Encyclopædia Dramatica

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Someone is wrong on The Internet

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Encyclopædia Dramatica (ED) is a barely relevant troll wiki. Originally starting out as a spiritual successor to LJDrama, it was discovered and infiltrated by users of 4chan's /b/ board and eventually shifted its stated mission to exclusively documenting Internet culture, memes, and "drama" for the lulz. And also porn. Lots of porn.

Coincidentally, it is also happy to document everything the userbase thinks is wrong with the Internet, but proudly does so in a style that exemplifies the very things wrong with the Internet. Unsurprisingly, it is filled with homophobic, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and (perhaps most infamously of all) antisemitic content.

History[edit]

ED was started in 2004 by the trolls at LJDrama.org, documenting and encouraging LiveJournal users and their overblown drama and unwarranted self-importance. The owner and founder was Sherrod DeGrippo, aka Girlvinyl. The site quickly attracted similar netizens from 4chan, the GNAA, Bantown, and so forth.

The site was shut down in mid-April 2011 and redirected to "OhInternet", a blatant ripoff of Know Your Meme. DeGrippo had apparently shut down ED for good, replacing it with "a more toned down content style and a streamlined design", having decided that having every second wikilink take you to pages with racist and/or homophobic content (or just straight up attack pages) was no longer financially viable in the face of escalating liability. It's also possible that there were no more places to put porn ads.^[2] OhInternet, in turn, died in October 2013; nobody cared or noticed.

Fans promptly started a few forks, dredging ED pages out of the Google cache. Here's a list:

• encyclopediadramatica.ch (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.se (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.es (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.se (came and went offline again)
• encyclopediadramatica.rs (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.fyi (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.wiki (dead, came back but went offline again)
• encyclopediadramatica.online (dead)^[3]
• encyclopediadramatica.top (dead)^[4][5]
• encyclopediadramatica.wtf (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.cm (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.cc (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.lol (never completed and currently aborted)
• encyclopediadramatica.win (came^[6] and went again)^[7]
• encyclopediadramatica.gay (dead)
• encyclopediadramatica.de (dead)
• edramatica.com (currently active, last active iteration for now)

The encyclopediadramatica.se fork has been the most successful reanimation, but has been down for some time without even bothering to pretend it has any legal oversight. With no porn ads… just kidding, porn ads again. Yeah, they were that site — the one that seriously still used pop-up ads. The second incarnation loaded somewhat faster than the original, and the aforementioned ads had been relegated to the sidebar, but this is a reminder that an ad blocker, again, is strongly advised.

In January 2020, the site went offline again. Their official Facebook account posted, "RIP ED i guess lol", and also claimed that they could not restore the site using backups because "the people with the backups are in federal custody and soon to be prison".^[8] The site returned in March 2020 under new management (again), up and running under the .wiki domain, but with much of the images missing, many of the articles in mangled condition (assuming they weren't mangled, to begin with), and the forums completely gone.^[9]

At one point from November 2020 to around July 2021, due to internal drama among administrators, there were two versions of Encyclopædia Dramatica that existed: .wiki (which was more strict with editing, requiring approval first, and somewhat redesigned) and .online (which was looser with editing, only requiring account creation first, and appears similar to the site before it was taken down in 2020).^[10][11][12] In the end, .wiki ED was shut down and .online ED became the definitive version of ED, except during those occasions when the ED admins forget to pay their server bills.^[13]

In May 2024, .online died as well. It was resurrected by yet another domain, .top,^[4] only to go down the following month.^[5] In June 2024, another domain was created, edramatica.com;^[14] this domain lasted a mere week before being terminated for abuse.^[15]

In July 2024, another domain extension of the Encyclopedia Dramatica wiki at .win appeared; however, it quickly went offline.^[16] According to an admin from .gay, " .win is an unauthorized copy of the site that was made by a disgruntled former wiki sysop." ^[17] The .gay domain later redirected to edramatica.com; by September 2024 it was offline. The only current domain is edramatica.com.

In October 2024,^[18] an archive (read only) version of Encyclopedia Dramatica appeared at .de but within a week went offline.

The Good[edit]

ED is good at documenting memes and internet events and gives frank reviews of popular websites. Since it's not limited by Wikipedia's stringent reliable source policies, it has better… je ne sais quoi. In particular, its article on Metal Archives,^{[note 1]} its articles on Twilight^[21] and other poorly-written romance fictions,^[22][23][24] and its extensive section on DeviantArt^[25] could be considered, if not praiseworthy, then at least interesting. ED was also involved in Project Chanology.

