While sites like Know Your Meme have since popped up and given web users a source for internet meme history and general information, Encyclopedia Dramatica’s brash, offensive and not entirely accurate style of meme-cataloging is no more forever , says primary contributor Sherrod DeGrippo.
ED was not necessarily an unbiased or even readable source of information, but it also distilled the culture surrounding memes and internet humor in all its unapologetic, hateful, dramatic, anti-everything glory. (As it was near impossible to single out the site as being offensive to a single group, as it made horrific fun of everyone from gay people, black people, old people, emo people, Jewish people and fat people equally- it still was the target of some banhammers , big government ones, too.)
The site that formerly cataloged the wealth of drama and attention whores on the internet now redirects to a sanitized, entirely different site called OhInternet. DeGrippo cites an impetus to move away from the racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and offensive graphic pornography that defined the old site:
DeGrippo says that the biggest difference between OhInternet and Dramatica is that the new site has moved towards “a more toned down content style and a streamlined design: Shock for shock’s sake is old at this point and we’re looking forward to the future and how things are evolving … when you put user experience first, the language becomes highly important and that’s what we’ve done.”
ED’s fanbase doesn’t seem to be easily converting to the newer, friendlier version of ED, and Geekosystem reports that OhInternet’s Facebook page was littered with offensive, pornographic comments in response to the new site. Will you be sad to see the horribly offensive site go, or did you have secret lulz when browsing its salacious pages?
