>>9
Why not?
4chan seems lighthearted, usually.
SomethingAwful was a special breed of terrible though. Like, there were posters who were typical loser neckbeards... but they'd get on a high horse and make fun of other neckbeards. Like ``I'm not like those OTHER losers!'' Okay, buddy, but you still have a hentai avatar and post edgy shit on a web forum multiple times per day. They claim that it's ironic, but I doubt it. Irony loses its meaning when it's over-used. Post-irony.
Unlike anonymous image boards, SomethingAwful, Something Sensitive, and so on had a lot more doxxing and harassment issues. At least 4chan was mostly anonymous, though every now and then someone would tripfag or post doxx. But that was very rare. It seemed like a frequent occurrence on SA. People just bored and with too much free time so they went out of their way to attack other people. Very strange.
Remember Retsupurae? A pair of grown-ass men who made fun of children who posted video game recordings to YouTube. Now they pretend to be paragons of virtue or some shit. Very strange. Shmorky was weird as fuck, Lowtax had drug issues, and the whole community was a shitshow. Moot seemed to be more hands-off for his community, but Lowtax seemed to be just as bad as the people who trolled his site. I think his flawed business model encouraged shit-flinging. After all, banning more people would get him more money. But then again, maybe he's just jaded from having to deal with the kinds of freaks who pay to use a forum. I can't imagine having to put up with human garbage for a living. It's probably taken a toll on him after all these years.
I'm surprised SA is still around. And the weird thing is how it's taken a 180 and become super leftist now. It used to seem like apolitical edginess, but now it's very politically-oriented.
I never actually made an account there, thank goodness. When I was interested in sites like that, I was too young to have a credit card. Even though I'm older now, I've never actually signed up, but instead just watched from a distance. Schadenfreude, I guess. I can't see a lot of SA directly, since I don't have an account, and a lot of it is paywalled. But its drama seeps over into spinoff forums and Twitter.
I wonder if the posters there have Stockholm Syndrome or something. I just don't understand why you'd willingly subject yourself to that kind of treatment.