The Troll Chronicles: SNOM

8 min readJun 20, 2021

SHITPOST — The Legend of SNOM.

The history of SCP has a bountiful legacy of trolls. Some are less explicit and more ideologically driven, like Roxie. Others are effortful and systematic like Xeno (listen to a great interview here.) Others are pure genius and too good to not remember, like Scp J911.

One troll that has escaped cannon but who I believe deserves a nod… SNOM. The SNOM.

Born in “Funny Town” on the 15th of February 2003, “Not Joe” SNOM joined Wikidot on the 16th of December, 2019. By the 17th, SNOM had submitted an idea to the forums in search for his first greenlight, just in time for Christmas:

So the SCP is an plastic Christmas tree that if you hang a decoration in it it wil teleport you to the nearest Christmas tree with the same decoration. In the end it turns out that if you hang something ugly in it it will eat you and barf you up as decorations made of flesh. It does this because it was a gift to a couple (Maybe with malicious intent). My friends think it’s perfect but i think that it needs a little bit more work to be good and less of a “thing that does a thing”, without adding to much like elves and dimensions.

Met with the resistance that typifies those not ready for a paradigm shift in the status quo, established members rebutted with questions meant to confound the idea. SNOM replied eloquently and directly, parrying their attempts:

How did the Foundation find out about it?

Put in a discovery.

Why does it teleport you to other trees?

Just because, it´s just a plastic Christmas tree, it’s not sentient.

At times the public, unsuspecting of an impending revolution, needed a bit of a nudge in the right direction:

Mmmmm Yes snom very cool idea very cool mmmmm. — SNOM

But the normies in the crowd just wouldn’t bite:

Staff notice: do not use other people’s discussion threads to advertise/seek attention for your works in progress. That’s rude and also generates spam.

SNOM’s impact was felt and commented upon even in the far away lands of the RPC Authority Discord. He even graced RPC with his draft at one point, and his sandbox can still be viewed today.

SNOM’s Christmas tree draft did not pass the greenlight phase. At about the same time, the illustrious 5K Contest began. What luck! Not for SNOM and his article, but for the site to have him at such a time.

So around January 19th, 2020, next to one month after joining the site and just days before the posting window closed, SNOM drops his 5K article, “A simple horror writer”. Well, actually it isn’t an article, it’s a tale.

SNOM took the shortcomings of his Christmas tree article and performed such an acrobatic twist with the material, you would have thought it was planned. His 5K entry was about him entering into the 5K, and still about a Christmas tree.

Expectedly though, it flopped. No one was truly ready for this. Maybe in 10 years’ time, SNOM. It was soon in deletion range and was gone within 24 hours. A diamond in the rough, lost forever.

Snippets of the submission still exist on the site thanks to their exhaustive deletion records:

SCP Foundation

Deletions 62: A crowded room, friends with tired eyes

www.scpwiki.com

Feedback on the article from users of the site was also preserved:

