Rantlister has been built, abandoned, revived, renamed, abandoned again, and even lost to a domain squatter. Here’s the not-so-brief story of the List, the old internet rant scene, and why Rantlister finally came back as an archive.
I neglect the archival side of this site like I neglect my girlfriend.
Which is to say, I spend some time on it, but probably not as much time as I should.
So today, we’re going to be taking a look at the history of Rantlister itself. Or at least, the parts I was there for.
Full disclosure, this is a rewrite/touch-up of an article I originally published to AJnet Magazine back in February of 2024. Yeah, I’m a lazy bastard. Sue me.
I guess we should start by explaining exactly what Rantlister was.
Put simply, Rantlister was a website that compiled rant sites and presented them in a list format.
This list was conveniently called “The List“.
Think of a directory or a blogroll, but for rant sites. Rantlister’s purpose was to expose listed sites to a larger reader base and allow members of the underground rant scene to network with each other. Every week, someone (usually myself, Bob Smash, or Bagoda) would go through the List and see if anyone posted a new article. Links to new articles were compiled into a single post and shared with Rantlister’s readers, of which there were quite a few due to the symbiotic relationship Rantlister had with the sites on the List. If your site got added to the List, we’d generally ask you to include a link back to Rantlister on your own site. It wasn’t mandatory, but most people did it because, ironically enough, even the biggest assholes on the internet still looked out for each other. This sense of community is something you don’t really see on the internet anymore, and it’s one of the things I miss most about the old days.
There were some minor disagreements as to the exact history of the site, who put in what work, and other details, but the following “About” page, which I’m pretty sure was written by Bagoda, is a decent summary of all the parts everyone agrees on:
Rantlister.com is a non-profit entertainment site and is provided ad free by B.S. Worldwide. Hosting for Rantlister is currently being provided by Bob Smash. Our mission is to provide rant writers with a community to meet other writers, expose their work to more viewers, and provide readers with one site to experience their favorite ranters and find new ones. Rantlister does not provide hosting or publishing for writers, regardless of talent. If you have a rant site and wish to be listed all you need to do is click the join tab to find out how.
Keep in mind that we are all bitter, anti-social sociopaths and will judge you mercilessly. If you have a fragile ego you probably shouldn’t apply. All intellectual property (artwork, writing) of List members are copyrighted material of each respective member.
A little history…
The list was started by Jake The Drake of DrakeGTA.com, the internet’s original fat bearded man. Unfortunately for all the list members, he simultaneously found Jesus and a woman who would touch his penis. Once DrakeGTA was done the list moved to The Big Rip Off, the website of the ranter who had been assisting Drake with the list, Prophet (pronounced Prophag). He housed the list for a while, then without warning deleted his entire website, along with the list. So Bob Smash of BobSmash.com (weird, huh?) decided to rescue the list from the purgatory that was Google’s cache’, since a small but dedicated community had sprang forth over the years. Slowly but surely the list started to grow, and eventually a writer named Bagoda came on board with his website The Cesspool. Bagoda felt the list would be better served with having a permanent home as opposed to being kicked around from website to website whenever someone found religion or spontaneously grew a vagina. He successfully secured the domain name, Rantlister.com, while Bob secured hosting service for the site. This particular incarnation started with an almost identical design to Prophet’s since we are pretty fucking lazy. Rantlister was then redesigned with help from Thilo, author of The Second Best Page In The Universe, to make viewing and joining much easier as well as to present a more professional website to encourage growth in membership and viewership. Additions were also made by Andrew Laporte and Angry Jerk (AJ), who continues to be a big part of the new direction of Rantlister.com. We now proudly use WordPress to make updating easier, keep a fresh look to the site, maintain an easy to use archive of previous posts, and enable RSS subscription to the site. We are also beginning to feature original content unique to Rantlister, and hope more of you will contribute guest rants in the future. Rantlister will continue to be improved upon to give all the list members every possible chance to be seen, and for the viewers to be exposed to the best entertainment possible. It’s important to keep in mind that we make no money what so ever off of this site. It exists because we are pathetic losers with no lives. For whatever that’s worth.
