Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died(vice.com)
vice.com
Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dmqb/richard-lowtax-kyanka-founder-of-something-awful-is-dead-at-45
184 comments
That's right, there have already been enough ewwwlogies written about him.
> ewwwlogies
This is an amazing word. Thank you.
This is an amazing word. Thank you.
This is one of the times you could use title editing for good.
What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users that still post in the technical sections is incredibly high as a rule when most other communities tend to need a lot more attention to curate the content. So in an ironic sense, Something Awful is an irony to me in that it’s actually now some of the better community created content on the Internet.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more
Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s
a bit of a pity the business model never
really panned out at scale.
By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route.
There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people.
One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well.
The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue.
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more
Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc.
I agree with you. One reason you don't hear about this kind of company is the owners don't want competition. "Oh yes, my hobbyist website/forum is clearly struggling... no need to launch a new website in the same space. Ignore my 700k house and paid off Model 3."
Remember that SA was a one-time payment of a fairly nominal amount. The primary purpose was not revenue. It was a combination of giving the users a stake in the community, and making it expensive to post maliciously (since you would burn through accounts).
I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into, although not quite the same obviously.
No, I don't think you can put Substack in that same bucket. Substack has raised a total of $82.4M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 31, 2021 from a Series B round. Their investors are gonna want to get that money back, and how do you think that'll happen? Substack is aiming to scale way beyond SA ever had the ambition to, and probably dreaming about ending up like Twitter, Facebook et al.
I think they meant that Substack is about giving people the tools to do the niche stuff. It's not doing niche stuff itself.
Venture Capital is where good idea's go to die....
Substack is a good idea, but venture capital will ensure they devolve into another Twitter, Facebook, etc... which is not good....
Substack is a good idea, but venture capital will ensure they devolve into another Twitter, Facebook, etc... which is not good....
Substack is trying to be a platform to let people build those kinds of businesses, the way Shopify let's any retailer build an online store.
I like them both. The best part about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something there is a random yokel there to call them out on their shit immediately. And aside from a check mark I barely notice, the posts are indistinguishable.
I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.
I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.
Also the worst thing about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something correct, there is a random yokel there to say they're an idiot immediately
I agree. Unfortunately, in my experience that person‘s criticism is buried in a sea of admirers trying to add to the point to grow their audience. I would love if twitter would embrace argument, instead of unconditional agreement.
I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
Twitter is a soup of opinions all mixed together.
I don't totally disagree with the concept but have you actually been to SA in the last year or two? It makes reddit look like an academic journal. Some of ugliest forums out there.
Depends upon the context and subforums, I've been a fairly active member for like... 20 years now (I am cringing as I typed that out, yikes). It's not that different from Reddit in that respect but it's much more readable for longer posts in a BB format compared to Reddit without a doubt (Reddit always struck me as a more accessible form of old Usenet posting than forums software of the 2000s). The programming and hardware conversation culture is somewhere between the dry conversation on HN and the rapid fire drive-by snark-for-pay that is the common denominator for modern Internet commentary.
I agree with this sentiment. People are currently attempting to do it at scale in a de-centralized way.
Stamp is pay-to-post, and the proceeds go back to the entire community.
https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum
Stamp is pay-to-post, and the proceeds go back to the entire community.
https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum
It's possible your comment brought the site down?
Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (well.com) is paid to post I believe, and has been around since about 1985.
The Well is an Internet pioneer. It long predates the Web.
I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.
I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.
> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now.
Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
----
As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...).
I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht...
----
As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...).
I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
> Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0"
I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
I too consider the label “Web 2.0” to have arisen alongside AJAX, but the greater insight is that periodization of history in general is post-hoc, imprecise, and subjective.
> I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then.
AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s.
> Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious.
Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that).
------
Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s.
> Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious.
Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that).
------
Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
Funny, one of my first freelancing jobs about 20 years ago was working remote for a company that used "identity verification" for some god forsaken reason. It's long dead for other reasons, but at the time they did their research and the #1 reason this was narrowing the funnel was that users assumed the "identity confirmation" thing was a scam, or that the site was porn.
Changing to "service costs $1", Metafilter style, actually brought more money to the company and increased conversions.
Changing to "service costs $1", Metafilter style, actually brought more money to the company and increased conversions.
Internet brands bought up a bunch of v bulletin boards a few years ago. You could pay to be a "premium member" but you still had to deal with the free members and didn't get many benefits other than skipping ands and perhaps access to PM's
They also bought vbulletin itself, and then developed future versions in house.
SA was free and had advertisers, but they disappeared and because the site was such a shitstain on the internet, no advertiser wanted to touch him with a ten foot pole.
> terrible, low effort, low quality content
You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.
> terrible, low effort, low quality content
You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.
There is a front page?
> I just woke up after hearing a crash. There's a big-ass hole in the World Trade Center, and smoke's pouring out of it. My suitemates are freaking out! That kind of sucks . . .
9/11 as it happened http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html
Took about 4 posts for the first joke, something about a band called "I am the World Trade Center" playing their next show while on fire. 10 minutes for the first conspiracy theory: X-files using predictive programming. 22 minutes to pin it on Bin Laden. God I love the internet.
