Why does something awful cost money

Meme Party Hard. Meme Zybourne Clock. Meme Fake Science Fair Projects. Meme Groverhaus. Subculture Let's Play. Meme It Is A Mystery. Meme Anagrammed Movie Posters. Recent Videos Add a Video. Add an image. Tags website something awful goons memehub internet humor site. Encyclopedia Dramatica, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia.

Dororo, Blue Alien. View More Editors. Add a Comment. View More Comments. It's really weird seeing attitudes and patterns of speech that originated there filtering out into the greater blog world.

Kyanka: It became so insular that nobody else could really enter it. By the tail-end of the first decade of the new millennium, web forums had lost their spot as the internet's water coolers. Sites like Reddit and 4chan and services like Facebook and Twitter had, for various reasons, largely bled away their users.

Something Awful was not exempt. While not quite a ghost town, the forums are populated by a fraction of the Goons they once were. Some see the decline of Something Awful is an inevitable consequence of the changing topography of the internet. Others point to specific decisions by Kyanka and others as causes of the site's much-diminished user base.

Rich blames the culture wars. To hear him tell it, SA was something like the internet's Switzerland. On SA, you could make fun of anybody without declaring allegiance to anybody else. But as the culture wars cut a swathe across the internet, not declaring for a side wasn't an option anymore, he said.

Kyanka: Back in the early s, in the game industry there wasn't this hatred for things like there is now. We could make jokes about things. I would make jokes about Cliffy B, I would make jokes about John Carmack and various other game developers and things like that but you knew they were just jokes. Now people seem to confuse jokes with personal attacks and it just seems like the hostility is ramping up and there seems to be no stop to it.

People are just getting meaner and meaner and meaner and there's no jokes involved, it's just hatred. Thorpe: FYAD was certainly known as a mean place, but it was not mean on the level of the meanness you see nowadays. People would definitely make fun of each other and insult each other but it was not a thing where you were calling the SWAT team to people's houses or posting people's addresses online and getting them messed with or calling their jobs and getting them fired.

None of that kind of stuff. If that kind of stuff happened there it was pretty stupid and horrible and nobody was down with it. Kyanka: There was more civil discourse because you had to basically have a certain level of intelligence to be on [the web]. People respected people more, and it just seems like the easier it is for people to get on, the less rational and civil discourse there is. I think it's great for everybody to communicate and I definitely think that people should be able to communicate and say what they want to say but the flip side of the coin is that a lot of people have really, really weird and stupid opinions, myself included.

Hendren: I think this has to actually do with smart phones in a big way, funnily enough. The old iPhones and piece of shit Android phones couldn't really render the forums properly. It was very slow. So people with jobs tended to leave for things like Twitter that were more mobile-friendly, kind of leaving the weird people who actually believe in sexism and racism at their computers at home. Those who stuck around kind of maybe didn't get the irony of it or something.

I don't know. Kyanka: I stepped away from the forums in I was getting death threats. I've had people say they're going to rape my seven-year-old daughter and throw her off of a bridge. I'm used to people saying that they're going to kill me because I run a comedy website. I said, "Fine, I wash my hands of this, I'm just going to concentrate on family and things like that.

I'm not exactly sure what you call a writer who doesn't write for a decade. Thorpe: Reddit and Twitter probably eroded the Something Awful core base, and even maybe things like 4chan, which was an offshoot of Something Awful originally. That's why it's not as big as it was.

Detailed rules, and we somewhat ironically discouraged memes. Kyanka: I think memes are just the laziest of things. It's like, "If somebody else says something funny, if I repeat the funny thing, then I'll be funny. If somebody just posted a meme or a catchphrase they would be banned, because we wanted people to actually contribute things instead of just parroting things other people said. Thorpe: [4chan's] original population was also at least partially defined by the sorts of people that got kicked off SA.

I Can Haz Cheezburger or whatever it is called started by leeching onto SA memes and now has grown into something else. It's kind of a reclamation project for me. Kyanka: I don't really necessarily believe it was Reddit. I think it's a combination of things, and I haven't really kept up with the current trends.

I don't have an official app, we're still working on the mobile version, stuff like that. If you look at any given Reddit post it's junk.

I've got nothing against Reddit, I don't think Reddit has cut into my business model at all, but Reddit is just shit floating to the top. We're trying to keep the Redditors out. With Reddit, there's no barrier to entry. Anybody can create a Reddit account, anybody could, up until a few years ago when we shut down their child porn forums , anybody could post child porn there, until we started a crusade to get those shut down.

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. Thorpe: There were definitely more humor sites on the internet as time went on.

Humor got a lot more meme focused as time went on, which Something Awful was always really, really against. You would get banned if you did any meme shit, and certainly on the front page nobody would dare do any of that shit, like LOLCats was popular for 10 minutes.

It never capitalized on any of that stuff, which it probably could have and made a ton of money. But as soon as something became recognizable as a meme, it was forbidden. Anyone who's from there is probably going to have an aversion to any kind of internet meme or catchphrase forever, probably, because it was such a huge part of the culture.

Everybody considered that the death of all humor and original thought. Hendren: As most of us moved to Twitter or whatever we kind of brought the community with us. It wasn't that Something Awful was bad, it was just easier for us to congregate here instead of there. We'd already established who was funny and who wasn't and we still know that to a pretty good degree.

Most of us still follow each other and still talk to each other on Twitter. I'm in a group DM with most of the same guys I've been talking to for the past 12 years now. The community isn't dead, it was just moved, mostly. Boruff: On Twitter, it's much easier to share an idiotic thought or whatever joke comes to your mind than an internet forum. The social aspects can be achieved through Facebook. And Reddit's more popular. I think they certainly took users away, but I think Something Awful would have declined on its own, anyway.

Thorpe: It was pretty gradual and for a bunch of reasons. When you have a day job it becomes harder to mess around on a pink internet forum where people are posting horrible pictures occasionally without warning. I think that's why a lot of people slowly went to places like Twitter that you could have open in a web browser at work. And you know just having more a life, more relationships and social obligations and stuff you don't spend your nights on the internet anymore.

I think people even gravitated toward other weird little places, I think people went to Digg and then Reddit, or they went to 4chan and then Twitter. There are just way, way, way more options in terms of socializing on the internet. Thorpe: Another perspective is that it is still fairly popular as a community by the standards of the internet then but the use and cultural force of the internet now is so gigantic now that it's sort of dwarfed by things like Twitter.

Boruff: Not that it's dead or it can't be saved or there's no life still left in it, but it reached its peak. Hendren: Cultures will change and subgenres of communities will come and go, that's always going to happen.

At some point people get a little tired of the old thing. Something Awful did grow a little long in the tooth. If goons are relatively subdued on their own forums, however, the opposite is true elsewhere, and they are renowned for being some of the most sophisticated and organized Trolls to stalk the internets. Or at least they used to be. These days, they still do some active trolling on the side, but the Troll torch has passed to newer websites.

The folks here were also responsible for Doom House and Gaming Garbage. Kyanka registered the domain somethingawful. A precursor to 4chan, Reddit, and "weird Twitter," the Something Awful blog and forums were a place where users shared memes and made fun of each other. Its particular mix of dark humor and absurdity has spread across the internet. The prolific and hilarious Twitter user dril got his start posting on Something Awful.