[rmidthun]

All this eulogy for an abusive bully.

Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in.

So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA so people could laugh at them.

Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.

The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.

[Meekro]

Agreed. I ran across SomethingAwful when I was quite young (maybe 12-14?) and it was rather upsetting. I kept seeing calls to action that sounded like "Hey guys, let's go be mean to _____ for entertainment! Bonus points if we make them cry!" The whole culture seemed to be like that, so I closed the site and never went back. I never understood what others saw in it.

[pas]

Those others saw a way to cope with their own powerlessness (for having healthy IRL relationships, eg. to set boundaries, and so on).

(At least this was my experience on other forums.)

[Apocryphon]

I think it is important to remember that while SA has become normalized as a community over time, more Reddit than 4chan, at its heart it was not simply a nerd community but a community for nerds to mock other nerds. Trolling and aggression was honed at SA. In many ways it was a bigger and broader successor to alt.tasteless and other shock sites. It definitely amplified the culture of snark and misanthropy in nerd culture.

[1123581321]

Brigading those ugly guestbooks was relatively harmless fun. The owners were usually enraged and nonplussed but didn’t feel anything of value was touched. This was before death threats and harassing employers and roping traditional news in to amplify the attack, and all that.

The Uwe Boll fight was very funny.

I think, though, my favorite lowtax moment was a recorded talk he gave at a university, in which he expounded on the “greater parrot-in-ass theory” about how much worse the world becomes when people with extremely niche and unacceptable interests are able to find each other online and convince each other that they’re normal and healthy. Prescient.

But yes, also a bully.

[watwut]

It was not harmless fun as proven by websites that closed after the experience. It was bullying, plain and simple.