Here’s why the front page at Something Awful depresses me. Wait - am I safe to assume that every single person reading this is familiar with that site? They and
Penny Arcade are the tentpoles of the early 2000’s pre-blog internet, sites born in some kids’ spare time that have become actual, profitable corporations (SA charges $10 to join their forums, and the last time I checked they had 90,000 members. Do the math).

Anyway, back to Something Awful’s front page. A front page so professional and clean and functional that it reminds many fans of AOL’s:

It’s like all at once the SA crew woke up and realized they had to stop acting like drunken college kids making fun of movies, and start acting like the thriving, efficient manufacturer of online content they are. Time to grow up, in other words. And that’s what bummed me out, because it brought to mind something somebody said in the forums about the death of the “old-world” internet.There was a time when if you wanted a biography on Redd Foxx, you had to sift through a dozen horrible GeoCities fan sites, run by crazy people who updated every six months and then only to add another row of flashing animated gifs. Now, you go to Wikipedia. A teenager’s online diary didn’t come in a neat Blogger template, every word archived in a database; it came with huge neon green text over a black background with a MIDI playing over it.

I don’t know. It’s like seeing all my friends get married and have babies and get nice jobs, and I’m still living in Mom and Dad’s basement. The internet’s growing up around me. I feel like I should… do something.

Here’s the Top 100 most popular Wikipedia topics. Oh, sure, you’ve got the expected porn searches, the teenagers nervously searching for info on “masturbation” and insecure males trying to find out what’s a normal penis size. No, it doesn’t get depressing until you starting seeing that various “Naruto” searches hold an incredible nine spots. That’s almost as many as all of the sex-related topics combined and, on average, are ranked higher.

I had to look up “Naruto” just to find out what it was. Guess where I went.

Thanks to Plustax in the forums for brining that to my attention.

THIS has nearly a million hits on YouTube, in two weeks.