EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS

by Stryker, Cole

  I think a registered pseudonym is useful because it gives you continuity if not accountability. You might not know that “CmdrTaco” is actually a dude named Rob, but on Slashdot at least, you know that each time you see a post with that name attached, you know it’s the same guy. I felt for Slashdot that it was important to provide that for people that wanted it. I don’t think that creates a sense of “personal responsibility” in any sort of globalized sense, but it allows you to build a reputation and history which might be important if you want to be taken seriously.

  Interestingly, anonymous posters on Slashdot are jokingly labeled “Anonymous Coward.”

  Matt Haughey was a big fan of Slashdot, but he wasn’t crazy about the interface. Slashdot had editors that picked from submitted stories. Matt was looking for something more democratic, so he created MetaFilter, a community where anyone’s story could land on the front page.

  The community blog became most notable for its Ask Metafilter section, which was an early example of information crowd-sourcing. You could ask an obscure question and, due to the size and quality of the community, sometimes get surprisingly informed answers. This kind of querying would influence sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Reddit, and, to an extent, even 4chan.

  According to Haughey, MetaFilter also developed its own memespeak pretty early on.

  Probably in the first year, 2000 or so, I noticed people shouting “double post!” to something they’d seen before became a sort of game for people, where they wanted to be first to notice something was old and demonstrate their expertise at MetaFilter. There was also this early meme where a post that was really awful or boring would elicit a response of someone saying “I really like pancakes” and then everyone would talk about pancakes and we sort of had a pancakes-as-mascot thing for a while.

  My favorite meme is the current one where someone overanalyzes something at MetaFilter, people tell them they are “bean-plating” which started with one user poking fun at another by saying “HI I’M ON METAFILTER AND I COULD OVERTHINK A PLATE OF BEANS.”

  MetaFilter users were known for being creative smarty-pantses, which was reinforced by a simple decision by Haughey to charge users $5 to participate for life. It’s a modest fee, but according to Haughey it worked wonders in keeping out trolls and casual passersby who would contribute nothing of value to the conversation.

  Haughey is fascinated by 4chan, especially how it produces interesting memes “from a place of total fuck-off anonymity.” Like most online communities, MetaFilter asks its users to post under usernames, but Matt recognizes the value in namelessness.

  I do appreciate moot’s point about how anonymity lets you be ok with failing, while a username feels more like “everything is on your permanent record” and people might be afraid to ever try something. I’m a big fan of failure and I think everyone should be terrible at everything they love for the first year or so they do it. I guess I’d rather see a world where everyone has a username and a permanent record and we all have these embarrassing beginnings where we openly failed again and again before we started to figure things out.

  Slashdot and Metafilter were the first big content aggregators, and their elegant feature sets have had a massive impact on the way all media now behaves on the web. Long before Digg and Reddit came along, Slashdot and MetaFilter provided users with a way to define what their news would look like. This democratization of the media has influenced not only the way news is consumed, but how it is formed, framed, and distributed.

  But what about all the news for nerds that doesn’t matter? What if it’s not news, but . . . something else?

  “It’s Not News. It’s Fark”

  In 1999, Drew Curtis unleashed Fark (a purposefully misspelled euphemism for a word you can probably guess), an offbeat news aggregator that would become a meme creation powerhouse. The formula was simple: Fark’s community submitted articles to the site’s admins, who then green-lighted the best ones for inclusion in the site’s news feed. Each news story had an accompanying discussion thread that allowed the users to engage in witty banter on very specific, immediate topics.

  Before Fark, Curtis often read news stories on the web and emailed the best ones to his friends, which he found to be a cumbersome way to share and discuss information. So he created Fark, allowing millions to share what essentially amounted to a giant global “News of the Weird” section.

  Curtis was attending college in Iowa but living in Kentucky during the early ’90s. A friend advised him to check out email, a cheap way to circumvent expensive phone calls to campus. So he got an account and started using email to correspond with his contacts in the Midwest. He remembers a conversation with some friends:

  I asked, “What is the Internet good for other than chat and text games?” They couldn’t think of anything. Even porn wasn’t doing all that great. Conventional wisdom was free porn sites had no chance of working because the minute people found out about them they crashed under the traffic.

  Because every news story provided a comment thread full of geeks trying to outwit each other, Fark was an early breeding ground for Internet memes. The comment fields allowed for images, so clever Photoshops and wordplay abounded. One early meme was “Still no cure for cancer,” which would append stories dealing with scientific advances in obscure, seemingly useless fields of interest.

  Curtis remembers when he first became acquainted with the term meme, recalling the development of Memepool in 1999 and rattling off some older memes that dried up long ago, such as Troops and I Kiss You. “It’s how I know I’m old,” he says. One meme that sticks out most in Drew’s mind is the legendary All Your Base Are Belong to Us, a garbled bit of Engrish (i.e., badly translated Japanese often found in video games) spoken by a villain from an old coin-operated arcade game called Zero Wing. The phrase took off on Something Awful and was further popularized by Fark. It eventually became a popular taunt in online gaming, a way to tell your opponent that they’d just been pwned. (This was another goof from video game land: in the frenetic pace of online play, people wishing to taunt their opponents with “hahaha owned,” as in “You’ve been owned,” easily made the mistake of typing pwned instead, as the p and o keys are adjacent on most keyboards.) Today there are thousands of photoshopped All Your Base images, and even T-shirts. It was one of the first image memes to be endlessly remixed.

