And honestly, most of the guys who want to talk about steroids, want to talk about them all day.” “If you were someone living the bodybuilding lifestyle back in those days, nobody besides ‘gym friends’ wanted to talk about that nonsense with you. “Steroid users wanted to talk shop and couldn’t, usually,” says Roberts. “These were people who had a more direct connection to very cutting-edge 1980s researchers like Dan Duchaine, and they were building off that work and exploring further in terms of supplementation, nutrition and performance-enhancing drugs.”įorum user discusses his own views on “racism.”
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“The newsgroup era was the actual golden age of all of this, with Anthony Roberts and Bruce Kneller and the other smart guys who were publishing posts back then,” says Aaron Singerman, the CEO of the supplements company Redcon1.
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Newsgroups were functionally similar to the later forums where many users migrated, but operated via usenet servers and newsreader software rather than a direct web-based interface. Much of what Doug was reading happened to be the legacy of individuals like fitness journalist and author Anthony Roberts, one of several writers who pioneered anabolic research on the newsgroups of the 1990s that preceded the bodybuilding forums of the 2000s. There was a lot of bullshit and lies on those forums, even the private ones, but you could also get access to steroid sources, read good information from top gurus, keep up with the gossip and follow all the trash talking.” BB’ers talk racism. “I was very into aesthetics at the time - a lot of my handles and nicknames on the sites were variations on ‘AestheticKid’ with some numbers at the end - and I believed I had to learn from the best. “I hated all authority, and I wanted to know the truth about muscle,” Doug, a convicted felon who “did it all for the swole,” tells me when I ask him about his decade spent lurking on bodybuilding forums. The bodybuilding forums, however, covered a vast sort of middle ground, exemplified by my Grantland- reading, anabolic steroid-loving cousin Doug Alexander. The comedy website Something Awful, by contrast, launched the careers of plenty of so-called “ dirtbag left ” podcasters as well as “weird Twitter” figures like dril. New and improved forum rules.ĭuring the rise of the “alt-right,” many articles attempting to trace the genealogy of the movement pointed to 4chan and 8chan (and related information repositories such as Encyclopedia Dramatica ) as the furnaces in which all this rebellious, nihilistic, world-hating clay had been forged. These places, forgotten with the rise of social media and the resulting end of anonymity, weren’t so much marketplaces for ideas as battlefields on which a unique kind of subcultural identity coalesced. You joined one or more of these forums, selecting some kind of made-up handle (“69UglyKidJoe420” or “IronPounderXXX”), and then went to war.
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The posts were episodic, the rants were epic and the rivalries were enduring.
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Once upon a time, the forums associated with sites like Muscular Development and offered users everything they could have wanted: an opportunity to interact with top pro and amateur bodybuilders, a chance to share workout tips, a safe space to learn about anabolic drug use and the possibility of trolling and insulting every other user on the site.