Easily 9.9 out of 10 people won't get sardonicism. My contribution was the Evil of Pippi Longstocking site, which aimed to prove that Pippi Longstocking is the devil. (Anybody remember the '90s?)<p>The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.)<p>I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being misunderstood (ha!).<p>The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off, but nope.<p>Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org, thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol.com/rtvdave/pippi.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...</a>
Fun read. The article mentions:<p>> <i>“e/n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term “blog” had gained wider adoption)</i><p>Does 'e/n' stand for something? This 1999 post [0] calls it 'Everything and Nothing', but I can't find anything else on it, is that right? It says:<p>> <i>This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name.</i><p>EBG?<p>I remember unabbreviated 'weblog' that seems all but gone now, but I've never come across 'e/n site' before.<p>Also, spoiler alert: the domain in question now redirects to a new Github repo with the original site's source. [1]<p>[0] - <a href="http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority</a>
My favorite bit of trolling, from 2004, was the "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist, but this one was really funny..." Such a very clever bit of trolling.<p>A few bloggers (most of a feminist mindset) agreed to launch it together, and they linked to each other. Then several dozen other prominent bloggers joined in, linking to each other with text, which varied but basically stayed with the same theme: "Blonde jokes are sexist, so I don't usually promote them, but this one was really funny..."<p>So a person reading the first blog would click the link, and go to a second link where the text was again "I know, I know, I should not promote blonde jokes, they are sexist, but this one really made me laugh..." and you click again and again you read "This is the funniest blonde joke that I have ever read" and you click again and again you read "I hate blonde jokes, but this one made me laugh out loud..." and you click again...<p>How many times did you click, before you realized the joke was on you? The joke was pretty much a test of your social intelligence.<p>That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now.
Reminds me of the time when I was running a dating site (before dating sites were really a thing)<p>I released some untested code and wound up emailing every user with a huge email which was essentially a concatenation of every user's email content, personal information et al.<p>Much anger was unleashed.
Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good times :)<p>I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no concept of social networks back then, but IMO he's totally wrong. I mean, obviously there weren't any social networks as they exist today, but between the message board communities, and the massively interlinked personal e/n blogs ... there very much was a social network. And it was decentralized. For a short time, it was turning out to be a beautiful thing, especially once RSS started gaining popularity.<p>I understand why myspace and facebook took all of that marketshare; it wasn't easy enough for the average person to put up their own site, and by the time things like wordpress became popular, every instance was so generic looking (despite templates) that it was tough to get anyone reading your stuff. There was a glimmer of hope with things like google's RSS reader, and Google's social graph API (<a href="https://developers.google.com/social-graph/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/social-graph/</a>) ... the future could have been awesome, but alas
> my massively inflated sense of self-importance from all of the blog posts, links, phone calls, and emails that continued to pour in clouded my judgement<p>This is brilliant insight. I appreciate this site contributed to better understanding what a reality without trust would look like.
It was so easy to register weird domain names back then. Our contribution was satan.com. The guy who owned the domain name eventually sold it and it goes nowhere now. For a few years in the late 90's the entire site was just a badly drawn MS Paint image:<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.c...</a><p>Clicking on that was a mailto: link that sent mail to an internal mailing list that we had. Got some good laughs from it but we could never figure out what to do with it. The archives are still floating around somewhere...
The internet was nothing if not hyper free speech back then.<p>So ironic that this shows up now, during the internet's "let's scrub out the fake news" phase.
It was bittersweet to see Lester haines' name on that Register link. Lester passed away last summer -- he was an inspired writer and a jewel of the 21st century incarnation of The Register. The link must have been one of his early pieces and not up to his eventual standards.
<a href="http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html</a><p>"Should I be concerned about Dihydrogen Monoxide?"<p>classic
Wow..... Just went to the site he mentioned (rotten.com). I nearly threw up. I thought I had a decent stomach for stuff but that is fucked up. Sorry for the click bait sounding comment but I am disturbed after a few of the pics. I have no words.