Prefacing the news with a disclaimer that it’s not a joke was necessary—faking his own death for laughs feels like the kind of thing Kyanka would have done. It typifies the gross and shocking humor associated with Something Awful.
Kyanka was a comedian and programmer who started the website Somethingawful.com in 1999. It began as a simple web forum and grew into a cultural phenomenon. To be on the internet in the 2000s was to swim in a sea of Something Awful’s influence. The image macro meme format, the creepy pasta story Slender Man, and Twitter’s dril all got their start on Something Awful. A lot of the basic grammar people use to communicate online originated in its forum posts.
But its influence was also terrible. Its members pioneered targeted harassment campaigns and formed communities that became too toxic even for Something Awful spun off into their own websites. 4chan began as an alternative image board after Lowtax banned hentai from the forum in 2003. Doxing forum Kiwi Farms got its start after leaving the Something Awful forums. If a lot of the basic language of the U.S. internet was influenced by the forums, so was the kind of affectless irony that starts with people pretending to be Nazis as a joke and ending up as actual Nazis.
Kyanka’s legacy is woven into the soul of the internet, for better and for worse. He hated the internet, the internet hated him back, and it's not clear anyone has learned anything from what he helped unleash.
“I'm obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be shitty back in 1999,” Kyanka told Motherboard in 2017. “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.”
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