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Comment by dontupvoteme | Hacker News Reader

And before/In parallel to Fark was SomethingAwful, which to my knowledge never did any meaningful redesigns and quasi died out because.. well i'm not even sure why, just a lot of us ended up leaving.

Though I guess there's still some skeleton userbase left. Apologies to any goons if i'm misrepresenting things.

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People just got bored and left after social media was invented, because it was more interesting.

That and Lowtax and the admins were mainly interested in making the users fight each other for content (eg Helldump); Lowtax then moved onto marrying and abusing various different wives then claiming they ghosted him when they moved out in the middle of the night.

SA just never got new users to replace the ones that left or grew out of the site. Younger millennials went to Reddit and other social media. The weirder ones went on 4chan.

> i'm not even sure why

In a word? Lowtax. It's quite the wild ride (with a few dark turns, regrettably): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhjMv9nxxWk

I think part of it is that SA's current culture really doesn't care about bringing new people in. The people there are quite happy talking to themselves on what they will happily call a dead forum. People leaving over time is the natural state of any platform; they're just below replacement rate and not too fussed over it.

People tend to age out of communities like SA, and the site had no real plan or desire to acquire fresh blood.

something awful had a forum for crappy users, called Fuck Youself and Die, but eventually the trolls and shitty users grew and the site was suffering, the mod war with those users is what 4chan was born from.

4chan was not a revenge website against SA, this is some kind of narrative written by later generations of twitter journalists. A revenge forum would have the same $10 to sign up rule.

(But the SA admins did delete the 4chan thread on the day its traffic surpassed SA.)

4chan was far more weeb than troll back in the day, I think the user base (at least the ones coming from SA) was largely ADTRW users/exiles/etc

Didn't FYAD go on to play a role in "weird twitter"?

Yup. Dril is a former FYAD poster.

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