Suck.com

» see suck.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 1998 i was a turkish 14-year-old just discovering the internet on a dial-up modem. suck.com was a daily satirical column of late-90s american gen-x cynicism, written for people who already knew what hotwired was and what they thought of it. that cultural prerequisite was not on offer in ankara on a dial-up account. i missed it in real time and read it later, archived, like everyone else who was not already in the right cultural pocket in 1996.

joey anuff and carl steadman launched suck.com in august 1995. they were both staff at hotwired, the magazine wired had spun up a year earlier as its web outpost, and they ran suck on hotwired's servers without asking. the format was one column per day, written in a 200-pixel-wide narrow strip down the center of the page, with terry colon's cartoons alongside. the writing was sardonic about everything wired was actually celebrating, and the joke was that the staff publishing wired was also publishing its critic on the same machines.

hotwired noticed within a few months and bought suck rather than fire it. wired digital ran it through 1998 and sold the whole web operation to lycos that year, which kept publishing suck under the new ownership. peak readership was over a million unique readers a month, which in 1996 made suck one of the most-read pieces of editorial on the english-language web. that run continued more or less unbroken until 2000, when ad spend collapsed and lycos started cutting.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the visual identity was as defining as the writing. a typical suck page was a grey background with that 200-pixel column of text running down the middle, half a dozen blue hyperlinks per paragraph leading away to whatever the column was making fun of. a terry colon cartoon ran at the top. it looked like nothing else on the web in 1996. the constraint was technical at the start, since steadman wrote the css to fit a small browser window on a low-end machine, but it became the visual signature.

the writers' bench was where suck got its real identity. ana marie cox and heather havrilesky among others, with joey anuff in the editor seat. cox went on to wonkette and the political-blog era of the 2000s, and havrilesky kept writing personal essays online for two more decades. the suck masthead was effectively the talent bench for the next generation of web journalism, the way mcsweeney's became one a few years later.

~ the decline ~

the dot-com crash hit suck through its parent. lycos was bleeding money in 2000 and started shutting down properties. suck was sold off into a new entity called automatic media alongside feed magazine. automatic media was supposed to be a publishing co-op for the web, where editorial brands shared back-end infrastructure and split costs. it never reached profitability.

by spring 2001 the writers were unpaid and the funding was gone. internal email at automatic media described the situation as terminal. anuff posted a final column on june 7, 2001 explaining that suck would be going on hiatus indefinitely, and the next day the site posted "gone fishin'" and stopped publishing. the hiatus turned out to be permanent.

~ the day it died ~

the "gone fishin'" notice posted on june 8, 2001 was a single page with a cartoon and a short paragraph saying suck was on hiatus. there was no farewell column or retrospective. suck just stopped, the way most websites actually stop. the archive stayed online at suck.com under wired digital's old infrastructure for another seventeen years before going dark in 2018.

the resurrection happened slowly. mark macdonald started a daily email newsletter in 2015 that republishes a suck column on its twentieth anniversary, one a day, on a delay. that's how a lot of writers in their twenties first encountered the site, twenty years after the original run. the modern reader gets the writing without the late-90s cultural context, which makes it about half as funny as it was supposed to be.

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