I also switched to MusicBee. It has a very modern UI that "just works" as they say. Everything included out of the box no need to bother with plugins for me.
I was really sick of where I was living, I quit my job, drove across the country. Took one week off to relax, unpack, etc. Put up my resume on the usual sites and started getting calls 9 am the next day. Had a job in a week.
I think they would, but mostly just because of selection effects. There aren't so many minorities in rural areas, and the ones that end up there probably had better-than-usual reasons to end up in rural parts.
I've lived in rural areas and they would say that when you get called "the good colored folk" by the white people in the area that there's a reason for that "good" description and it's not because they believe in racial equality.
it's difficult to imagine parts of the world being different than the part of the world you live in and/or the depiction of the world portrayed by the media.
Spoiler alert: I have done this and they disagree with you.
Look, everything is contextual -- your rural area may be superior in some respects to the ones I've been to. But you also shouldn't assume that your experience is universal.
Edited to add: if you haven't been to a big city in a while, you should take a trip. They're not generally the hellholes you've been led to believe by right-wing news media.
In my experience rural Americans tend to live in abject terror of just how fine they would feel were they treated as they treat minorities and it is compounded by a deep down understanding they are already the minority, it just has not arrived there yet.
I wish I could alleviate their fear. Given the opportunity, people are people, good & bad do not stratify in any meaningful way along the arbitrary lines that get drawn.
I used to live in rural America. I don't any more. There are reasons for that.
Cities usually kill people by ignoring them until they die. Exceptions are so rare that they become the stuff of history books.
The big upside of cities is that nobody cares enough about you to actually hate you. If you're running away from something, that can be pretty inviting.
Yup. Unmoderated forums are a sanctuary and a blessing. I would never have one - I would run a very offensive forum, but not one that annoyed me in any way or else I would brutally censor and crush it.
I honestly think the reason SA was so successful (other than the buy-in) is that the the only criterion for censorship was that you were annoying. That's an arbitrary and unfair criterion, though, so you had better be funny or interesting. It's certainly whatever the opposite of a free-speech zone is.
Art Bell was amazing in the late 1990s........then I think his son being sexually assaulted messed him up because was all downhill after that. He would constantly flake out and always had an excuse. He finally got a new show, then claimed people were shooting guns outside of his house so he had to cancel his show. Always some kind of drama with him for the last 15 years of his life.
I'm old so I remember when SomethingAwful was like 4chan and reddit combined for its time. I never actually registered an account on the forums, I was busy on other sites. My biggest issue with the SA forums is how they abused their users("Goons").
Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I think the last thing SA contributed to internet culture was Slenderman.
> Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
IMHO, that's one of the best features of the forums. I first joined in 2003, didn't read the rules, posted garbage, and got banned. I ended up making a new account avoid having the embarrassment of being banned. Later on they ended up loosing the rules a bit and came out with probations.
Also, that $10 went towards the costs of running the website/forums. When SA came out there was no AWS, they had to lease cabinet space in a colo facility and buy real servers. The website/forums was actually down for while when Hurricane Katrina hit, (their colo was in downtown New Orleans at the time).
> Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
Flip side, the paid account system means that banned trolls coming back under a different username doesn't happen nearly as often as it would on other platforms. It still does for sure, there are a couple of people who apparently have no problem throwing cash at the forums to be able to post their nonsense, but it's not really a big thing. The vast majority of users pay their 10 bucks once, maybe buy a few upgrades, and then never pay a cent more.
I've been on the forums since the early 2000s and have honestly never seen frivolous bans as a thing. 6 hour probations are sometimes thrown around like candy, but they're mostly meaningless unless you do something stupid in response.
In the end, the ban list is public so the system has a lot of transparency. If you know what your friend's username was you can see the exact post that earned it, as well as their history of infractions, and what mods/admins were involved. https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
> I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.
>I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.
Keep in mind I am talking about something that happened back in 2003. I long ago lost touch with this person. He was SA's biggest cheerleader and he couldn't believe I didn't have an SA forums account since I am a huge computer nerd that spent countless hours on multiple forums in those days and SA was the "place to be" back then.
He actually did show me a screenshot of the post that got him banned and I couldn't believe he got banned over that. No profanity, calling people names, nothing that got you banned from most forums. He was just calmly explaining why he thought a movie he had just seen that day wasn't very good in his opinion. He did register another account since his whole online life was based on SA at the time. By the time I thought about maybe registering an SA account it was already on the way out as being the center of internet culture.
One thing I could never figure out back in the day was SA's burning hatred of FARK.com. I used to go there just to skim the news and check out the comments. Apparently admitting liking FARK on SA was a big no no and would get you relentlessly mocked.
Again this is all ancient 15+ year old drama at this point.
I've been a forums member since 2006. The SA forums are my home on the Internet. It's definitely had its ups-and-downs, as you describe. But the forums have taken me through all of my major hobbies and interests, from video games and Internet culture, to cars, to music, to guitar. I've even made real-life friendships there. I think over the past few years, and especially since the ownership transition last year, the forums have been in a bit of a golden age. Even if you've been turned off by historical decisions, I'd really strongly suggest joining and tuning in to some of the subforums that are related to your interests. It's a really great set of communities, and overall is actually a really welcoming and progressive community, especially compared to the lowest-common-denominator free-for-all that current ad-based social media promotes.
I might check it out since it is under new ownership. The era of SA I knew of was 1999-2003. I haven't thought very much about SA in a long time. I started using 4chan in like 2008 and didn't even know it was made by a former SA user till I bothered to look into the history of 4chan.
> One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion.
One of the best things about the moderation culture at SA was that they came down hard on facile, thoughtless half-posts like the one you describe. It tended to result in vibrant threads full of people who actually had something to say.
Since banning ended up being a big part of their revenue model, I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account. That would have avoided the chaos of losing users that had reputation while still kind of working for their odd moderation and revenue system. They could have also, of course, just made the $10 an annual thing and solved it that way too, but that just seems clinical to the madness that made the forum entertaining, and the banning kind of played into the humor.
I'll out here that my work is very strongly influenced by Something Awful and I had an account there a very long time ago. I was banned by Zack Parsons for I don't even remember what post (nothing any reasonable person would think deserved a ban), and that was the end of my participation in the SA forums, I didn't want to have to re-build an identity from scratch there and I decided to move on, for better or worse.
That was the way normal bans worked. Pay :tenbux: and get your account reactivated. Permabans, which generally required really toxic* behavior were "we never want to see you on this site again." and you weren't supposed to re-register an account at all.
*Over the years Rich was running the site it seemed like "criticism of the mods" more frequently became a perma-bannable offense.
> I think an interesting approach they could have took was to allow you to re-instate your existing account if you were banned for $10, instead of having to register a completely new account
When I got online in 1996-1997 there was some website that played with font sizing and graphics to make the biggest Fuck on the internet. Like it would take a couple minutes to scroll on an old 640x480 monitor. Good times lol.
