Good Night Sweet Prince
So I have a morning ritual. I get up, make coffee, get my iPad (yeah shut up), and browse my favourite sites for updates. It’s normally around my second piece of toast that I get to site number four: Encyclopaedia Dramatica (ED). So imagine a half-eaten slice of heated bread falling to my kitchen floor in slow motion, when – instead of seeing the front-page of my favourite wiki – I am greeted by a new site called ‘Oh Internet!’.
As I fell to the floor gasping for breath, I started the normal routine of blame: “ED has been haxx0red”, “this must be a joke”, “/b/awwwww”. But as I investigated further, the truth became clear. This was and inside job! An intentional act of euthanasia by its creator.
For those not in the know, ED started back in 2004 as a wiki to catalogue memes, oddballs, and most importantly ‘lulz‘. Despite criticism from the Internet, it was actually a very well written clever piece of satire, that pushed the boundaries of …well…everything to the logical limits.
To find out what happened, I got in contact with ED’s architect of the lulz, Sherrod ‘girlvinyl’ DeGrippo:
What happened to ED? It seemed to be ticking along ok, why change it all?
I don’t think anyone would say that ED was ticking along ok. There were criticisms all over various messages boards, forums, etc. I take those seriously and it is shocking to me that anyone would say ED didn’t need a chance. The site hadn’t had an upgrade or redesign in literally 7 years. I wouldn’t run a laptop that had been up for 7 years with no upgrades, why would a website? We have implemented semantic mediawiki, streamlined the design, added lots of new hardware and gone to a much shorter domain name. Additionally, when we attempted a content overhaul previously, there was just too much to keep track of, so doing development and improvements with a core group of sysops is what we decided would make things easier.
So this new beast ‘Oh Internet‘ is very similar in its approach to ED. There are, however, some new rules. The most notable is the ‘Safe for work’ approach, why is this?
Because the sysops and I all have jobs that we want to browse from. There are lots of workplace filters that block sites which aren’t SFW and it is a real pain to get anything done or even check on uptime and status because of it. I tried checking some downtime from an apple store once and it really showed me how much impact that can have.
There has been some concern amongst the ED community that a SFW Oh Internet will be too tame, and lulz will not be able to grow, how do you answer these charges?
I think people should give the site a chance instead of being hysterical. It’s 99% the same moderator and sysop group as before. We’ve been doing this a very, very long time and we know what we’re doing. The people who truly know what they’re talking about will understand this.
Shoe on head!
AGREE!
We’ll have to wait and see what the future brings for Oh Internet!, but I remain optimistic. Like Sherrod says above, these guys have been doing this for a really long time now, and I’m sure they’ve thought the whole thing through. Time, as they say, will tell.
Ken Eakins
Encyclopedia Dramatica has not been taken down. It is on new Swiss servers at http://www.encyclopediadramatica.ch, where it is being reconstructed.
Oh cool. So we have a new SFW version, and the old version. Nice.
You are a traitorous Jewish faggot, Mr. Evers.
You will not succeed as planned. The DDoSing will destroy the crucial opening week, while the truth of the KYM-ripoffing will be given to the public.
We are Legion, after all.
Unfortunately, you forgot the last part:
Expect us.
Joseph Evers doesn’t exist does he?
The theory that jews are behind this has some credibility. The very first thing to be pulled before this latest orgy of censorship was the racist humor. The ED page on Jews was hilarious and totally insensitive to the precious “six milllllllion” lampshades that got fried.
If the jews took down ED they deserved the “holocaust” and a LULZOCAUST can’t be far behind.
Yeah he doesn’t exist. You should do you research noob.
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Joseph_Evers
so in other words, we lose more controversial content because a bunch of people cried poor? why don’t we all just move to china so we can’t access ANY good sites? FFS if you’re browsing this kind of stuff at work i’d really question how you still have a job in the first place. i can’t see that looking up lolcats will be perceived as a good use of anybody’s time. what a pointless thing to do – just like google’s attempt to quash BT. nice try, but no sale. so what if the site hadn’t been upgraded? why change perfection? SA hasn’t been upgraded in about that amount of time if not longer and it’s still as good as ever – hell, maddox’s site hasn’t been upgraded in 10+ years and it’s stil fine. i’d like to say grow a pair, but really, if the creator of ED is crying about all of this insignificant crap then he doesn’t deserve ED anymore anyway.
son, i am disappoint.
what a shame, all the good times i had reading the real ED, neither OhInternet is any good nor the so-called swiss backup of ED. Bring back the real deal, if anyone has a backup. The pages on the jews/zionists/lolocaust were the best. I even enjoyed the fun poked on my countrymen Indians.