Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

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SA was great during the GWB years. The developer forum had really smart and helpful users. The Photoshop challenges produced work that was significantly better than what floats up to r/all today. The political arguments were vicious and pretty smart. The front page could almost always make me laugh.

Another brilliant monetization not mentioned in the article: you could pay to customize your own user image and title. For twice the price, another user could pay to anonymously choose their own title/image for you, usually to insult. Want to change your appearance back? Pay again.

If you were banned you could pay to re-register and come right back. If you were permabanned you couldn't. A funny pseudo-permaban was that sometimes a user would get put on probation for a ridiculously long time like 9999 hours.

I'd love to find a modern SA: large enough to be always raucous and lively, moderated well enough to keep out really poisonous users. On Reddit the only good subreddits are locked down really tightly and the ones that aren't are full of garbage and full of meh.

One of the threads from that era that really stood out for me was when they went on to a predominantly-gay niche dating site, posted pictures from it, and mocked the members for their height, weight and general appearance. It eventually got gassed after a newer member who didn't share the traditional SA belief that it's not homophobic to call men from groups SA has dehumanized who are in relationships with men "faggots" - because obviously they're not really gay, just too much of a loser to get women to sleep with them - objected to the people using this term, someone bought him a custom title calling him a faggot, and the mods finally decided this was too far.

The thing that contributed most to SA's reputation, in my opinion, was the fact that it became an internet cultural norm that their choice of who to dehumanize, their morally grey tactics, and their edgy humour were beyond criticism even by sites and people who campaign against the exact same things elsewhere on the web. Imagine what Vice would say about a subreddit that did this, or harassed someone until they killed themself, or permabanned a woman because her boyfriend said she'd been raped at a community-related meet up by someone from the site, or...

Yep. There was a definite feeling of "elitist tastemaking" that permeated SA as it hit its peak and post-peak years. The forum regulars were consciously engaging in the performance of a forum post, rather than a forum post, which, in tandem with the banning and fees, developed towards an anxious, cynical, and insincere atmosphere ripe for toxicity - qualities which remain true of many of the prominent alumni. At the same time, it was productive for a certain kind of effortful, memetic content, which made it alluring and popular.

Because open hate clearly wasn't in good taste and tended to get moderated out, SA would more often focus on dogwhistle cues, e.g. furry groups instead of LGBT groups, [0] and then harass critics for not getting the joke. Material that originally developed from outside the forums was claimed and appropriated as it passed through. There were a lot of ways in which the claims to quality were overblown or outright false. Even so, I got curious and bought an account too, though I lost the password to it at some point.

[0] https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

The SA you describe still exists, and it still has those things you mention.

A lot of people (including SA posters) say it's not as good as it used to be, but that may be the same phenomenon HN users complain about when they say HN used to be better back in the day.

I just took a look for the first time in years and it does look pretty good, though not as active as I remember. I was never banned. I ended up walking away permanently in early 2008 because I realized that it had become a dangerously deep time-sink for me. I just logged out and never logged in again. (I left kuro5hin earlier in a similar way.) Now of course I sink my time across other forums. HN is my current favorite. I seem to have a little better graduated self control nowadays; I'll not post here for a week or more if higher priorities interrupt.

I'm still active on Ars Technica but the constant political sniping allowed there is really tiresome. I could happily live the rest of my life without seeing "snowflake" used as an insult again. Or without seeing a snarky anti-Trump comment in an unrelated article with 70 upvotes. I don't like Trump either, but that doesn't mean I want to read lazy insults against him all day in every discussion. Reddit's never tempted me to register an account though I like to read Ask Historians.

You are absolutely right about the time sink aspect, although the User Control Panel is pretty useful in that it provides a view of only the threads you have subscribed to, which minimizes the "hmm, this thread looks interesting... ah crap it's 4 AM!" problem.

But then you're just more efficient and get more posts in the same amount of time.

SA was the first forum I really got involved in and I posted there for years. When I was there I thought it was the pinnacle of comedy; I'd never been exposed to that brand of humor before it, and I thought it was genius.

When I look at SA today it just seems juvenile and try-hard. Really, painfully unfunny.