“There’s quite a few capitalization and grammatical errors (eg. ‘prefect’, etc.). But apart from this, I didn’t really find this especially humorous. This basically (in a way) tried to subtlely bash on other 5kcon entries in a particularly unpleasant way, especially with how you talked abt djkaktus’ 5kcon entry. So yeah, -1.” — DrUnoriginal
“This comes off as really pitying. I didn’t like DjKaktus’s proposal at all, but bringing it up, explicitly in a tale about how your piece didn’t do to well comes off as whiny and immature to me.
Downvotes aren’t fun to receive but we’ve all gotten them, even the best of us, same with deletions. My advice is keep writing and posting and trying your best, rather then writing self-pitying pieces such as this. Firmly downvoted.” — Amelia Wright
“Uh there isn’t a market for roast-style comedy here, regardless of the circumstances. It violates rule zero which is simple; don’t say anything mean. And especially about individual authors, ones who have helped the site grow over many years. You really think Kak just cares about winning? You’re missing a bigger point mate. Seagull’s article would be great in 5555, I hope they get it if not the 5000 slot.
SNL is hiring writers last I heard though. I do hope Snombert makes another appearance, great name.” — archaeologyofsilence, which was actually me (AoS — > ToS) with a bit of tongue-in-cheek-ness re: Kaktus and the utter lack of a sense of self-reflective humor on the site
“I don’t get what the ‘shitting on veteran authors’ trend is about. Yeah, they can come off as little harsh sometimes, but they’re still people and they built the site you’re posting on. Plus, even in this Tale where you’re trying to set yourself up in a sympathetic light, you still call attention to the fact that you completely ignored what the 5k contest is all about.
I didn’t want to say anything earlier because I knew I would say something harsh, but this has been bothering me. Downvoted.
Quick edit: Hadn’t noticed your post where you said it isn’t about you, but my point still stands. Why would you name a character after yourself if it doesn’t represent you, though? I know a lot of older authors have ‘avatars’, but at least they’re based on their creators a little.” — TrustyOlValet2
“The larger sin is that this is a really poorly written tale. Maybe that was the point? Hard to gauge intent — certainly would prefer to assume that the low quality on display here was some kind of ironic artistic choice as opposed to something else. As a piece that communicates some kind of message, it’s not really fair to the message to have it muddled in something as thoroughly pedestrian as this. I mean, really: ‘Statues that move if you don’t look, killer graffiti, large eels and other scary things (Although there where also some funny articles and tearjerking ones)’
Grammar and formatting issues aside the structure of this is almost aggressively high school (Not really a knock against all of our high school aged users, but coming from someone who has spent a lot of time reviewing high school age written pieces you gotta know that this is the ~trend~) and can’t even keep a consistent tense throughout the piece. It jerks back and forth between ideas at an almost mind-scratching pace, doesn’t give the thoughts on display any time to develop, etc. Just not very high quality at all.
I certainly don’t know anything about the author (except for their propensity to talk shit when downvoted, I guess?) but I think it’s fair to say that more preparation could’ve gone into this before posting it to the site. The best pieces of shit talking are, in my experience, those that do not fumble their way into this world and leave meekly on a deletion vote. In other words, if you’re going to do something, do it right — this piece is not sufficiently well-written enough to accomplish what the author was aiming for, I believe.” — djkaktus, who just can’t resist biting bait
“I have to agree with Kaktus here. The problem isn’t really with the fact you mention other people’s articles (which IS a crappy thing to do) it’s that this is just really low-effort in my eyes.
For one, this is less than half a page. For two, this is…what, just a description of the posting process of something that’s gonna get deleted? For three, this comes off as super whiny about your article not getting upvoted. Beyond that, what person is this supposed to be in? Third person? Who is he talking to? This comes off more as second person. Also, you have spelling errors.” — DrMagnus

The farcical intent of this jewel which prophesied its own demise well was utterly lost on the high-brow and esoteric palates of the site’s elite. They literally took the opportunity to critique it as if it were a genuine attempt at posting. This is like a wine snob picking up a glass of urine and giving it a thorough analysis and review on why it is not a good wine.

These users had zero realization that their responses are the real punchline. Just another demonstration that the prevailing attitude at SCP is so pompous that it has lost its sense of triviality. So elevated is the expectation of the critiquing crowd that they were legitimately confused by this. So holy do they regard the hallowed pages of their Wiki that the thought of something being submitted in irreverence as mockery is too remote to fathom.

The best trolls leave room in their trolling for participation of the trolled. They invite them in to sit down and have a cup of tea, the meeting impossible and defeatingly lonely without them. SNOM, whether intentionally or not, redemonstrated that vocal SCP authors, a couple in the upper crust of influence here, are mentally broken individuals. He played these stuffy ass authors like a fiddle. What a nice song. 🎼 🎶 🎵

Luckily — and with a ton of foresight, good fundamental analysis and an instant recognition of classic articles, and with the mythical sense of humor that SCP has banned for being insensitive to users with sticks up their asses — your boy LoL preserved the whole article. I was too naive to archive this in the Wayback or archive.today, but I did happen to snap screencaps. This in turn means that I believe this blog is the only place on the Internet to relive the magic of SNOM’s 5K entry in its entirety and as it was prior to deletion.

So without further ado, I present SNOM’s 5000 contest SCP entry (he calls it a proposal, actually a “preposal”):