For devotees of the late, lamented Suck, one Matt Sharkey has written a definitive history of the "first great website," chock-a-block full of quotes from Reasoners (and former Sucksters) Tim Cavanaugh, Brian Doherty, Peter Bagge, and yours truly. Read it here.
A few years back, the Village Voice detailed the "Suck-ification of Reason" here.
What is Chris Bray (i.e. Ambrose Beers) doing these days? Is he writing anything?
What's with all the suck.com stuff posted on here? I know there
are a few alums here who miss it, but... FFS, it's been gone for
years.
Is there some big demand among reason readers for three posts a
week about what became of suck.com or what suck.com had to say
about something in 1999? Christ, next thing you know they're going
to start finding prophecies in old suck columns and start up the
Church of Suck or something.
Dude, Nick, Tim and the others are just remembering the good old
times, much like your senile grandmother.
Stop harshing on their buzz!
Chris Bray contributes to a blog here. I just found it a few
days ago. He's apparently studying history.
Oh yeah, and he was
called up in from the Ready Reserves and is currently on his
way to Iraq.
Ahahaha. Suck/Hotwired must have gotten snapped up by Lycos just
as I was on my way out of Lycos. I could have told you then that
Lycos, at least, was going to eat dirt and start sloughing off all
its extracurricular content. Lycos would have gone under even if
the rest of the dotcom bubble hadn't.
I was working in development, on user account management and
database administration for the Personalized Lycos stuff, when
Lycos bought Tripod. And I remember being told we were going to
integrate all the Tripod user accounts with our own accounts. I can
remember thinking: 'We just bought this company for its accounts.
We bought this company because it has however many hundreds of
thousands of users. We have no interest in their actual
business.'
And I can remember getting the word from On High that our ads were
not getting enough clickthrough. We did a partner-promotion with
AT&T advertising some super-cheap long distance service. And we
made these goddamn ads, and these registration pages, where you
could hook your Lycos account up to this AT&T thing. We got
something like 2 percent clickthrough, and out of over 250,000
pageviews we got 7 signups. Seven. Not seven percent, not seven
thousand. And I remember thinking, 'Lycos is doomed. I'm glad I'm
saving most of every paycheck.'
Lycos was a shithole, and reading that Suck was bought by them was
the most tragic part of that article. Looking at what's left of the
picked-over corpse of lycos.com, I can only feel a sense of smug
satisfaction.
I think about 3/4 of the people I ever told about that site
never looked at it just because it was called Suck.
Maybe you should have called it Stroke or Diddle.
I seem to recall suck devoting a lot of CRT ink to dot-bomb
business culture like you experienced at Lycos.
In that respect, suck was like FuckedCompany for people who knew
how to read.
Man, I remember wasting time reading Suck at my first job.
And now, I'm wasting time reading Reason at this one.
�
I never really figured out whether or not Suck was worth reading, since the massively uninviting presentation -- the one referenced in the first comment above -- kept me at bay.
I thoroughly enjoyed that history, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL. You
kept me at work an hour past quitting time.
Suck did not.
I'm only about a third of the way through the article, but so
far I'm enjoying it.
(When I want to read long items from the WWW, I usually paste them
into Word, then print them off 7 pages at a time to read when I go
to the can. This one is almost too long to read in one day, unless
I eat more fiber.)
"Oh yeah, and he was called up in from the Ready Reserves and is
currently on his way to Iraq."
Fuck. Because what Suck said was true:
"In the course of his reporting, [Bray] became the only Suckster
other than Polly Esther for whom readers have demonstrated any
feeling other than homicidal contempt."
And now he's the third man I know to have been called up in the
last two weeks.
Fuck.
Anon
I'll just be slightly, vaguely embarassed that I came across Suck once in 1996, scowled at the look, and surfed on...
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
Site comments/questions:
Media Inquiries and Reprint Permissions:
(310) 367-6109
Editorial & Production Offices:
3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd.
Suite 400
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 391-2245