I think part of it has to do with the stricter moderation; SA in the early 2000s was 4chan before I knew there was a 4chan, and I appreciated the raucous, sometimes offensive humor.

Moreover though I think you're right, SA is still SA. My ideas about what is funny have changed, but SA is still the same.

>When I look at SA today it just seems juvenile and try-hard. Really, painfully unfunny.

this is how trends work. the originators are truly creative and interesting, but over time the paths they forge spread across populations, and inspire increasingly poorly executed knock-offs. eventually it becomes embarrassing for earlier adopters.

SA lost lots of good people to 4chan, mainly because a bunch of them were banned for loli on a Direct Connect hub (Raspberry Heaven). All of the original 4chan admins, mods, and posters were also SA posters, including moot himself.

I've not logged into my account in a decade. I suspect that SA didn't change, I think we've changed. Getting older sucks.

It's also worth noting what an important role the SA file sharing forums had on on SA and the file-sharing scene. Many of today's private file-sharing communities are direct descendants of what began as "No Mp3s" and "Don't Post Porn Here". It was terrible for the SA community, but I'm sure all the bans for "where the filez @" posts were quite good at mitigating server expenses.

ah nmp3s was great for so long and IIRC oink grew out of it as well.

We don't talk about nmp3s/dpph.

The 9/11 thread was pretty shocking. Two things stuck in my memory from GBS/SA, the "All your base" thread and the 9/11 thread.

But you laughed.

As someone who's read SA since Hellchick was joking about crates, I think the SA boards are still pretty great. There's a weird phenomenon currently tolerated where some posters sort of lazily semi-troll, but other than that it's still a good forum.

Much like Reddit, the value at SA is in niche sub forums. I haven't looked at GBS in years but still visit places like Ask/Tell, Book Barn, etc as well as specific game threads. (Is this like advanced "there's a front page?) I bookmark them and visit via the control panel pretty much exclusively. Big threads are like communities, especially around specific games and TV shows. It's wild to me that SA is still a thing after all these years (I started in 2001) but I think the site has been through so much that it can survive anything these days.

Voat had a lot of promise, but it's degraded into a cesspool of racism.

Voat had remarkably little promise and followed the standard tragectory of sites designed to clone a site for angry users jumping ship.

Moot, founder of 4chan, had some good comments about the phenomenon during his resignation:

>To single out 420chan, it’s actually one of the imageboards that I have actually respected over the years. I think that what's kind of defined a lot of image boards, even going back to the first kind of spin off from 4chan (which was 5Chan), 7chan and all these others. They tend to spin out based on a decision I make, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like 4chan, or they don’t like 4chan culture or whatever. More or less over the years, most of those sites have kind of fizzled out.

>While 420Chan started similarly to 5chan, (the admin didn’t like me), I really respect that he wanted to have a bunch of topics that 4chan didn’t have ... ["]4chan is never gonna have a drugs board, or a wrestling board, or all these other boards that I want, and so we may as well create a site that caters to that.”

>I really respect the fact that he really took it in its own direction, it doesn't look like 4chan. The other sites ... created a whole era of open source clones of 4chan that offered 4chan in a box and emulated our front page and everything.

>People, for whatever reason wanted to make 4chan that wasn’t 4chan.

Voat is just the latest "reddit that isn't reddit".

>or a wrestling board

It does now, in the form of /asp/ I think :)

However I don't know how well moot's prediction of fizzling out holds for say 8chan, which has started to very much grow in popularity; granted, having roughly some of the same popular boards as 4chan (except for where moderation doesn't matter, like on NSFW boards) but with some interesting and nice top boards, like /leftypol/ which 4chan would never host.

I remember being on 4chan when the total amount of content currently hosted was listed as 50GB. And I thought it would be going down.

8chan's growth rate looked promising for a time, but I believe it's pretty inactive at the moment.

Well, being removed from Google surely doesn't help, but it's still one of the 5k top visited sites in the US according to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/8ch.net

Why did it get removed?

They say because of CP, but I highly doubt it. I'm assuming a three digit organization didn't like the conversations going on there.

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