  Curtis claims that this insular Internet culture went mainstream around the advent of the big social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, which brought so many people online and made it easy for average joes to share content.

  One thing I find interesting is that there isn’t another Fark. There’s stuff that kind of looks like Fark but nothing really exactly like it . . . Right now I’m pushing the fact that the entire social Internet is set up to give you what it thinks you want—Fark gives you what you don’t know you want. It’s about the only place out there which intentionally isn’t putting you into an echo chamber of like-minded sheep.

  Curtis says that the social aspect of the site wasn’t really his goal from the beginning. He just wanted a place to share funny, interesting links with friends, not much different than lots of link aggregation sites of the day. He had a “Submit a Link” option on Fark from day one, but after a year it became obvious that the site’s future was in user submissions, so he made it a more prominent and integral feature.

  It became apparent that people were submitting material faster than I could find it manually. So I switched to selecting from the submission queue as opposed to searching the broader Internet. Wasn’t really a plan so much as I’m just lazy.

  Curtis eventually discovered that the crowd’s ability to provide the best bits of information vastly outpaced his own ability to curate content. This rest of the media caught up to his discovery in the Web 2.0 revolution that occurred several years later.

  It wasn’t just the unique features of his site that made it a success; it was the changing infrastructure of the web as a whole. Blog softwar
e was becoming popular and increasingly approachable, even for tech noobs. It enabled unpaid, amateur writers and commentators to compete with mainstream news sites, and aggregators like Fark, Slashdot, and Metafilter gave them equal standing in terms of traffic. It wasn’t who you were, it was what you were saying.

  Curtis doesn’t have a lot of nostalgia for the good old days (“Things were clunky and didn’t work all that great”). But things are always changing:

  Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the VC [venture capital] dollars seem to scramble around based on the rules of web statistics. Look at all the money that poured into content farms [Demand Media, Associated Content], and now Google changed the rules and made them more or less moot (for now).

  Curtis defines two major changes in the web since he started out: Tons more people, and the presence of a generation of folks who grew up online. Today, people are much more well-equipped to share the things they like, and companies are being forced to come to terms with the reality that their content has to be good, and that there is no secret formula for creating a viral sensation.

  Fark was the first of the big content aggregators with a focus on the sort of offbeat stuff that people eventually recognized as being “from the Internet”—in other words, Internet memes. One popular Fark meme was a Photoshopped image of a kitten frolicking in a field, being chased by two Domos (a creepy Japanese TV mascot that looks like a brown rectangle with sharp teeth and beady eyes). The caption reads, “Every time you masturbate, god kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.” Farkers didn’t invent the phrase, which dates back to a 1996 student newspaper, but the goofy image coupled with the amusingly sacrilegious phrase went viral.

  Another was the infamous UFIA, or Unsolicited Finger in Anus, which derives from a news story posted to Fark about a high school football player who poked a teammate’s butthole in a bit of jocular fun. The other kid didn’t think it was so funny and pressed charges, prompting a judge to eventually declare that an “unsolicited finger in anus is crude, not criminal.”

  Farkers gleefully beat this catchphrase to death, culminating in Drew Curtis’s purchase of the naming rights to Boston’s Fleet Center for a day, hoping to rename it the Fark.com UFIA Center. The Fleet Center caught wind of the prank and opted to not use the name. However, a Farker was able to convince the Tennessee Department of Transportation to put up an “Adopt a Highway” sign that read “Drew Curtis TotalFark UFIA,” which he explained stood for Uniting Friends in America. The sign lasted a few days.

  “The Internet Makes You Stupid”:

  Something Awful

  I discovered Something Awful, a wonderland of bizarre online culture, almost immediately after getting online in the late ’90s. Its community of “goons” thrived, providing perhaps the most direct Western antecedent to 4chan, which was eventually spawned from its anime forum. Launched in 1999, the site charged a one-time $9.95 fee for forum access, which thousands willingly paid to be a part of the strangest community on the web.

  Something Awful was a repository for lowbrow humor, with condescending editorial commentary tacked on. Founded in 1999 by Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, the site featured daily essays about everything on the web perceived as awful, with a focus on nerd stuff like video games, anime, and script kiddie culture (script kiddies, or skriddies, are teenagers who’ve learned a few basic hacking techniques and think they’re capable of bringing down the Pentagon. Rather than hacking manually and writing their own code, they use prefab scripts with little understanding of what they’re doing). A trademark feature was the site’s “Awful Link of the Day,” which shined a spotlight on some hilariously dumb corner of the web. It might be a website fetishizing girls sucking on ice cubes or some guy’s exhaustively researched argument about how the biblical hell is geographically located within the earth’s molten core.

