Creepy Wikipedia

Dude was very bitter and had the unwarranted ego of a 90s tech bro who constantly failed upward

He basically succeed because of timing. His humor was bad like a lot of late 90s internet shit. People will sometimes defend it but it’s still there to read, Jeffrey didn’t take the front page down when he bought the site. And the other shit from that era too, Maddox, penny arcade, realultimatepower, etc

It’s just such shit. Like I don’t think that being crass or offensive inherently means you are unfunny but that was the era of white dudes being like “crass offensive thing hurr durr act like im angry beef jerky ha” or just lol random non sequitur then a curse word or slur. It’s humor for a cod lobby

Like read any of these:

https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01/

https://www.somethingawful.com/feature-articles/ask-jeff-learn/1/

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=litter

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/02/requiemaa-strip

ugh. This shit was all gold in 1998-1999. The internet was a cesspool. I mean it still is, but it was too

The frontpage was always shit, he was a bad writer, he knew it. The only reason he had any success was because success on the internet in 1998 was to appeal to lowest common denominator tech dorks, write semi coherently, know basic html, and update on a semi regular basis. That was enough to get him a decent number of readers but never enough to earn a living.

What earned him a living was making the precursor to social media, basically, and this was mainly timing. And frankly he didn’t even do this. There were plenty of other general interest forums. People talk about the “quality” of somethingawful and I will admit it was a good forum, I spent a lot of time there, but the history that has been whitewashed is that they had forums for piracy from like 2002-2005 or so. They were serious too, they adopted BitTorrent almost immediately, they had private ftp top sites for mp3s, they had dc++ hubs for general shit and a separate one for anime. Those file forums were only visible if you paid to register and there were thousands of accounts that clearly only registered for that purpose. He deleted those forums “for the good of the community because those users were shitting up the place” but realistically it’s because by 2005ish the heat on torrenting was getting huge and he didn’t want to deal with it

Fun fact: the dc++ for anime (from adtrw) was called raspberry heaven, after the ed for azumanga daioh. It was in the chat for that server that moot, shii, nem, and some others eventually created 4chan. This is probably why 4chan’s futaba has some style cues from SA to this day, like (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) in red. It used to have more references but they’ve been patched out over the years I think, I don’t really go on 4chan anymore. Probably also why 4chan culture is so heavy on image macros. I got a lot of my anime from that server back then and it’s where I started to learn Japanese

His bitterness led to him banning all those users btw when 4chan was clearly more successful than SA a couple of years later (like 2005ish). And a couple of years before he died he did an interview where he was so salty about shit “from the forums” that blew up like 4chan, slenderman, dril, etc and said something to the effect of wanting a piece of each. He would absolutely be the scumbag boss who demands 40% of your startup because you had the gall to start a company while working for him even though he contributed absolutely nothing