The site’s design was simple and straightforward: center-aligned black text winding down the white background of a single static web page, updated once every weekday. Unlike many other content-based sites in the early ‘90s, Suck didn’t have a front page or a login portal. At a time when hypertext was used formally (cf. print footnotes), Suck used it to comedic effect, often deploying tertiary links as punchlines—a sly, original humor that was grounded in a technical understanding of how the web was meant to work. (Subverting the web’s organizing principles is now part of online-writing’s DNA: The Awl editorializes in its tags and categories.) Suck quickly attracted more traffic than the clumsy web presences of major corporations or renowned publications.

Suck owed much of its originality to the cynical wit and insight of its co-creators, Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman, who existed both inside and outside of the cultures they criticized: tech, media, and the web. Steadman and Anuff both worked as developers for HotWired, a digital sibling of Wired magazine. Unlike many early web pundits, they knew their material, and knew that the Internet didn’t live up to the media hype. “I don’t know what it is about the Internet, but people start prophesizing all over the place,” Anuff told me over the phone. “Between Wired and HotWired, everywhere were people who took themselves seriously and were full of pronouncements.”

Anuff and Steadman determined that one of the best critiques of the web would be to simply build something better than what existed, and they developed Suck as an after-hours project. As the site rose in popularity, Steadman and Anuff managed to conceal their involvement from HotWired, despite the fact that Suck ran out of their employer’s server room. (“A lot of HotWired employees had cheap PCs running out of the server closet,” Anuff told me over email. “ [It] seemed like a meaningful office perk at the time.”) Three months in, anonymity blown, they sold the site to HotWired and turned Suck into a bonafide day job, with a robust freelance budget and a full-time staff.

The site’s employee roster was impressive: Ana Marie Cox, Tim Cavanaugh, and Owen Thomas all honed their skills at Suck. Also among the early employees was Heather Havrilesky, who wrote under the pseudonym Polly Esther. The moniker stuck: Havrilesky still writes a weekly column, “Ask Polly,” in which she dispenses compassionate, tough-love advice. “Ask Polly,” which originated at the Awl and is now run by New York Magazine’s The Cut, is so popular that it became the foundation of a forthcoming book, How to be a Person in the World.

By all accounts, Suck was a heady, exhilarating, frustrating place to work, in no small part due to the rigor and inexperience of its staff. “Reading Suck was like finding an eye rolling teenager with a Lit Theory degree at an IPO party and smoking clove cigarettes with him until you vomited all over your shoes,” Havrilesky wrote over email. “And working at Suck was like working for that teenager.”