Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
Social news site
Reddit recently held their
"Best of Reddit 2010" awards honoring key players in the site over the last year, including the progenitor of
the Rally to Restore Sanity, the clever drive-by cartoonist
Sure_Ill_Draw_That, unofficial image host
Imgur, and feel-good story of the year
"Today you, tomorrow me." But perhaps most interesting was the winner for Best Big Community:
FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU! Originally inspired by 4chan's popular
Rage Guy meme, F7U12 (for short) is a clearinghouse for user-made web comics, slice-of-life affairs that
tell a story or
share a common frustration using
a small collection of crudely drawn yet highly evocative facial expressions. Several have become small memes in their own right -- the wily
Trolldad, the doormat
Okay, the prideful
Fuck Yea, the melodramatic
Gasp. And
one comic, inspired by the warped text randomly generated by
reCAPTCHAs (
previously), has given us
Lord Inglip --
god of
a dark religion now
rivaling FSM whose
cryptic commands marshal
loyal armies of
gropagas,
falcows,
Sellicks, and...
canary into exploits both
monstrous and
inconvenient (
timeline,
wiki). Obey him --
or else! More fun with F7U12:
rage face origins,
rage faces in real life,
Twitter feed,
search comics,
create your own (
alternate).
posted by Rhaomi
on Feb 8, 2011 -
168 comments
An anonymous hacking outfit called "Gnosis" has
infiltrated Gawker Media,
hijacking the front page and
leaking the company's internal chat logs, source code, and content databases along with the usernames, email addresses, and passwords of over 1.3 million users (including Gawker staff). The attack, which was motivated by
what the group describes as the "outright arrogance" with which the company's bloggers
taunted anonymous imageboard 4chan (semi-previously), affects every site in the Gawker network, including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Jalopnik, and io9. While most of the leaked passwords are encrypted, more than 200,000 of the simpler ones in the torrent file have been cracked, and the links between account names and email addresses are in plaintext for all to see. Since
the integrity of Gawker's encryption methods remains in doubt, it is recommended that anyone who has ever registered an account on any Gawker property change their passwords immediately, especially if the same log-in information is used for other services.
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 12, 2010 -
312 comments
We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth. The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infallible logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.
posted by aheckler
on Mar 29, 2009 -
51 comments
"He is responsible for the online lives of 5 million monthly ... visitors -- the hackers, slackers and potty-mouthed geeks. They come ... when they should be doing calc homework. Now -- in debt, out of work, another example of the Internet's intangibility -- [he] just needs to figure out how to make that matter."
The Washington Post
profiles Christopher Poole, founder of
4chan.
(Previously, minus the current economic realities)
posted by mkultra
on Feb 17, 2009 -
64 comments
Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.” The New York Times investigates the ever-evolving, LOL-corrupting, epileptic-seizuring, iPod-leaving-on-gravestone-ing phenomenon of major Internet trolling, featuring interviews with Jason Fortuny, Weev, and a gentleman named Christopher Poole (
prev).
[more inside]
posted by Sticherbeast
on Jul 31, 2008 -
91 comments