If you want to read a bit more about the history of Rantlister and The List then check out the interview we did with Jake The Drake HERE.
The Legion Of Doom
This panel is a revolving group of an odd number of active members at any given time which is currently headed by Bob Smash. All decisions as to adding writers to the list, to Rantlister, or posting guest rants are made by the Legion. We also meet once a year deep in dark a secluded woods to dance naked around a fire and throw feces at the stars. Don’t judge us. All panel activities are carried out in the “Legion of Doom” board on the forum which you don’t have access to because you think a bunch of men dancing naked in the woods is gay. Well it’s not. Is it?
Eventually, the classic internet ranter subculture faded out and was replaced by the rise of professional YouTubers (I gave my thoughts on this in “What killed the internet rant scene?“). By 2012, most of the sites on the List had stopped updating or went offline. Attempts to find fresh blood proved daunting, as not only was the subculture dying, but most of us had grown older and had real jobs, real families, and real responsibilities.
While all this was going on, Bob Smash (who owned Rantlister at this time) was going through a slew of personal issues involving his family life. As such, his attention was elsewhere. Coupled with GoDaddy routinely having issues and Bob forgetting to renew the site, it sometimes felt like we were fighting an uphill battle. Attempts to get Bob to step aside and at the very least hand the domain over to myself or Bagoda proved futile. I’ll always have a lot of respect for Bob, and I can’t fault him for prioritizing his family life over a dying website, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t a stubborn bastard when it came to switching away from GoDaddy or handing over the site.
Some might feel that Bob Smash was to blame for the demise of Rantlister, but I think it’s unfair to place the blame entirely on him. His stubbornness definitely contributed to a degree, but the ranter subculture was already dying. Bob being stubborn about changing hosts or handing over the site certainly didn’t kill an entire subculture. Even if Bob had yielded to our demands, or if he was able to give Rantlister the attention it needed, I think things would have still played out the same in the end.
If I had to date the true death of Rantlister, it would be by the end of 2012.
This is around the time when most List sites stopped updating. Text-based content creation was being replaced by videos, so fresh blood was dwindling. Even the Rantlister forums had all but died. Most of the conversation regarding Rantlister had moved over to the AJnet Forums, where both members of the Rantlister community and my own continued to discuss ideas for Rantlister’s future.
This is where I’ll take my share of the blame for Rantlister’s failure. I was great at coming up with ideas, but I was even better at expecting someone else to do all the work for me. I had basically taken the Rantlister project under my wing, and here I was trying to pawn the actual work off onto someone else because I was more concerned with partying and chasing women. I was lazy, and I won’t pretend that laziness didn’t contribute to Rantlister’s death. Would the site still have met the same fate had I stepped up and actually executed some of my ideas? Probably. But I certainly didn’t do everything I could have to ensure the site’s survival.
Solely blaming any one person or thing for the demise of Rantlister would be foolish and just plain incorrect. Rantlister’s death was the result of an assortment of failures, some preventable and others purely circumstantial.
In 2014, Bob finally agreed to transfer the Rantlister domain over to me.
At last, the project was fully in my hands!
I enlisted the AJnet Forums to help me in my bid to restore Rantlister to its former glory. Keeping with my usual theme of making grand plans but expecting someone else to do the actual work, I bailed on the project. Rather than just sit on the domain, I handed it off to DrakeGTA, the original creator of the List. Drake was fairly similar to me, full of great ideas but lacking the drive to carry any of them out. He ended up forgetting to renew the domain, and Rantlister.com domain was forever lost to a domain squatter, where it still remains to this day, because I’ll be damned if I’m paying $1,000 for that shit.
I was kind of annoyed at Drake at the time, but I wasn’t mad enough to let it affect our friendship. He remained a great friend of mine up until his untimely passing in September of 2021.
In 2016, the motivation bug bit me again, and I wanted to try yet again to rebuild Rantlister, this time on AJnet.