  Other features on Something Awful include “Photoshop Phriday,” a weekly image gallery that lampoons any old thing using image editing tools. 4chan users have turned this practice into something approaching an Olympic sport. “Your Band Sucks,” a recurring column, offers hilariously provocative essays taking down highly regarded bands. The “Weekend Web” gathers quotes from weird message boards devoted to topics like urine consumption as a spiritual exercise, white supremacy, or support groups for those with self-diagnosed Asperger’s.

  If there was something awful on the web, the guys at Something Awful eventually found it and skewered it with unparalleled wit. But beyond the collation and parody, Something Awful’s vibrant community eventually began to form a unique creative culture of its own, which included a collection of powerful memes. Perhaps more than any web community before it, Something Awful harnessed the power of its community’s creative abilities. With a bit of editorial direction, Something Awful managed to skim the cream from the top of its goon community, creating grade-A comedic content for web geeks.

  Longtime contributor David Thorpe describes the site’s unique appeal.

  I think a fair number of people who wound up fascinated by weird Internet fringe stuff came from Stile Project. Something Awful was on the rise right around the time Stile Project was on the decline, and the two sites had a few crossovers once in a while. Something Awful was much more appealing because it was funnier and way less sleazy. Rich Kyanka, the guy who started it, was making fun of the Internet from the perspective of a legitimately funny and fairly normal dude, whereas Stile presented himself as the kind of C.H.U.D. [Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, named after a cult classic b-horror flick] who was only one step above the people he was making fun of.

  Thorpe joined the Something Awful forums in 2001 and hung around for a while, simply because it was a community of fun people that he could joke with. Zack Parsons, the closest thing Something Awful has to an editor-in-chief, eventually offered him a gig writing for the site.

  I asked Thorpe if he thought it was weird how mainstream meme culture has gotten. When he started at Something Awful, a lot of the jokes and slang that are now featured on MTV were solely the realm of these hellaciously witty geeks on obscure Internet forums.

  I always sort of figured it would happen. The fact that people are making tons of money on it now is kind of depressing, partially because the stuff that’s making money is a lot of the dumbest stuff, the worst of “Internet humor,” like the lolcat shit. Another reason it’s depressing is because I’m not one of the people making money off it.

  Thorpe points to the creation of image macros, which used to be popular on Something Awful but have since died out due to their mainstream popularity. These are basically images with text plastered on top; lolcats are the most popular example. They were called macros because it used to be possible to post popular ones by typing a code in the post that would automatically generate the image. This is loosely based on the computer science concept of macros by which input sequences are linked to output sequences. In this case, code in, funny photo out.

  Eventually, they developed into what a lot of people would call memes, like all the lolcat stuff. A good example of SA’s influence on that development was that my friend Jon, another writer for Something Awful, made this picture of Spider Man looking confused, with the caption “How do I shot web?” That was one of the first examples of the kind of broken language thing that slowly evolved into the lolcat phenomenon. Jon is pretty ashamed to have indirectly influenced the development of something so idiotic.

  How Do I Shot Web is a massively popular meme, with thousands of iterations. It might be idiotic, but it’s a tangible part of web culture that makes up the memescape. The non sequiturs and obsession with human eccentricity were two powerful themes that defined Something Awful, and later 4chan and Internet pop culture as a whole.

  The Birth of the Chans:

  Ayashii World, Amezou, and 2channel

  Meanwhile, an enterprising Japanese slacker named Hiroyuki Nishimura developed a message board in 1999 called 2channel, a text-only anonymous forum that would e
ventually become a popular place for emotionally repressed Japanese to vent. But what made 2channel special was its almost complete lack of rules and anonymity.

  2channel was based on a previous text board called Ayashii World, the first big anonymous text board in Japan. It was an outgrowth of Japanese Usenet culture, created by Shiba Masayuki in 1996. Because it was an extension of Usenet, its subject matter was deeply nerdy, focusing on hacking, pirating, porn, and other black market information. Ayashii World, like 4chan, was unique for two reasons: anonymous posting and meme creation. Ayashii World even had an equivalent to /b/, called the “scum board,” which was used exclusively to plan raids (attacks on other sites through hacking, spamming, or other destructive means).

  The first image board meme, Giko-neko, was created here. It was represented in ASCII art, a form of illustration using text characters, as a cat, usually saying itte yoshi (Japanese for fuck off). Because the cat could be easily copy-pasted elsewhere, with new captions, it was easy for other users to make Giko-neko their own.

  Ayashii World, like many anonymous chan boards, experienced so much downtime that its owner began to receive death threats, prompting him to shut down the board in 1998. When Ayashii World was shut down, many of its users created their own textboards in an effort to create a new home for nanashi, Japanese for anonymous.

  The anonymous creator of one of the splinter boards, Amezou World, added a new style of discussion threading called floating threads, which displayed discussions in one chronological stream rather than in branching conversations. Secondly, he integrated bumping.