Something Awful

Last updated

Something Awful
Something Awful logo.png
Type of business Limited liability company
FoundedNovember 16, 1999;24 years ago (November 16, 1999)
Headquartersformerly Pleasant Hill, Missouri, U.S.
Founder(s) Richard Charles Kyanka
Key peopleRichard Kyanka
Zack Parsons
David Thorpe
Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Industry Internet
URL somethingawful.com

Something Awful (SA) is an American comedy website hosting content including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so did its contributors and content. The website has helped to perpetuate various Internet phenomena, [1] [2] [3] and it has been cited as an influence on Internet culture. [4] In 2018, Gizmodo placed it as 89th on their list of "100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It". [5]

Contents

The website has been involved in a number of events. These include a conflict with the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, a Hurricane Katrina relief fund being caught in PayPal's red tape, [6] an exhibition boxing match between Kyanka and movie director Uwe Boll, and the creation of the Slender Man.

History

Something Awful was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka. [7] Kyanka started Something Awful several months before leaving his previous job, after using his "Cranky Steve" persona to write a comedic website update deriding the attitude and work performance of a fellow Planet Quake administrator. He moved the "Cranky Steve" personality he had created to the Something Awful site in 1999. [8] In the years immediately following Something Awful's launch, several sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, failed to compensate Kyanka as promised for advertising on the site. [9] [10]

In 2001, the site began charging an activation fee (currently US$10.00) for forum access. [11] Only members can post messages or threads; to encourage new registrations, the forums are only intermittently viewable by unregistered users. The site and forums draw continuous income from fees for new accounts, forum upgrades such as custom avatars and access to the forum archives and search features, and merchandise sales. [11]

On October 9, 2020, following a backlash from the community in response to allegations that Kyanka was a domestic abuser, [12] Kyanka sold Something Awful to a fifteen-year member and moderator known under the pseudonym of Jeffrey of YOSPOS. [12] Following its sale, Kyanka was banned from Something Awful on March 23, 2021. [13] [ non-primary source needed ] On November 9, 2021, Kyanka died by suicide. [14]

Spam Prevention Early Warning System

On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) added an entire class-B subnet with the Cogent ISP to their spammer list, since Cogent was hosting a known spammer that SPEWS found difficult to block.[ citation needed ]Something Awful was added to the list in the process, disrupting its ability to communicate with its customers who were using SPEWS. Upon appeal, SPEWS initially refused to delist SA. The Something Awful administrators responded by telling their users to post their support in the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting. However, that group and news.admin.net-abuse.email were flooded with off-topic posts and trolls from Something Awful users, incensing SPEWS advocates. The SA administrators claimed that SPEWS was attempting to hack the Something Awful server. Forum users responded by threatening to perform a distributed denial of service attack on SPEWS, although this type of behavior was strongly discouraged by Kyanka and assistant editor Zack Parsons. [15]

Hurricane Katrina charity

As Something Awful's servers were located in New Orleans, the site temporarily went offline in August 2005 during the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. After the site was brought to a semi-functional state, Kyanka set up a link to a PayPal account where people could donate money to the survivors of the hurricane via the Red Cross. Kyanka put in $3,000 of his own money, [16] and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10.[ citation needed ] PayPal froze the donation account, then stated that they would unfreeze the account once it was provided with proof of shipping from aggrieved buyers. Due to the nature of the collection, there were no actual "buyers", and it was impossible to provide proof of shipping for donation. [17] Eventually, Kyanka contacted a customer service representative over the phone, and asked to have PayPal donate all of the money to the American Red Cross. However, he was told that PayPal would only give the money to United Way of America due to their business affiliation; Kyanka initially agreed, but after receiving several emails from readers detailing alleged corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed his mind and told PayPal to refund all of the money to the individual donors. PayPal refunded the money, but did not refund exchange and handling fees for international donors. [16]

Shooting deaths

In 2005, William Freund sought advice in the Something Awful gun subforum about purchasing Hevi-Shot brand ammunition [18] several days before embarking on a "shooting rampage", during which he killed two people before taking his own life. Freund had stated in the thread, which was closed before the killing spree, along with his ability to post comments being revoked, that he intended to use the ammunition to defend his Halloween pumpkins from vandals. [19]

Uwe Boll fight

In June 2006, Kyanka accepted an open challenge from German movie director Uwe Boll, who had offered to fight critics of his movies in a series of ten-round boxing matches. Something Awful had posted a humorous review that was critical of one of his films. [20] [21] The event took place in Vancouver, Canada, on September 23, 2006; after being knocked down several times and eventually forfeiting the fight in the first round, Kyanka claimed that he had been told by Boll, a trained amateur boxer, that the fight would be just for show. To that effect, Kyanka purportedly acted like a silent film comedy character during the fight rather than seriously attempting to fight Uwe Boll. [22]