I wanted it to be bigger and better than the original List, with more features. I went right to work on a new “About” page. After consulting Bob Smash and Drake for their versions of the history of Rantlister and receiving stories that involved a lot of infighting, I realized it might be a better idea to just make up a bullshit backstory about the List being a list of Satan’s favorite websites.
A few drinks later, and I came up with this:
Mopping the world’s hatred into one bucket
Deep in the bowels of Hell, next to the throne of Satan himself, there existed a list. “The List”, as it was called for obvious reasons, served as a personal collection of the Prince of Evil’s favorite websites. Websites filled with hate, anger, rage, and even a little bit of nudity here and there. When the monotony of ruling over Hell became too much, Satan would hop on his HP-brand laptop (for you see, Satan is a majority shareholder in this company, along with Apple, Samsung, and many other makers of terrible technology) and browse the websites on the List. Their hate-filled haranguing never failed to fill the Fallen One with delight.
Enter Drake.
Drake was a man whose life was arguably the physical embodiment of Hell itself. Fat, balding, and angry, Drake didn’t just have a chip on his shoulder, he had a whole family-sized bag. Of the ones with crinkle-cuts, so he could easily dip them. It was this hatred for life in general that fueled his website, a slice of drunken rage known as DrakeGTA. He hated everything and then some.
One night during one of his famous drinking binges, Drake was summoned by none other than Satan himself. Satan had really taken a liking to Drake’s website, it was his favorite amongst all the sites on the List. As he had forgotten the password to his Yahoo account, Satan could not simply send Drake fanmail. Instead, he had chosen to summon Drake to the 9th Circle of Hell and personally offer his approval. Upon realizing where he was, Drake proceeded to do absolutely nothing, for you see he was too drunk to give a damn, even in Hell. Taking a swig from his liquor bottle, Drake smiled and nodded politely, doing his best to hide his disinterest from his host. As Drake’s eyes scanned the room, he noticed a piece of paper sitting on a table next to Satan’s throne. His curiosity piqued, Drake slammed the rest of his liquor and promptly asked Satan for more. Satan gladly obliged, drunkenness being one of his favorite human vices. As Satan left the room to get more liquor, Drake picked up the paper. It was simply titled “The List”, and had a list of websites similar to Drake’s. Reading material for later. Drake pocketed the List as Satan returned with a fresh bottle of Jim Beam. The two shared a drink, and Drake was transported back to our mortal plane. It wasn’t until much, much later that Satan realized the List was missing. When Satan realized that Drake had pilfered it and brought it back to Earth with him, he laughed heartily. The prophecy had been fulfilled.
Back on Earth, Drake began to share the List on his own website. At first Drake enjoyed this new source of vitriol, but slowly it began to have a poisonous effect. Hellish visions began to plague Drake’s dreams. War, disease, famine, young folks wearing Guy Fawkes masks, a socialist president. No matter how much liquor Drake drank these torturous visions continued to haunt him. After two years, Drake’s mind could not take anymore of this bombardment. By stealing Satan’s List of favorite websites, Drake had effectively unleashed Hell on Earth. The List’s dissemination had kickstarted a chain of events that would lead to the rise of the Antichrist himself and untold suffering the likes of which this world had never seen. The only thing Drake could do now was repent. And so Drake begged the Lord for forgiveness, forsaking his website and the List in favor of servitude to God.
It was then passed down to a man known only as “Prophet”. It is suspected that “Prophet” was an earthly alias used by the Archangel Michael, and he had taken over the List in an attempt to stop it from gaining momentum and bringing forth the reign of the Antichrist. Once in possession of the List, Prophet abandoned it in the darkest corners of the internet and focused instead on providing links to illegally-uploaded TV shows. His plan to make people forget about the List ultimately failed though, and it fell right into the hands of another fat, bald, and angry man.
