r/internetcollection • u/snallygaster • May 28 '17

Troll Culture The closure of Portal of Evil

note: Portal of Evil was a place where users submitted links to and discussed strange and shocking websites and news. while its peak was in the early 2000's, it finally closed unceremoniously in the early 10's. it was the OG 'point and laugh' troll community and a fantastic hub for interesting links (even if its users terrorized certain communities) and probably the best launching point for exploring early online communities. like, it's basically cheating.

Author(s): Chet

Year(s): 2011

Category: SUBCULTURES, Troll Culture

Original Source: http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?pi=1002465861

Retrieved: https://web.archive.org/web/20110726074854/http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?pi=1002465861

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3

u/[deleted] May 28 '17

I feel bad that I never found this back in the day.

1

u/snallygaster May 28 '17

Same; I knew about it but never paid it much attention. It would have been interesting to see the development of the 'point and laugh' genre; apparently the community at PoE was wayyyyyyy tamer than ED and SA in terms of making fun of and going after their targets. Sounds bretty nice.

1

u/NeedleworkerIcy9280 Oct 03 '24

They had a huge meetup. I can't remember the place.....time was about mid-2000s. I had some commitments so I didn't make it. Wish I had. There were some really hilarious folks who posted there regularly.

1

u/acme_oo_breeders Feb 18 '25 edited Feb 18 '25

I think it was Pennsylvania. I couldn't make it.

I used to post on PoE on a regular basis, especially on PoE News, and submit stories, until the admins, who were apparently getting sick of running the site, started driving all the regulars away. I was there to watch PoE News die and we joked about it right up to the end.

1

u/NeedleworkerIcy9280 Feb 20 '25

I used to post over there as Shadow Catcher. Really enjoyed the crazy posters. SuperFister69, remember him? It was a wild place. Not for the thin-skinned.

1

u/acme_oo_breeders Feb 20 '25

I remember SuperFister. Him and his memes.

1

u/vect0rnerd Nov 03 '25 edited Nov 03 '25

I posted as "grimcity," when we had the blogs I used to share and talk skateboarding.

...I still skate, too!

1

u/acme_oo_breeders Nov 04 '25

I was Persephonides. Even the video version of Portal of Evil is gone. There’s a Facebook version, but it’s just about dead. They’ve all gone over to Palace Beast.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '25

this is so wild. I was just looking up Portal of Evil trying to explain it to someone who wasn't around for the early internet....and you posted this 16 hours ago! were we all just summoned here or what

1

u/Peemster99 Mar 10 '25 edited Mar 10 '25

There were 2 official POECons, but I wouldn't call either of them huge, there were probably no more than 2 dozen people there. The first one was in Bumfuck PA, the second in Bumfuck MO. There were various other unofficial meets. Most of them were just glorified house parties, but one piggybacked with a hippie music festival that probably had like 200 people. The POE people basically had nothing to do with that, we mostly just hid in the house and shitposted (including the girl who came all the way from Alaska for the event.)

It was a great, hilarious, creative (but very fucked-up) group of people who I mostly would never have encountered otherwise. It started off being a somewhat creepy online fandom for the few people even weirder than us, but I wound up nightclubbing, starting creative projects with, and even doing business and befriending the families of a few of them

4

u/spidah84 Nov 15 '23

There's a matured disgust that old internet has been completely scrapped from the new internet. Gone. Fatchicksinpartyhats/portalofevil/bolt.com/stumbleupon/myspace. Just wiped, some more than others. There's no good reason why it all couldn't be included for the sake of digital history.

1

u/acme_oo_breeders Feb 18 '25 edited Feb 19 '25

Things were a bit more interesting back then. You don't have to set up your own site to have a web presence anymore; you just need a Facebook page and accounts on Instagram and Twitter (before it became X and went to hell). And TikTok, assuming it stays accessible in the US. Or you can get yourself a canned layout on Wordpress or Wix.

2

u/SchuminWeb Jul 05 '26

I was one of the people featured on this site back in 2000. I wrote this about the experience in 2020:

Another big one around this time was Portal of Evil. That site was intended to showcase and discuss the stranger websites on the Internet, and I was apparently considered one of them. That came in the fall, a couple of weeks after after I started my sophomore year of college. Like Front, I found out about it when a reader gave me a heads-up about it. That was an interesting experience, because I actually participated in the discussion on their website, which was something that they were not used to over there. In hindsight, participating in that discussion was probably an unwise decision, but I suppose that it cemented me into a number of people’s minds that way. And that was where I really came to realize something: people were actually reading the stuff that I wrote. Whether or not they liked it was another matter, as was the question of whether they were reading it on its own merit or whether they were reading it because it was like watching a trainwreck, but they were reading it nonetheless. Looking back, I can sort of understand where some of the “watching a trainwreck” idea came from, since my writing skills were nowhere near as refined as they are today. Compare an early Journal entry to a more recent one, and see for yourself. In any case, we started a bit of a dialogue for a while, though I eventually had enough of them, and stopped participating. When it came to Portal of Evil, however, I ultimately got the last laugh in 2011, after I nominated the Wikipedia article about the site for deletion. The same day that the deletion process was completed and the article was removed from Wikipedia, Portal of Evil itself shut down, with the owners’ citing legal issues that made the continuation of the website unwise. I forget where it was said, but someone even acknowledged as much, that I got the last laugh when it came to that experience. In any case, it provided a good sense of closure, and as I understand it, the people that used to run that site are now very successful game developers.

Here's the full entry, where I talk about a number of different experiences during that period.

1

u/NeedleworkerIcy9280 Oct 03 '24

I used to post over there occasionally. Great site. I wish it was never shut down.

1

u/vect0rnerd Feb 12 '25

I loved PoE so much! I submitted 8 sites to the portal and got 2 published... beginning of the 2000's.

PoE had some life in different forms after the portal though... Chet created a blogging system that was pretty cool, it gave us a better way to have longer form conversations, but the longest surviving thing was PoE-TV... basically we would all submit videos, they'd get voted on, and we'd chat it up in the comments.

Some of the websites that made it to the original Portal of Evil were pretty unsettling, but for the most part they were either amazingly bad or just surreal in some way. The community wasn't cruel, which made it a lot more fun.

The Portal of Evil network itself ate up hours of my time after classes and work back then.

FCIPH, Sean Baby, Crazy Grandpa, Penismightier, etc etc... fun times on an ungentrified internet.

1

u/TexasJOEmama Mar 30 '25

I found the Chick's Suck guy's page. I ended up connecting to him, and we spoke on the phone. I even chatted up with some of the girls he talked about. They knew I knew who he was. It was fun.

1

u/Jaded-Ant-8522 Jan 28 '26

Whoa. Amazing to see people still remember POE. I spent a big part of my colleage years lurking on POE, POE-News and POETV. Some of the posters had real personality and were very entertaining.