Death of Sean Smith

Sean Smith, a forum moderator and leading member of the Goonswarm Federation alliance (which originated in part from the Something Awful forums) in the video game Eve Online , was killed in the 2012 Benghazi Attack on September 11, 2012. Eve Online players paid respect to Smith by renaming space stations after him. [23]

Site content

The frontpage article series Golan the Insatiable is the basis of an animated series of the same name that premiered on Animation Domination on Fox on July 27, 2013. [24]

In 2014, the American Folklife Center announced that Something Awful was one of the sites it would be archiving as part of its efforts to compile a history of digital culture. [25]

Forums

The site is home to a collection of Internet forums running a highly customized version of vBulletin, charging a one-time registration fee of US$9.95 for posting privileges and full access to the forums, with additional user account and forum features available for purchase at prices ranging from US$4.95 to US$29.95. [26]

The forums have spread several Internet memes, such as "all your base are belong to us". [2] The forum's users refer to themselves as "Goons". A weekly activity is "Photoshop Phriday", where users will modify existing images to create parodies through the use of image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. [27] The website also highlights some of what its administrators believe to be exceptional forum threads in the Comedy Goldmine feature. [28] A forum member, moot, also launched 4chan after hentai was banned, [29] [30] and the Let's Play phenomenon originated in posts on the Something Awful forums.

Many originators of "Weird Twitter", including dril, originally posted in Something Awful's Fuck You and Die forum. [31]

The Slender Man urban legend was created in a 2009 thread in the Something Awful forum. [32]

The 2015 video game Dropsy originated as a 2008 CYOA thread on the Something Awful forums. [33]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spamming</span> Unsolicited electronic messages, especially advertisements

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PayPal</span> American multinational financial technology company

PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet forum</span> Online discussion site

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A Photoshop contest, or sometimes Photoshop battle, is an online game, in which a website or user of an Internet forum will post a starting image — usually a photograph — and ask others to manipulate the image using some kind of graphics editing software, usually Adobe Photoshop, however other editors are commonly allowed, such as Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, PaintShop Pro, Paint.NET or even Microsoft Paint. People can also use video editing software to create these images, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Kdenlive, OpenShot, or NCH VideoPad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Kyanka</span> American internet personality (1976–2021)

Richard Charles Kyanka, known by his username Lowtax, was an American internet personality who created the website Something Awful.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zombie (computing)</span> Compromised computer used for malicious tasks on a network

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">B3ta</span> British website

B3ta is a popular British website, described as a "puerile digital arts community" by The Guardian. It was founded in 2001 by Rob Manuel, Denise Wilton and Cal Henderson.

Lowtax may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whirlpool (website)</span> Australian website

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Worth1000</span> Image manipulation website (2002–2013)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uwe Boll</span> German filmmaker

Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker. He came to prominence during the 2000s for his adaptations of popular video game franchises. Released theatrically, the films were critical and commercial failures; his 2005 Alone in the Dark adaptation is considered by many critics to be one of the worst films ever made. Boll's films during the 2010s, comprising mostly original projects and independent movies, received home media releases to better reviews. After retiring in 2016 to become a restaurateur, Boll eventually returned to filmmaking in 2022. His films are financed through his production companies Boll KG and Event Film Productions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YTMND</span> Online community centered on the creation of hosted meme web pages

YTMND, an initialism for "You're the Man Now, Dog", is an online community centered on the creation of hosted memetic web pages featuring a juxtaposition of an image centered or tiled along with optional large zooming text and a looping sound file. Images and sound files used in YTMNDs are usually either created or edited by users. YTMND is generally considered to be a humor website, owing its tone and culture to the original YTMND and its early imitators.

eFront was an affiliate marketing network which purchased successful websites, such as Penny Arcade, SquareGamer, and BetaNews, and pooled traffic to those sites to command higher prices for advertising during an industrywide ad revenue slowdown. In 2001, there was a scandal when ICQ instant messaging logs between the CEO Sam P. Jain and other employees were leaked onto the internet through Fuckedcompany.com. The logs detailed activities such as not paying websites that had hosted their banner ads, sending legal threats to websites that spoke poorly of eFront, and threatening to "rape her and spit on her". The logs also detailed how eFront attempted to hire, though never ended up paying, Something Awful founder and webmaster Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, ostensibly to have him generate a positive buzz for the company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fark</span> Website launched in 1999

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. The site receives many story submissions per day and approximately 100 of them are publicly displayed on the site, spread out over the main page as well as topical tabs that are organized as entertainment, sports, geek, politics and business). Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he tries to run both far-left and far-right articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">4chan</span> Anonymous imageboard website

4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, anime, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of which approximately half are from the United States.