The infamous Bob Smash. While not anywhere near as drunk as Drake had been, it was this sobriety that made him infinitely worse than Drake. While Drake’s anger was fueled mostly by alcohol, Bob Smash’s anger was a self-sustaining energy source, fueling itself in a never-ending cycle of perpetual hatred and violence. Bob’s anger came from a natural place, deep within his blackened soul. It was this anger that attracted the attention of a mysterious being known as Bagoda (rumored to be the demon Abaddon, sent by Satan himself to help move things along). Forming an unholy union, the two set out in their endeavor to increase the List’s notoriety. To promote the site as its own entity, a domain name was purchased. “Rantlister.com” was now live and filling the hearts of mortal men with hatred and rage. Under this new banner of war against all that was good and pure, Bagoda and Bob began not only promoting the List, but adding new websites to it.
From among one of these new websites came a young and angry jerk. Angry_Jerk, a man whose name was the personification of anger, and invoked hatred amongst those who heard it. For Angry_Jerk, there was nobody beyond the range of his rage, not a single soul who could not be offended by his derogatory texts, no ethnic group spared his verbal genocide. While Bob’s hatred had been stronger, Bob had never mastered complete control of it. His own hatred eventually overcame him, and the List was passed down to Angry_Jerk.
Angry_Jerk, who was like a Jedi Master of hatred, took great delight in taking control of the List. He had heard the rumors of its otherworldly origins, and sought to ensure that it fulfilled its destiny. Nothing could stop the List now, save for an act of divine intervention by God himself. In a final, desperate act, God blessed Angry_Jerk with many successes in life, so many that he could not adequately manage neither his own website nor Rantlister. Rantlister.com was dead, and the List all but gone from the annals of time.
However, in accordance with the Book of Revelation:
“And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.”
Indeed, not even God himself can subdue fate, merely postpone it. Like the fiery phoenix, Angry_Jerk rose from the ashes, vowing to resurrect not only his own website, but the List. And so, here we stand today.
Ranting isn’t dead. Ranting can never die, for it is as eternal as time itself. From Satan’s original rant against God, to the ranting of the crusaders against Islam, to the Founding Fathers’ rant against the British Crown, to relics of the late 90’s and early 00’s like Maddox, to the modern ranters on YouTube. Ranting has taken many forms throughout history. Ranting was, is, and always will be.
If you’re an angry son of a bitch like me, if you want nothing more than to see the human race burn, if you just want to blow off some steam, then you’ve come to the right place.
Welcome to… Rantlister.
After further discussion on the AJnet Forums, we agreed it might be a good idea to give the project its own domain again. Since Drake had let Rantlister.com expire, we decided to come up with a new name. AJnet Forum member Torbrex came up with the name “The Rant Network”, and we went with that. With contributions from Torbrex and Rogan (another AJnet Forum member), I made this logo:
This time, I was determined to not fall into the same trap of talking but never doing.
We came up with ideas and features for the Rant Network that would distinguish it from its predecessor. Myself, Drake, and Torbrex became the site’s in-house writers, with planned contributions from Bagoda and former List members like Thilo and Jon of the Shred. We also decided to try to adapt to the times and find YouTube channels that specialized in rants.
Unfortunately, the Rant Network also met failure for the same reasons my last attempt to resurrect Rantlister did.
Again, I began to expect everyone else to do the work for me. Again, people lost interest and didn’t have the time to make content. Again, we were having a hard time finding sites to include on the List.
Even our attempt to incorporate YouTubers into the List amounted to nothing. With the exception of “I Hate Everything” and “A Dose of Buckley”, YouTube really didn’t have much in the way of a rant scene. There were plenty of political commentators and unhinged weirdos ranting and raving in front of their cameras, but I didn’t want the rant scene to be associated with any of that. These people weren’t the rant scene, they were just lunatics.
After talking to everyone else involved with the project and receiving a bunch of excuses about why they couldn’t contribute anything (and I don’t blame them, considering how I kept trying to get them to carry my lazy ass), I abandoned the Rant Network and let the domain expire.
In 2023, I completely resurrected AngryJerk.net and began to fully embrace the “AJnet” nickname the site had picked up on the forums over the years. I was going to steer the site away from just being a rant site, and make it more of a digital magazine with a variety of writing. I came up with a bunch of ideas for content and features, many of which I’ve implemented since then.
One of those ideas was attempting to restart Rantlister.
