Something Awful

» go to somethingawful.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

most comedy sites from 1999 are dead. the one that charged admission is not. Something Awful began in november 1999 as richard kyanka's personal humor site, under the handle lowtax. the front page had reviews of terrible movies and terrible websites. the forums grew up next to it and became the actual institution. members call themselves goons. since 2001, posting has cost ten dollars, once, and if you get banned you pay again.

i lurked from around 2002, mostly for photoshop phriday, and never paid the ten dollars. in hindsight it was the best value on the internet and i am not sure why i was so cheap about it. reading was free. that was my excuse then and it is still my excuse now.

~ the ten dollar wall ~

the registration fee was moderation with teeth. spam accounts cost money. trolling cost money. a ban was not an inconvenience, it was a ten dollar fine, and the forums published the ban reasons publicly, which became its own genre of comedy. everything the free internet later tried to solve with karma systems and shadow bans, SA solved in 2001 with a credit card form.

~ what escaped from it ~

the list is absurd. the let's play format, where someone plays a game and narrates it, started as SA forum threads in the mid 2000s, then became one of youtube's largest categories. slender man was invented in a june 2009 photoshop thread by a goon posting as victor surge. early image macros spread through here in 2001. the FYAD subforum incubated the writers who became weird twitter, including the account dril.

the goons also colonized eve online as goonswarm, one of the game's most feared alliances. one of their diplomats, forum moderator sean smith, known in game as vile rat, was a real us foreign service officer killed in the 2012 benghazi attack. players renamed stations across the galaxy in his memory. a ten dollar comedy forum, mourned in a spaceship game, for a man who died serving his country. no other website has a paragraph like that.

~ what almost killed it ~

the 2010s, mostly. reddit did what SA did, free, at a thousand times the scale, often with jokes that had been laundered out of SA threads. membership drifted away. then in 2020, kyanka faced domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives. he sold the site in october 2020 to a longtime moderator known as jeffrey of yospos, and was banned from the forums he founded. in november 2021 kyanka died by suicide. the forums stayed up, run by the people who bought them, which is a bleak sentence and also the whole story of this place.

~ why it still matters ~

the forums are still active in 2026, still paid, still moderated like it is 2004, and the library of congress has recognized the site's role in internet culture. every free platform that replaced it is now unreadable, and the one that charged ten dollars is not. the goons have outlived their founder, most of their imitators, and several of the platforms built on their jokes. they will probably outlive this entry.

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