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Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, trolling and abusive or otherwise unwanted information. Forum spam is usually posted onto message boards by automated spambots or manually with unscrupulous intentions with intent to get the spam in front of readers who would not otherwise have anything to do with it intentionally.

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Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

References

  1. ↑ "Tourist of Death". Archived from the original on December 22, 2010. Retrieved November 24, 2006.[ unreliable source? ]
  2. 1 2 Johnston, Rich (February 28, 2001). "All your base..." Guardian Unlimited. London. Retrieved November 24, 2006.
  3. ↑ "All Your Base Are Belong To Frogstar". Archived from the original on October 20, 2006. Retrieved November 24, 2006.
  4. ↑ David Thorpe, Kevin Pereira (July 5, 2005). Somethingawful.com, Pink Five, Chris Gore (television). G4 television.
  5. ↑ "100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It". Gizmodo. October 19, 2018. Retrieved May 3, 2021.
  6. ↑ Mook, Nate (September 9, 2005). "PayPal Blocks Hurricane Relief Funds". BetaNews. Archived from the original on April 10, 2021. Retrieved December 12, 2021.
  7. ↑ Lynch, Steven G. "Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka" . Retrieved May 10, 2007.
  8. ↑ Kyanka, Richard (May 10, 2005). "Here's Mud In Your Eye, Batman" . Retrieved May 10, 2007.
  9. ↑ Dan Knight (October 11, 2000). "Something Awful & Express.com". Low End Mac.
  10. ↑ Tim Johnson (March 13, 2001). "eFront: What Went Wrong?". The Duke of URL. Archived from the original on February 2, 2002.
  11. 1 2 Jeremy Turnage (January 23, 2006). "Something awfully funny". Archived from the original on February 25, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2007.[ unreliable source? ]
  12. 1 2 Something Awful, a Cornerstone of Internet Culture, Is Under New Ownership, by Matthew Gault; at Vice ; published October 13, 2020; retrieved October 15, 2020
  13. ↑ The Button, archived from the original on December 12, 2021, retrieved March 24, 2021
  14. ↑ Gault, Matthew (November 11, 2021). "Richard 'Lowtax' Kyanka, Founder of Something Awful, Is Dead at 45". Vice . Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  15. ↑ John Leyden (August 8, 2003). "Something Awful going on with SPEWS". The Register. Situation Publishing Ltd.
  16. 1 2 Farivar, Cyrus (September 8, 2005). "PayPal Freezes Out Katrina Aid". Wired. Retrieved May 27, 2018.
  17. ↑ Demerjian, Charlie (September 4, 2005). "All your donations are belong us". Archived from the original on December 13, 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2018.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  18. ↑ "Something Awful forum post".(subscription required)
  19. ↑ Kimi Yoshino (November 6, 2005). "The Cyber World Shut Out O.C. Loner Too". LA Times.
  20. ↑ Kietzmann, Ludwig (September 25, 2006). "Uwe Boll does something awful to another critic". joystiq. Retrieved March 12, 2007.
  21. ↑ Chris Baker (December 1, 2006). "Raging Boll". Wired. Retrieved March 12, 2007.
  22. ↑ Tillson, Tamsen (September 24, 2006). "Boll K.O.'s crix in the ring". Variety. Archived from the original on June 9, 2007. Retrieved May 10, 2007.
  23. ↑ Beckhusen, Robert (September 12, 2012). "Diplomat Killed In Libya Told Fellow Gamers: Hope I 'Don't Die Tonight'". Wired. Retrieved March 28, 2018.
  24. ↑ Byrne, Craig (February 28, 2013). "FOX Announces Season Finale Dates & Summer Premieres". FOX . KSiteTV. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
  25. ↑ Getting serious about collecting and preserving digital culture, by Nicole Saylor, at Folklife Today (at the Library of Congress); published June 5, 2014; retrieved December 15, 2014
  26. ↑ "Something Awful Secure Purchase System" . Retrieved April 18, 2009.
  27. ↑ "Photoshop Phriday". Something Awful. Retrieved February 2, 2008.
  28. ↑ "Comedy Goldmine". Something Awful. Retrieved February 2, 2008.
  29. ↑ Jerry Langton (September 22, 2007). "Funny how 'stupid' site is addictive". The Toronto Star . Retrieved July 16, 2008.
  30. ↑ Rich Stanton (November 11, 2021). "Richard 'Lowtax' Kyanka, founder of Something Awful and onetime king of the internet goons, dead at 45". PCGamer.
  31. ↑ Weird Twitter: The Oral History
  32. ↑ Blistein, Jon (February 19, 2015). "Images From Slender Man Stabbing Suspect's Notebook Surface". Rolling Stone . Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  33. ↑ Gera, Emily (July 17, 2013). "Dropsy: The surreal adventure game the Internet made". Polygon . Vox Media . Retrieved July 4, 2015.
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