Adequacy.org
From Free net encyclopedia
Adequacy.org was a satirical web site. It featured articles on politics, religion, technology, history, and sociology, as well as the "Linux zealot" cartoon series. The site shut down on September 11, 2002, but has since made its archives available.
Adequacy.org's slogan was "News for grown-ups", a play on the slogan of the popular Slashdot technology news site, "News for nerds. Stuff that matters.", as Adequacy's founding editors were regular trolls on Slashdot.
Background
The Adequacy authors began as trolls on Slashdot and Kuro5hin, another technology-oriented discussion site. They devised and posted many comments designed to provoke outraged responses; common styles included slighting a revered operating system or open source leader, or posting messages with simple but deliberate technical errors, which would incite hundreds of corrections.
After several years of such behaviour, the Adequacy authors decided to open their own site consisting entirely of such articles intended to incite the reader, where confederates would post comments agreeing with the articles. All comments posted by outsiders, openly stating their belief that an article was a troll, were removed from view.
Behind the scenes, the targets of the articles would be enticed to come to Adequacy and read the article. Adequacy members would post to weblogs, and other discussion forums, often pretending to be outraged by the article themselves. As an example, the article Not Just Harmless Fun[1], which argues that all anime is hentai and is designed to destroy Christian morals, was promoted on Usenet as such: "the author is some kind of Christian lunatic who believes that anime is all about paedophilia!"[2]. The person behind this Usenet posting was James "spiralx" Skinner, a.k.a. "Jon Erikson", the author of the article in question. He later stated, "I wrote the article to wind up anime-loving geeks."[3]
Adequacy style
Roger "localroger" Williams attempted a summary of Adequacy's general modus operandi in a mildly controversial Kuro5hin article, The Adequacy-Style Troll: A Brief Refresher[4]. Williams' article was composed in response to the article titled Pedal Error: A Brief Refresher[5], written by "RobotSlave", a former Adequacy editor. Williams argued that the articles on Adequacy used a common methodology; that they started with basic, factually correct premises, followed reasonable-sounding but carefully constructed flawed logic, and arrived at outrageous conclusions. The article takes the stance that trolling attempts to cause chaos or disorder and is thus critical of Adequacy (it claims Adequacy-style trolling "brings a blender to the ordinary practice of shit-stirring"). Williams claims that deadpan satire of the sort found on Adequacy is too easy to mistake for sincere argument.
Another popular device used in Adequacy articles was to hyperlink almost every word or phrase to another article on the Internet, related to the specific word or phrase linked, often humourously, but meaningless in the context of the article. For example, the sentence "we survived a hardy winter" might have the word "hardy" linked to an article on Laurel and Hardy. Adequacy would also occasionally hyperlink to itself using words like "controversy" or phrases such as "the world's most controversial web site".
Adequacy would often deliberately misspell the targets of its satire. For example, Linux was always written as "Lunix", which has connotations of "lunatics" (although this spelling was already widely used in humorous contexts elsewhere, notably by Jeff K.). Linus Torvalds was written as either "Linux Torvalds", "Lunix Torvaldez" or "Linyos Torovoltos", and claimed to be a native of various countries, most often Russia. There were also technological in-jokes such as the idea of "IP Tokens" which could be stolen by hackers and used for nefarious purposes if you didn't have the correct protection mechanisms. Interestingly, this predated genuine "your computer is broadcasting an IP address!" web adverts which try and scare people into buying firewalls.
Many respondents to Adequacy used the point by point rebuttal format for raising their objections. For a brief period, Adequacy responded to such comments by removing them from public view and replacing them with a "Deletion Notice", which contained only their consequently incoherent responses, together with a copyright violation notice, chastising the poster for reproducing the entirety of the contested article without the author's permission.[6] [7] [8] This was termed a "War on Copyright Violation"[9], perhaps as a satirical reference to the War on Drugs or War on Terrorism.