Simon Willison’s Weblog

Adequacy gone

27th January 2003

It looks like Adequacy.org has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the site, it was a truly unique evolution of the common internet troll. Adequacy specialised in posting stories that were deliberately designed to cause controversy, then sending out carefully crafted “invitations” to any online communities that were most likely to take the bait. Since, unlike other trolling situations, the trolls were now in control of the discussion they could prolong the scam by deleting any comments which had figured out what was going on and were trying to warn other clueless participants.

The best explanation of the site is probably this one, by Stuart Caie. An archive of adequacy stories is still available on the site—I recommend the classic Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? (sadly archived without comments) for an example of how the site used to work.