mongosteen posted:

lurkers are cool.

yeah but can they please holla for a minute though?

raptornomics posted:

i think it just takes time for many people to eventually start posting. i literally just started posting on LF about 2 weeks before maggotmaster got the forum destroyed. and that was after a good 6-8 months of reading everything (including the things in the archives) posted on LF. at the time the more active LF posters would completely destroy you if you posted something even slightly ignorant (i don't mean that as a criticism, i think it is a good thing) so it makes sense to lurk as well.

This was why I loved LF, i’d find smart people and harangue them from a point of antagonistic ignorance and make them defend and explain their ideas in the manner and method which best suited me. It was like going to university but you can yell at the lecturer so much that he will devote all his time to you. I dunno it’s weird, that’s how I learn

gyrofry posted:

*jools sits in his magnificently appointed manor at blandwick-upon-glorpington and sneers at teh n00b*

This reminds me…..King Ralph was TV a few days ago and I watched a little bit of it and it’s amazing how much even 22 years ago seems like an entirely different planet. He falls in love with some northern stripper lass and they go to her town and everybody is white and looks like they’ve just been laid off from the british Leyland factory! No kebab shops or call centres or Sky TV or even Chavs!

gyrofry posted:

oi

Jools told me that this is what he wants played at his funeral

MadMedico posted:

LF was a meritocracy of jokes, a meritocracy of jokes. Thinking up a great one-liner—the briefer the better—kicked off an endorphin rush.

That’s what I got addicted to the anti-science gimmick. I started it in some thread about the F-35 and found out that whenever I made threads critical of science they would explode….such a thrill….so lame…..so cool

MadMedico posted:

LF was a meritocracy of jokes, a meritocracy of jokes. Thinking up a great one-liner—the briefer the better—kicked off an endorphin rush.

hen SA started it was a site where snarky, funny, and sometimes nerdy people collided who made fun of the internet and the world in general with pretty much no limits. Nothing was sacred, people would say things that were considered offensive and shocking by the mainstream. However many people were funny, intelligent, and talented. Debate was actually of a higher discourse than you'd imagine. People had different talents. Some were good writers. Some good photoshoppers. Some could do long parody. Some short insults. Others quick jokes or puns. SA was like a chaos generator of humor. People threw everything to the wall to make it stick and often the jokes you'd hear on SA would hit the mainstream days or weeks later. SA also started a lot of important internet memes.

As time went by, there was a culture change which I'm sure someone with a better memory than I could detail better. But after a few years a lot of the funny people were gone...some went nuts, some got banned. More and more things were deemed "off limits" or offensive. People began to report people whose opinions differed from theirs, or who offended them.

A lot of the change seemed to come from older, female posters who somehow gravitated towards the site...the "catladies"...women in their late 20s-40s who were often fat, single, and thought they were funny. They came to SA for the "dangerous" humor but upon arrival sought to "fix" it and make it better, safer, and more like a Hallmark Shoebox Greeting card. They made their way into the mod and admin team and changed the culture of the site.

Years later, there was a subforum of Debate and Discussion called Laissez's Faire, which started as I don't know what, but by it's peak had become a forum of bitter hard left stereotypes. There were Marxists who wanted to throw down the system (along with a whole rogues gallery of other college communist types), militant feminists, hardcore race theory people, outspoken GLBT types and a smattering of self diagnosed Aspergers/Depression people. The most bitter, angry, and harsh of all these were the people who were self loathing majorities. The actual Black Black Studies majors weren't half as annoying as the white ones, there were numerous self hating male feminists, born rich Communists, etc.

They circlejerked a lot in there but over time decided they needed to change the rest of SA to be more like their desired worldview. They burst out of LF and began to "call out" supposed cases of racism, misyogyny, gay bashing, rich privilege, etc in every forum. They ganged up on threads in organized attacks, planning who would throw down which study or graph, best ways to shame or troll their "enemies" etc.

There was a backlash against them both, so much that many of the Catladies were taken out of power or muzzled for a time, and LF itself was destroyed and many of it's more vocal and bitchy adherents banned when they just didn't get what was going on.

But those attitudes have become part of the DNA of SA, and you have mods like Eggplant Wizard carrying the Catlady banner and daily bannings for "wrong thought." Thread invasions by LF people aren't organized, but they still happen, just because so many people are around that think that way now. So it's easy for one person to start attacking someone else for misogyny in a Ask/Tell or TVIV thread and a few more will come out of the woodwork and pile on.

It's hard to see because a lot of the older threads aren't on the Internet Wayback Machine or Archives. A lot of the worsening of the site came as it got bigger and there were more and more subforums, and stupid rules like not being able to post new stories in GBS without a probation (GBS IS NOT AN RSS. USER IS ON PROBATION). Some people got older and moved on, and newer people went to newer forums instead of joining SA. Certainly the charging $10 thing was controversial, and debatable as to it's effectiveness (I wouldn't know; I joined early and never paid). But the Catladies and LF Krew were certainly good examples of two groups trying, failing, but ultimately succeeding in changing the nature of the forums.

SariBari posted:

My fellow mostly-lurkers or total lurkers,

After a delightful weekend up north with our Queen of the Rhizzone, discipline, I have come to ask you to leave your hideaway for a moment. Why do you lurk and for how long have you been reading these funny-broken-intelligent-disgusting conversations? Do you organize or participate politically offline? Do you lurk out of love or hate of this place? Most importantly to me: if you are another lady lurker, what keeps you from participating in discussion? Plz don't lurk this thread! lurklurklurklurk.

I lurk because I think I generally don't have much to say that is funny or interesting. I've been lurking since the pr0n haul megathread, and what little I have posted began with mspaints of anthropomorphic dicks and later devolved into posts about economics and academia. I don't actually do anything leftisty other than (hopefully) exposing college students to leftist perspectives on economics along with the standard neoclassical fare, so my lack of bona fides is another reason I don't post much.