I don't want to say that I grew up with Something Awful because it was really just my formative teenage years. I graduated high school in 2004, so all during those four years starting in Y2K, I was active either as a lurker or a poster. At one time I read every frontpage post and I thought Lowtax was the funniest man on the Internet. But by the time I was leaving high school, it didn't really make sense to stick around. And I didn't.

There was always a beautiful and ugly side of the website. On the plus side, it was the most entertaining site at the time and the quality of the posts was quite high compared to other places. But there was inherent elitism that came with that. If you could make it through hazing and learning the customs of the site, you'd be one of the group, but on the downside, it was basically an Internet gang that terrorized the entire web. Back in those days there was no etiquette about not raiding other forums. Every online service dreaded the goon invasion that would come from Something Awful if they got enough attention.

It was a place where you could truly thrive when you're 14 years old.

In those days most things didn't have an ultimately divisive political slant to them. It was always a left leaning place but that sort of thing wasn't pronounced in those days and someone of other views wasn't necessarily unwelcome. Things like /pol/ didn't exist; hell 4chan didn't exist in my day. It was a toxic place sometimes but not in the same way that you think of toxic today.

The best way to explain it is: It was a nihilistic website where the only god is comedy. If it's funny, anyone can be thrown under the bus at any time.

I didn't realize this at the time but a lot of the reason for the uglier parts of the site was that the site owner, Lowtax, didn't know where to draw the line and how to lead the community by example. To be fair, in those days no one really did yet. But probably anyone else would have been better to have at the helm than him. He would have made a great poster, but a great admin, a person whose example the rest of the community should follow? Not really. But as a teenager none of that occured to me. I loved Lowtax and I still kind of did when I heard about his death and how the whole forum hated him for his abusive relationships and alcoholism.

Because I wasn't around for any of that, it was a shock to watch this more than a decade later and find out what happened. I hadn't even thought about the website in the whole span of time as I was just busy with my life and the relevance of forums like that fell off especially by the 2010s.

By the 2020s though, oldweb nostalgia had taken over and I was deeply into it -- obviously, that's why this site exists. I found myself looking back fondly at my days on the forums. At first glance it seems like the majority of people still using the site have grown up. People have changed with the times: They don't do childish raids anymore; they don't chase lolcows; it's just a retirement home for old timers.

Of course it becomes clear that a lot of history happened since I left and many users have registration dates long after I was gone. And a lot of people seem to have forgotten the old motto: "The Internet Makes You Stupid." These people are as terminally online as anyone else from Reddit or Twitter. This isn't a community that's meta-aware that the old Internet had something special about it. It's a community that transformed with the rest of the world for better AND worse.

Some things never change I guess. It's initially beautiful that the site is still going somehow but it's also ugly once you see under the surface. It's still run by people who shouldn't be at the helm. It's toxic not like the Internet used to be but how the Internet is now -- majority of the userbase is ideologically captured, especially the people in charge. It might as well be /pol/ for lefties. I'd rather chop my balls off and fuck my dog with a strap on in a fursuit than post there.

It's for that reason I recommend users to view the site via archive.org.

RIP Something Awful; you should have died with Lowtax.

P.S. I'm stealing the thread icons.