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2001·Early web, before YouTube

Something Awful

The comedy site and forum where a startling proportion of internet culture was actually invented.

You might remember it as Photoshop Phriday

A trend people joined in with

This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on somethingawful.com.

The story

What this was

A comedy website started by Richard Kyanka in 1999, and behind it a paid forum whose members called themselves goons. Its recurring features — Photoshop Phriday, Awful Link of the Day, the front-page reviews — set a tone of practised cruelty and enormous inventiveness, and its ten-dollar registration fee kept out exactly the kind of drive-by posting that later sites drowned in.

It first appeared in 2001, during early web, before YouTube.

An implausible share of the culture came out of one forum. All Your Base Are Belong To Us was carried by it; the image-macro conventions that became lolcats formed there; Slender Man was created in a Something Awful thread; 4chan was founded by a Something Awful user for anime discussion the forum did not want. Gizmodo listed it in 2018 among the hundred sites that shaped the internet.

The forum still runs. Its cultural centrality ended when the things it invented outgrew it, and its founder's later years were troubled and publicly so. What it demonstrated is that a paywall and heavy moderation could produce more creative output than an open site, which is not the lesson the following two decades took.

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on somethingawful.com.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A comedy website started by Richard Kyanka in 1999, and behind it a paid forum whose members called themselves goons. Its recurring features — Photoshop Phriday, Awful Link of the Day, the front-page reviews — set a tone of practised cruelty and enormous inventiveness, and its ten-dollar registration fee kept out exactly the kind of drive-by posting that later sites drowned in.
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