I always hated them, I was even aware of them in like 2001 and 2002 when they started getting prominence. Something about the humor was so dependent upon irony and being superior to whatever they were mocking. It's such a restrictive, self conscious way to constantly be. (aside: I get a same vibe from the Red Letter Media guys, also insufferable faggots I never liked despite massive early popularity, who probably hate themselves and want to kill themselves.) As someone who enjoys O&A and unethical harassment for laughs I can't explain why this bothered me but there's just something ugly about a personality that views everything like that.
Somewhere in the mid-late 2000s they went from general 'snark' to full libtarded. I remember this "comedy" site put up a donation for Katrina, so 2005, and started censoring mocking commentary and images about looting niggers. It was like "mask off, this now a leftist political website." And since they were founded on mockery, finding subjects they could feel superior to, irony, and at least nominally comedy, they directed all those tendencies, their autism, and their Adobe suite proficiency towards politically right leaning figures and movements. It became, essentially, a wing of Antifa, and they graduated to doxxing, social media pile ons, getting people canceled etc.
ChapoTrapHouse stems from this same style, I don't know the details but I think one or several of them were "goons" (something awful members self appointed nickname) who moved to twitter. Felix I believe, whose whole unending dedication to remaining "ironic" 24/7 is a classic SomethingAwful personality type. ChapoTrapHouse ended up being number 1 on patreon for idk how many years, and idk how many hundreds of thousands if not millions of listeners. A quote from
an extremely gay article just to prove the connection(anyone who says "Weird Twitter is a FAGGOT):
From Weird Twitter, which attracted and assimilated people who weren’t active in SA’s leftist cliques (such as
Felix Biederman and
Virgil Texas, who just lurked), came Chapo Trap House, darling of every obscure Slate clone from Brooklyn to Queens. Chapo has featured several SA regulars, including Alex Nichols (@Lowenaffchen), who was
active on LF as Golden Lion Tamarin (his Twitter username used to be @GLDNLNTMRN), and Dan O’Sullivan (@Bro_Pair), a
now-banned former SA moderator whose username is now Fat Curtain Dweller. It’s interesting that a podcast heralded for
‘actually giving a shit’ comes from a subculture that began as pure trolling.
The whole ChapoTrapHouse community is almost like an offshoot of SomethingAwful, not just in spirit but literally. The "Dirtbag leftists." They're the hugest fucking faggots online, Something Awful was ALWAYS gay, and I'm glad this dude who oversaw and put out all of this cancel culture social energy it is gone