The Awl, 2009-2018

https://www.theawl.com/2018/01/okay-go-be-as-stupid-as-you-want/

by mountainplus • 8 years ago

87 16 8 years ago

RIP

A fantastic website that rekindled the spirit of my early web experience reading Suck, et. al. It published an uncanny number of unpublished writers that would create ballyhooed careers. More importantly, they, uniquely, published numerous people that would write one fantastic piece and didn’t chase a writing career (leaving everything out on the proverbial field).

lazyjones• 8 years ago

Perhaps you could have cut some running costs by not using images with 12MB (displayed as 461x151 px) on the main page?

ghostcluster2• 8 years ago

It had a good period of influence with some cool stories and writers, but I honestly hadn't come across a story from The Awl organically since around 2015.

dmart• 8 years ago

I personally stopped reading when they switched from Wordpress to Medium - found out recently that they switched back after a year, but it was too late at that point.

ghostcluster2• 8 years ago

Similarly, I abandoned The Onion and AV Club when they were acquired by Univision and moved to "Kinja".

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They killed their community and turned all their content to sludge.

kmfrk• 8 years ago

I really loved how The Hairpin, Awl, and Toast brought back the bloggy atmosphere other sites and publications abandoned.

Hopefully we'll still love to see quirky CMSes that hark back to the good old days of Blogspot, Typepad, and LiveJournal.

dsr_• 8 years ago

It's not the CMS. It's not the layout. It's the writing, first, last, and always.

XVII• 8 years ago

It was both. The minimalist layout allowed the writing to stand out.

zcarter• 8 years ago

For a flavor of the content that is being reminisced, an old favorite: https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcri...

gmmeyer• 8 years ago

this is one of the greatest articles I've ever read on the internet

jonah• 8 years ago

It says so much about so many things so simply.

JustAnotherPat• 8 years ago

The Awl and Hairpin were destined to die because the people who wrote/would write for them would never be satisfied being poor past their 20's.

It was a 'labor of love' from the glamorous set.

sinemetu11• 8 years ago

Sad to see The Awl go away. I've really enjoyed it the last couple years. Best of luck to the team!

th0ma5• 8 years ago

Maybe I'm weird but it seemed like there was always just too much stuff being published daily? The Verge is like this too. Anyway, the stuff I did manage to get at was always good.

The Awl, 2009-2018

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