The Bad[edit]

In ED's own words, "expect blatant, biased lies, and expect boring truths to get deleted quickly".^[26] Where ED fails is mostly in its own obsessions with goatse, (dead) internet memes, furries, racist, sexist, ableist humor, and shock value. This is hardly surprising given its contributor overlap with 4chan and Anonymous (as such, its article on 4chan is quite favorable in comparison to others). It has also been used frequently as a tool against others, with people creating accounts just to write unfunny articles about others they disliked in hopes that other ED readers would attack said person. According to white supremacist Andrew Auernheimer ("weev"), who is more recently associated with The Daily Stormer and also was recently exposed as the creator of the original ED,^[27] many ED articles were purveying racism and pushing the "pro-racist dialectic of lulz".^[28]

ED's content includes not only hosting extreme pornography (which is illegal to possess in certain countries e.g. the United Kingdom), but there's even a so-called "Consent Withdrawal Policy" page, which actually just tricks users into clicking on a link which displays a page showing the real fucking most extreme of the extreme pornography that ED hosts. This page consists of a series of images that ED calls the "Pain Series". It first starts with goatse, then depicts things that are far too disgusting to be described on here. People often describe them as Not Safe For Life (NSFL). The Pain Series can be found on a page called "Kittens", but be warned that it shows as soon as you go to the page. You really should steer clear of that page if you value your sanity, and/or your freedom. As a result, many people hate Encyclopædia Dramatica. From 2014 to 2015, the continued presence of Channers and Redditors (especially from Gamergate-related groups) tended to give new ED additions a reactionary alt-right bent. Strangely, this change doesn't seem to have affected anyone outside of ED.

Encyclopædia Dramatica was utterly infested with advertisements in the past. Back then, even clicking the search bar resulted in annoying pop-up ads for porn half the time. For a while, there was also a pop-under ad, which was particularly insidious because you could close the browser window to get rid of Dramatica as your boss was approaching, and find that in its place now was an explicit full-page ad for PunishTube. On the other hand, as their goal seems to be to offend (of course, without any actual insight, originality, real world knowledge, or understanding of what's being made fun of (what do you think they are, funny?)), that may have actually worked to their advantage. However, the staff announced this was problematic and fixed the issue:^[29]

ED is free of all javascript^[sic] / popup / virus ads and only uses simple banner ads. Please whitelist us on AdBlock.

ATTENTION: ED is NOT asking for donations.

Anyone asking for donations to pay the server bills is trying to scam you.

The Ugly[edit]

The perpetrator of the Aztec High School shooting was a sysop for ED (as well as a prolific poster at related sites like Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer), until reportedly getting banned for appending too many pro-Columbine shooting memes and "shitty facebook commentaries" praising Donald Trump to the site's home page.^[30]

The perpetrator of the 2018 Toronto van attack was influenced by ED articles that listed mass murderers ranked by grim metrics such as kill counts and kill-to-injured ratios. Incel killers he was attracted to were on the lists.^[31]

The perpetrator of the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting was reportedly a target of a vicious bout of online cyberbullying in 2015, which included a "parody website" "which resembles Wikipedia" creating a page to "mock his weight and accuse him of engaging in illegal activity". The cyberbullying was reportedly vicious enough to cause the perpetrator to change his name that year.^[32][33] Although no mainstream media source reported what the site in question was, it is perhaps no coincidence that ED has a lengthy page on the perpetrator, and actually updated the article after the shooting instructing ED readers to prepare for "when your favorite wiki gets DDoSed to hell by trannies, just like the Kiwi Farms."^[34]

Management[edit]

In 2019, Conrad Rockenhaus was the admin of Encyclopædia Dramatica and hosted the site through his company GreyPonyIT^[35][36] and was protected by Cloudflare.^[37][38] In August 2019, the site experienced a long period of downtime, but came back online by October. In October 2019, ED's official Twitter account responded, claiming Rockenhaus "hosts us through his hosting company" but is not the owner of ED.^{[36]Do You Believe That?} In November 2019, both Conrad and ED's official Twitter accounts were permanently suspended.

The creator and owner of the .wiki version of ED was Jacob Stellmach, and the company was registered in Nevada.^[39][40][41] Stellnach described himself as a "technical analyst and darknet researcher".^[42] It also contained links to his Twitter ban-evasion service and his "library" including such nice things like The International Jew and Mussolini speeches.

Twitter bans[edit]

Encyclopædia Dramatica have been banned on Twitter many times. In April 2020, they opened yet another account:

So here's how it's gonna work.

Since Twitter so obviously likes us being here, we've got several throwaway accounts ready to be made instantly.

We'll tweet from here, but only RT from main. Which means we can say whatever we want more or less even if suspended.^[43]

In March 2023, this account was suspended from Twitter,^[44] along with the more official(?) "@LulzWeTrust" account listed in the .online main contact page between August 2021 and January 2023.^[45][46] At this time, it seems that ED is a bridge too far even for Elon "Unban Everyone" Musk...

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]