EFFORTPOST The life and death of xoxohth, the most prestigious law school discussion board in the world.

You might have heard of xoxohth, aka AutoAdmit, a couple of years ago when it cropped up in the news after a writer for Tucker Carlson was forced to resign after someone doxxed his posts on the site, which included bangers such as replying to a 2 year old thread titled “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” with the thought provoking answer, "I wouldn't get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no." As CNN graciously explains in their article: "The subject line was not censored on the forum."

But what, you may ask, is xoxohth? Well, to get the answer to that, we need to go way, way back, to a week in March of 2004, when, while listening to Green Day on his Motorola Razr and buying tickets to Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, a 19 year old member of the Princeton Review test prep forum named Jared "rachmiel" Cohen, got together with an MIT student, alias Boondocks, and a UPenn Law student named Anthony Ciolli to start https://xoxohth.com, a simple PHP-based forum for law students. Xoxo experienced rapid growth, and quickly became one of the more popular forums for law students on the internet, fueled in part by its pseudo-anonymous posting and lax moderating standards.

Like many online-communities, AutoAdmit over time developed its own vocabulary (some of which can still be found sometimes on current law school forums, such as https://Top-Law-Schools.com). The slang had the added benefit of making xoxo borderline unreadable to someone out of the loop. Fear not, dear reader, for I shall loop you in:

• 180 - A perfect score on the LSAT and used by users much in the same as "based" is today.

• CR - "Credited/Correct Response" - Self explanatory.

• Ding - Being rejected.

• TTT - "Third Tier Potty" - The bottom ranking group law schools on USNWR, which is the definitive ranking of law schools. Means something that is bad.

• WGWAG" - "White Guys with Asian Girls"

• NOWAG - "No One with Asian Guys"

• reptiles - Conservatives

• shitlibs - Liberals

• pumos - after creating an account, you could change your monikor at will, and many users who didn't want a post associated with their other posts would change to it a random collections of punctuation marks (i.e. .,./,./.,/.,/.,/,/.,). Such users were pumos (punctuation marks).

• shitlaw - Any area of law outside of BigLaw (and possibly government).

• Poasting - Participating on the site.

A more complete (but non-exhaustive) list can be found on the EncylopediaDramatica entry on xoxo.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "but these are law students, right? Productive members of society (), who shall soon be respected professionals. These forums must surely be be full of interesting, intellectual discussion, advice on how to get into law school, how to do well, maybe how to find jobs, right?" And in a way it was all those things. But, my dear reader, you mustn't forget that in those days the internet had not yet acquired the feminine touch for which it is so known today. Xoxo was, like anything, a product of its time, as evidenced by a random sampling of some posts between 2004-2006:

• Got a F in class (in which the author gets informed by multiple users that he deserved it, as its "an F", not "a F")

• Rank the Asian Herarchy (consensus seems to be Japan > Korea > China)

• Lehigh University has some hot bitches (which has no comments, as users are too in awe at this sage wisdom to say anything).

But, you see, unlike a peer website such as 4chan, where the fingers behind the screen belong to an unemployed IT admin living in his parents basement, users behind posts such as the below masterpiece are written by a 22 year old, who, more likely than not, will be wearing a suit and making $200,000 within 2 or 3 years:

And so, a strange dynamic was formed, where this anonymous shitposting that could rival even the most debased /pol/ posting was read by a large enough portion of the already tightly knit law community that it lead, for example, to a Harvard Law grad not being able to find a law firm job after becoming a meme on the site because somebody posted about her without her knoweldge. Another strange part of this dynamic is that today, there is a good number of law firm partners, making millions or tens of millions of dollars a year, who started their career 2 decades ago with posts such as Autodinging chicks who've dated/fricked a black...racist? And, also, one must not forget that all of these posts were sandwiched between posts actually related to law school, such as advice on which school to choose and name the best cities to begin a career in.

As xoxo became more popular, it did not go unnoticed by the larger legal community. As one can imagine, such a community is prone to posting and the forum slowly made its way into the Real World™. Articles such as Pestilence, War, Famine, Death…and Unemployment?: An Analysis of the Internet Message Boards' Impact on Law Firm Recruitment, Why are Message Boards So Mean, and Oh My God, You Guys, Lawyers Are Actually Totally Mean! started cropping up all over the place. This marked the beginning of the end for good old xoxo.

Things boiled over in 2007. As taken from wiki (because I'm lazy):

On 12 June 2007, two Yale Law School students filed a lawsuit against Anthony Ciolli and a number of AutoAdmit's anonymous posters, claiming their "character, intelligence, appearance, and sexual lives have been thoroughly trashed by the defendants". Filed in the District Court of Connecticut, the case, Doe v. Ciolli, 307CV00909 CFD, cited violation of privacy, defamation, infliction of undue emotional distress, and copyright infringement against Ciolli and several anonymous posters. The two plaintiffs were represented pro bono by the litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest LLP, David N. Rosen, a Yale Law School professor, and Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in computer and internet law. It was said at the time that while AutoAdmit's reported lack of IP logging might prevent the plaintiffs from learning the defendants' true identities, the case could prove significant within computer and internet law if it came to trial. The plaintiffs subsequently dropped Ciolli's name from the list of defendants, and successfully obtained Doe subpoenas of Internet service providers (ISPs) in hopes of identifying the anonymous defendants. As of August 2008 the attorneys had discovered the names of some, but not all, of the offending posters.

The lawsuit exposed the site to a level of fame it had not previously had, and it became an archetype of the "bad internet," going so far as being mentioned in the same sentence as /b/ by the Newspaper of Record. With the fame came real life consequences for those caught associating with the site and Anthony Ciolli, one of the co-founders gets his job offer rescined and quits the forum.

Still, the forum remained popular. So popular, in fact, that a WSJ article about the law suit started with "For all you AutoAdmit junkies..." And, because this was the in prehistoric times, when we weren't all as civilized as we are now, the forum even had its share of high-profile defenders, who exalted the (now widely understood to be evil) notion of free speech. The Dean of Penn Law, for example, posted a letter on the site stating that, "while debates should be encouraged, 'we all have a moral and professional obligation to engage in that debate in a responsible manner.'" Imagine that.

But still, death comes for us all, and, with time, the infamy and controversy caused students to move away from xoxo to greener pastures. And yet, the site still exists, now full of a few remaining original users, now in their 40s, who mostly posts such things as "Which escort with HUGE TITS should I frick in VEGAS" (not a shitpost btw, reviews of hookers have become a staple on nu-xoxo.) And, after the Tucker fiasco, rachmiel, who still manages the site, randomized all monikers, making reading the site even harder than it already was. On top of this, signing up for the site still requires putting in a law firm or law school username, which no one in their right mind would do. And so, it persists as a zombie version of itself, with a few sad lawyers (or, mostly, ex-lawyers), boomer posting about Trump and giving tips on how to cheat on your wife.

There is much more to say on the topic, and perhaps if this gains traction I will make a Part 2 talking about some of the better posts on the site and some of its more interesting characters. But, for the moment, I had a sudden flash of clarity and realized I have just spent over an hour writing a summary of a 20 year old shitposting forum for https://rDrama.net, and will now go reflect deeply on the choices that have brought me here.