SherlockFilter: What is this site for?

April 4, 2005 8:30 PM

Calling web sleuthes: what's the real deal with this site ["most embarassing moments: forum"]? It's just stupid... why does it exist?

I looked through a few of the threads there; they are universally stupid. It's obviously not a set of real forums: the first post to any thread is a lame 'hook' that reads like something a teenaged boy trying hard to not look conspicuous might write; subsequent posts are almost all from net users who stumbled across the site and thought the hook was dumb.

There is nothing resembling a community, which makes the entire operation moot!

Climb up a level, and it's a banner-ad page with a bunch of links to similarly dull themes, which in turn are banner-ad pages with links to a bunch of stories and photos.

I figure there must be a payoff to the site owner, other than banner-ad clickthru. Is it harvesting personal information, identifying trends in bad taste, google rankling, performing some unearthly and possibly micely experiment?

posted by five fresh fish to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I don't mean this in a snarky way, but why should the fact that it's stupid and pointless make its existence surprising? It's no stupider or more pointless than, say, most sitcoms. Someone probably thought it might have been a good idea, then abandoned it, but let it sit out there for people to stumble across.

Lotta garbage out there in Internetland.
posted by Dr. Wu at 9:33 PM on April 4, 2005

I dunno, I think it's legit. The whois records say the domain was registered in 2001, and the archive.org wayback machine has snapshots of the site going back to 2000. It's at least well entrenched. Seems like it's just a gimmicky message board with a proto-link farm type setup accompanied by banner ads. It reeks of pre-Google (or early Google) traffic-attracting web design, where you just post the word "sex" on your site as often as is possible and pray for hits.

As frightening as it sounds, the people on the forum seem real to me. I only glanced at the first page of maybe eight threads, but that's pretty indicative of the level of discourse you'll find on any random discussion forum. See Something Awful's Weekend Web feature for corroboration of this.
posted by mmcg at 9:34 PM on April 4, 2005

mmcg's right; javascript there links to this. It's a trafficho.
posted by trondant at 9:43 PM on April 4, 2005

The posts look real to me, too.

Y'know how stupid the average net user is? Half of 'em are even stupider than that.
posted by squidlarkin at 11:18 PM on April 4, 2005

I used to read this site, and I seem to remember it having various anecdotes of varying quality (not great literature, but a fun time waster). But... ye gods... it's just incoherent now.
posted by tomble at 4:52 AM on April 5, 2005

Trondant, what's a "trafficho"? It doesn't Google well.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:52 AM on April 5, 2005

maybe "traffic ho."
posted by edlundart at 12:24 PM on April 5, 2005