The Outrage Olympics singlehandedly destroyed the GAF OT. Now it's just a hollow oneupsmanship to see who can be the most outraged at any given event. I'm just trying to think of when this started. 2010 maybe? It also wrecked a lot of sections of SA as well.
I think its the 'new generation' of online users is simply like this. They feel almost like they grew up 'sheltered' from the real world and how raw it is.
I have this theory:
My teenage formative years were all about hanging out with really fucked up guys on local bbs systems; bbs systems that dealt in the typical underground/hacking/phreaking stuff of that era (1993-1998); and people who were around that era can tell you that those kind of places had forums with a really raw, hard sense of humor, and it bred a certain type of attitude, a certain way of acting online. It was all about being hostile with each other, etc. With time, people who grew up in that era eventually moved on to the internet on irc at first, and eventually on the first late '90/ early 2000 waves of geek'ish forums like somethingawful, portal of evil, stileproject and so on. Even GAF was pretty raw back then, to a certain extend. Somethingawful was pure evil in its first years, and its no wonder it eventually spawned 4chan over time. Still; at the time, you had that certain style of humor that was really mean and hard floating around. I guess that with the years, those kind of posters reduced their online activities or moved on; and were later replaced by a softer, pink generation of internet users. This is why we have forums like SomethingAwful turning into absolute junk; people now the hard shelled posters have moved on and now its all pussies who never grew up with the oldschool hostilities who get offended at everything.
