular forum?
Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on"
A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts.
The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and even briefly think about it) is that we would have avoided Donald Trump if lowtax had not banned hentai on the forums.
Genghis Khan was a great man. You cannot unify a nomadic people and conquer a shitload of Asia and not be a great man. Given that under his leadership, the Mongols literally reduced the carbon footprint of the whole planet based upon the amount of people they killed, you could easily claim he was not a "good" man.
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)
This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185381
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8
I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Things I saw first on SA:
- Micro transactions
- Paid membership for content
- Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users)
- Image macros
- Let's play videos
- Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level
- Libertarian white men in engineering and technology
- Social justice warriors
Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.