Suck.com It To Me

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.

Comments

[rob]

Ah
yes
suck
.com
the
only
website
with
more
margin
than
text.

[Kevin]

What is Chris Bray (i.e. Ambrose Beers) doing these days? Is he writing anything?

[independent worm]

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.

[mediageek]

Dude, Nick, Tim and the others are just remembering the good old times, much like your senile grandmother.

Stop harshing on their buzz!

[Ryan O.]

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.

[isildur]

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.

[Douglas Fletcher]

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.

[mudfoot]

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.

[Carl]

Man, I remember wasting time reading Suck at my first job.

And now, I'm wasting time reading Reason at this one.

?

[SP]

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.

[NoStar]

I thoroughly enjoyed that history, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL. You kept me at work an hour past quitting time.

Suck did not.

[Stevo Darkly]

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.)

[kevrob]

Have a look at Suck For Dimwits.

Kevin

[Anon]

"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

[Stevo Darkly]

It took me two days, but I read both linked articles. Good ones.

[Eric the .5b]

I'll just be slightly, vaguely embarassed that I came across Suck once in 1996, scowled at the look, and surfed on...

[Stevo Darkly]

I love Terry Colon's cartoons, actually. There's something about them.