I drew up plans to restart the List, and enlisted the help of the newly-formed AJnet Organization to track down rant sites that were still operating.
The first thing we did was look into sites that were on the old list. Most returned 404 errors, and the ones that didn’t either hadn’t been touched in 10 years, or only updated once every few years. As far as the old sites went, AngryJerk.net was the last man standing.
We then began scouring the internet for new talent. Google’s algorithms made this next to impossible. Most results for “rant site” were sites geared towards people looking to vent anonymously, and the ones that weren’t were just news articles about how those sites were actually bad for your mental health.
So we turned to YouTube. Again, we ran into the same brick wall as before. There were only the same two YouTube ranters as before, I Hate Everything and A Dose of Buckley. Hardly enough to start a list with. The only other results were still political pundits and unhinged weirdos that I wouldn’t even want to sit next to at a bar much less want representing the rant scene. YouTube was still a dead end.
With that, I gave up on restarting the List and instead focused my efforts elsewhere.
In May of 2023, I was browsing through old emails when I came across the interview I did with Maddox for Rantlister in 2011. Then I came across the other interviews I did. That’s when I had an idea.
If I couldn’t restart Rantlister, I could at least preserve it.
I began trawling through the Internet Archive, as well as my own files, and grabbed all of the interviews we did with various writers on the List. I then began republishing them to AJnet as part of a feature called “Rantlister Archives”, adding a little opening backstory to each interview to avoid just republishing old material and calling it new content (which, hilariously enough, is exactly what I’m doing right now). Once I ran out of interviews to republish, I moved on to reposting old AJnet articles with added commentary. But in the back of my mind, I still had some attachment to Rantlister, and I wasn’t about to just let that go. In 2024, I grabbed Rantlister.net during one of my domain-buying sprees. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it, but I knew I was going to do something. Eventually. Maybe. Eh, probably not. But still, I made sure to renew it each year.
2026 rolled around, and I decided it was finally time to get up off my ass and do something with some of these domains. I decided that the AJnet Organization was now a media organization, and Rantlister would be one of the sites under our umbrella.
But every single attempt to restart Rantlister had failed. The subculture was dead, YouTube was a dead end, etc. Just what the hell was I going to do, exactly?
Then I remembered something.
If I couldn’t restart Rantlister, I could at least preserve it.
I had been able to scrounge up the old interviews, so why couldn’t I just do the same with all of Rantlister?
So, with the help of my girlfriend and ChatGPT, I got to work rebuilding Rantlister. Except this time, it would be an archive.
Using the Internet Archives, we got as many old posts as we could and reposted them with the exact dates they were posted originally. I also dug through my own files and found thumbnails for all the List sites over the years. I rebuilt the List using archived copies of the sites. I even had ChatGPT help me redesign the GeneratePress theme to look closer to Ikarus, Rantlister’s original theme.
While we were going through the old iRants, I had another thought.
We can create some new content here too.
The site didn’t have to be purely archival. It could also have some fresh content.
So I reopened the iRant feature, where readers could submit their own rants in the spirit of the old days. At the very least, it gives me a place to publish rants that aren’t good enough to be in my Angry Jerk column over at AJnet Magazine. I’ve also been trying to do reflective pieces about some of the old sites on the List, and the rant scene in general.
And that’s where we are today.
I’m not looking to kickstart a second internet rant scene renaissance or something like that. That ship set sail long ago, and was destroyed at sea by social media. The passion people once had for making a half-assed website and firing off about stuff is pretty much gone. These sites are considered cringy relics of the internet’s teenage years. If someone wants to rant about something, they create a Reddit account and post it there. Not many people want to go through the hassle of buying a domain and coding a website or setting up WordPress just to express their opinion.
Are they right? Maybe.
All I know is, we’re going to do our best to preserve the legacy left behind by the pioneers of internet writing. I want this generation to get a glimpse of what the internet was like before all the algorithms, influencers, and censorship. I want people to know that we were here.
If any of the old Rantlister writers are reading this, feel free to drop me a line and say hi. I hope all of you went on to lead at least semi-productive lives.
