Unfunny Things
A collection of pretentious things from the web and elsewhere that are much less funny than they think they are.
Apr 19th, 2011 @ 5:03 pm
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Rest in peace.
I was never a real ED editor. I made about three articles and significantly contributed to another two. Besides that I just bitched at some of the Chris-chan obsessives and made a fuss when I noticed annoying articles featured on the front page.
But ED was something I cared about, perhaps for what it was once capable of being, more than what it came to represent: an archive of funny articles about internet drama. But now it is gone. The admins—sorry, “sysops”—killed it a few days ago. It now redirects to Oh Internet, a new, simplified wiki based on different software and a database of content that I think has something to do with the newly-defunct whatport80 (a prior attempt to re-build ED as a safe-for-work quasi-wiki.)
Wait, they killed ED?
Well, the wiki we knew as ED is no longer accessible. These guys have a text-only backup from February (loaded into MediaWiki here), and I assume at some point an ED admin will put up a final dump of the whole thing on The Pirate Bay for historical interest. But as it happened, the whole wiki was simply dropped, with no public warning, replaced with something totally new and quite unlike it. Millions of words and thousands of images, all substituted with a much smaller, safe-for-work, simplified meme database.
The reason that this is an Unfunny Thing is less to do with the sentimental feelings I have about 4chan jokes and more to do with a complex story about how fast-moving internet communities decay and become awful. The internet meme database business is perhaps the best example of this I’ve ever seen.
How things fell apart
ED began as something of an offshoot of 4chan and its associated communities, which in essence was an animu-focused group of communities formed off the back of Something Awful. I do not know what its original task was, specifically. But what it should have been was a chaotic wiki full of internet drama written in colloquial internet language. Instead, it awkwardly shifted between the very different purposes of internet drama catalogue, meme database, springboard for internet movements, and “rude” Uncyclopedia clone.
You can track most of this entropy with the word “lulz”. Most people find this word annoying, now, and for good reason. It has come to represent being a sociopathic idiot.
I know how it came to this. Apathy. From the admins and the ED community. The only rule that the admins kept to was that “more content is good content”. Write words, make it look effortful, and it’s a contribution. It became a part of ED culture.
I have two good stories about this. The first: my friend tried to replace an idiot’s self-indulgent self-written article with a shorter, funnier, more accurate one, and when an admin blindly reverted the change, he was suspended for daring to argue his point with an admin. The second: a non-admin user who went around deleting dumb Uncyclopedia-esque articles en masse, only to be told off and banned after all his changes were reverted. Not a single page he deleted had anything to do with internet culture, ED’s purported raison d’être.
This culture killed the site, and by the time it turned the wiki from mostly drama into mostly Internet Comedy Hour, the admins just gave up.
girlvinyl: ED fucking sucks and is a pox on the face of the internet.
girlvinyl: And as such I have pretty much 0 interest in dealing with it.
SuitCase: It still kind of frustrates me. I love the idea of ED and I think its best articles are fantastic. I also like the voice that evolved from it, the racism etc, I think it’s funny and has a kind of spirit to it all that makes it fun to support and identify with. The problem has been that there’s been no real direction or reinforcement of what the site is supposed to be about, and I think that’s really regrettable. Like, new users will come and fuck things up with articles that even if they were funny really shouldn’t be on ED, yet nobody breathes fire down their neck for being idiots, they’re either permitted or the rest of the community laughs at how they described a historical war leader as pwning noobs in a battle and it goes on and on.
girlvinyl: Yeah, it’s stupid and crappy.
SuitCase: Do you regret the way it is? […] From my perspective, the userbase has gone to shit and [the admins] are too permissive and have no vision for the wiki overall.
girlvinyl: Yeah, that is all pretty true
girlvinyl: I just don’t care about it
And what a waste it made of a busy community full of funny people eager to cut down terrible people.
“lulz. Common usage: doing something of abnormality online.”
In short, they stopped cataloguing what leads to “lulz”. Dumb kids got the definition wrong—see the headline—and nobody corrected them.
My best effort at encapsulating what “lulz” should have meant is pretty simple: “pleasure derived from provoking and/or observing unjustifiable internet rage”. It’s what ED was supposed to be about: trolling lame deviantART artists, documenting the nonsense that goes on in small web forums, occasionally posting flashy gifs on epileptic support forums. Amusing things, designed to teach dumb people lessons about how to lighten up.
But if you looked at its usage today, “lulz” is simply the newfag’s tough guy way of saying “lolz’. It doesn’t really define anything, but it tends to accompany all sorts of “bad behaviour”. Perhaps its dilution was unavoidable, as people came along and tried to impress people by being mean for the sake of being mean (no better exemplified than by the horrible mess of sad retributive nerdery that became the Chris-chan harassment community), but unlike in /b/ there was never much of a concerted resistance against those doing it wrong.
With no real conception of what ED was about to work by, it’s no wonder that ED users progressed from posting useful, interesting articles about internet drama to organising bullshit pop culture rallies against nonsense causes like Scientology.
Progress
And now we’re left with this.
“Oh Internet”. Where over nine thousand articles have been culled to a few hundred. A lot of which have interesting facts about internet drama llamas like Jared Lee Loughner. I don’t have much to say about this site that you couldn’t conclude for yourself, but it’s not hard to draw a comparison to Know Your Meme, the internet culture encyclopaedia your dad can use. (Or buy out.)
Great.
