Something Awful/YMMV

• Animation Age Ghetto/All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: Something Awful is known for flaming and probating (sometimes banning) whoever likes anime if someone brings it up outside the anime subforum (mostly due to its reputation of lolicon and an incident in the anime subforum where a bunch of lolicons were banned). Before Zorak (the current mod for the anime subforum) came by and cleaned it up, even so much as having an anime avatar or having a post in ADTRW would get you banned on sight in certain subboards, if not flamed clear off the thread, and people still refuse to touch anime/ADTRW to this day. Zorak and the mods tend to ban people who won't shut up about espousing this mindset, though.
• Broken Base: Either you adore their Tongue-in-cheek Accentuate the Negative attitude and oftentimes bombastic acts of trolling, or you hate them for those very same reasons. That is all.
  • Something Awful is full of this itself. If there's a subforum, it will be hated, especially FYAD and its ilk. You're very likely to have at least one person flaming you if you've got the dreaded forums cancer, the sign that you're an FYAD regular. Even more so amongst mods - you either think they're jackbooted shits who ban for giggles, or the only sane men (and women) banning retards and shitposters.
• Fan Hater: Many goons (usually those on PYF) absolutely despise TV Tropes and Reddit, the former for focusing on anime and video games rather than analysis of important artistic work (like revolutionary films and classic literature), how certain members acted on the forums, and the now-defunct Troper Tales, and the latter for an active base of pedophiles, extremely loud libertarians, and the Atheist sub-board. There are two active threads dedicated to mocking both, the TVT one in particular containing some former tropers or still-active ones.
  • SA was infamous for starting the Furry Fandom hatred a long time ago.
  • My Little Pony's been added to the list of things goons hate, enforced by the mods (who hate the show). Talking about it in any function will most likely require another ten bucks. Some fans have fought back by forcing MLP avatars on hapless victims.
  • PYF in general (and Debate and Discussion to a lesser extent) usually hosts threads mocking other sites.
  • Most tropers seem to think that they have a point, and try to improve accordingly. Redditors, on the other hand... have we mentioned the child porn subreddits or r/atheism yet?
  • Ex-goons (and some that are still active) known as the Something Awful Sycophant Squad used to mock goons with the same amount of gusto and sarcasm goons used on other sites. They still live on, albeit as "The New Effort".
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Applied on a community-wide scale. They donate to charities, love their pets, and contribute to society as a whole in other ways besides mocking people who may or may not deserve it.
  • On a bigger sense of the scale, certain forums are very welcoming and full of people who'd you least expect to be goons, and tend to be the least likely to act anything like a regular goon.
• Memetic Mutation: Do you have stairs in your house?
  • I am protected.
  • It's (x)/you. You're the terrible (x)/poster.
  • DOOMHOUSE
  • So that's where my 10 bucks went/anything related to ten bucks in general.
  • SA started the 'sperg' pejorative craze after making fun of one too many self-diagnosed Aspergers 'victims'.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Pet Island.
  • Goons donating thousands to charities (Katrina, the Australian wildfires, Haiti, Chile...).
• So Cool Its Awesome: The forums; total fuckwads get bitched at, shunned and moderated away, making SA's discussion forums among the best forums on the entire Internet for their topics (Games, SHSC, Automotive Insanity, BSS, and ADTRW being the most recognized examples). The forum also attracts more than a few older posters, meaning you can hear some great stories from Goons who were in the military, prison, law enforcement, law school, teaching positions, etc. A bunch of kickass projects have started from the bowels of the subforums and advice is always legit.
• Snark Bait: If you're the target of their ire! Stuff covered under Fan Hater (bronies are slowly being added to the list), and SA singlehandedly started the hate for furries back when the internet was young and fresh, until someone managed to leak the fact that a few SA mods and posters were unironic posters on furry boards). Arguing against a majority of goons is a great way to waste ten dollars.
  • "Homegrown" (self-made porn of goons/goons' lovers), for obvious reasons.
  • PYF has a collection of horrifyingly bad art/porn/websites and really, really awkward photographs.
  • Then there's the Political Cartoons they find. Some of them seem to be written by escaped mental patients, to give you an idea.
• Tastes Like Diabetes: Lovedump.
• Too Dumb to Live: Mod sass.
  • Liking lolicon.
  • Having a shitty Let's Play.
  • Posting stupid threads. (Usually gets you autobanned.)
  • Using memes.
  • The user Ironic War Criminal. He was permabanned, but tried to make a new account (that was also permabanned under the rules) so many times (each one costing him $10 - and we're talking in the hundreds) that he was finally given another chance-and his new account (Pipe Dreamer) lasted less then seven months. By extension, everyone else in the thread he frequented - after it was made VERY CLEAR that responding to IWC for anything would get you autobanned. The banlist was clogged with "responding to IWC" bans.
  • Koos Group does the same thing, and occasionally the mods'll let him stay for about a month before banning him again.