May he forever have stairs in his house.
> I just woke up after hearing a crash. There's a big-ass hole in the World Trade Center, and smoke's pouring out of it. My suitemates are freaking out! That kind of sucks . . .
9/11 as it happened http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html
Took about 4 posts for the first joke, something about a band called "I am the World Trade Center" playing their next show while on fire. 10 minutes for the first conspiracy theory: X-files using predictive programming. 22 minutes to pin it on Bin Laden. God I love the internet.
May he forever have stairs in his house.
Seeing history preserved on 20 yo threads like that is pretty nuts
:(
Corn_Boy - AM what are you saying robot, plese stop it I do not like you. turn yourself off robot!
Corn_Boy - are you there MR lowtax??
Corn_Boy - mr lowtax are you alright??
Corn_Boy - are you there lowtax?????
https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-spa...
Corn_Boy - AM what are you saying robot, plese stop it I do not like you. turn yourself off robot!
Corn_Boy - are you there MR lowtax??
Corn_Boy - mr lowtax are you alright??
Corn_Boy - are you there lowtax?????
https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-spa...
Please tell me this wasn’t the thread they were setting footage of the jumpers to Yakkety Sax
The second post also has a joke:
> Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.. And I thought my morning had sucked so far!
> Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.. And I thought my morning had sucked so far!
Dropsy the Clowns was a very unique Forum game in the pixelated style of Day of the Tentacle / Full Throttle. Collectively choose your own adventure, by incorporating posts and prompts from everyone. https://jaytholen.net/dropsy2.html
And, the collective scam baiting, with the p-p-p-powerbook. http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf
I still shiver at the words "keyboard goop".
And, the collective scam baiting, with the p-p-p-powerbook. http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf
I still shiver at the words "keyboard goop".
I took this news a little harder than I should have. It was like the kids from It found out Pennywise was dead except Pennywise wasn't real and was actually your cousin from another state. His death seems like a time to reflect on the internet of old and maybe even reconnect with old friends you pissed off in a flame war. So many mixed emotions and I'm still thinking about his death two days later.
To each their own but I’ll share a contrasting point of view, resolve to never settle your grudges, and never forgive your enemies.
Yeah. SA's legacy is... complicated, and mixed, to put it mildly.
But SA was so representative of that era of online culture. If you have strong memories of that era, then Lowtax's passing has got to hit you some kind of way.
But SA was so representative of that era of online culture. If you have strong memories of that era, then Lowtax's passing has got to hit you some kind of way.
Best put. I'm not sure if younger people these days can imagine just how anonymous the internet was then.
It had its advantages and disadvantages.
Although I'd still rather live in the future of that world than our current identity-everywhere one.
It had its advantages and disadvantages.
Although I'd still rather live in the future of that world than our current identity-everywhere one.
> can imagine just how anonymous the internet was then.
It wasn't that anonymous on SA though. Once you paid your :tenbux: then the site admins (incl. Lowtax) had your PII, assuming you used your own credit-card, ofc.
I don't recall Lowtax et al. ever doxxed any of their own forum patrons, at least not any in good-standing, but I assume fear from the possibility of being doxxed for being an asshat on the forums kept enough people in-line - not the fact it was $10 in 2001 (hmm, that's $27 in today's money, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ - but that doesn't seem right to me)
It wasn't that anonymous on SA though. Once you paid your :tenbux: then the site admins (incl. Lowtax) had your PII, assuming you used your own credit-card, ofc.
I don't recall Lowtax et al. ever doxxed any of their own forum patrons, at least not any in good-standing, but I assume fear from the possibility of being doxxed for being an asshat on the forums kept enough people in-line - not the fact it was $10 in 2001 (hmm, that's $27 in today's money, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ - but that doesn't seem right to me)
Lowtax wasn't anonymous either... My friend looked up his number and address with whois and we called him, then went to his apartment parking lot and bought t-shirts out of the back of his car. Sometime circa 1999.
[deleted]
You have to press the calculate button. It reports it as around $16.
Derp! Wow, yes... Thank you.
You're correct, although I still get the parent poster's point.
You weren't anonymous on SA in the sense that law enforcement couldn't find out who you were, or whatever, unless you used a burner credit card and... never used your own wifi, or whatever.
But you were anonymous in the "Google search results" sense that nobody was expected to publicly share their real names or faces, and what you posted on SA and its ilk didn't necessarily follow you around for the rest of your life.
You weren't anonymous on SA in the sense that law enforcement couldn't find out who you were, or whatever, unless you used a burner credit card and... never used your own wifi, or whatever.
But you were anonymous in the "Google search results" sense that nobody was expected to publicly share their real names or faces, and what you posted on SA and its ilk didn't necessarily follow you around for the rest of your life.
They did respond to plenty of warrants asking for information on users, including from the secret service
I had strong memories of that time and never cared or engaged with something awful.
The thing is, this is subculture and past of some people. But not all people at the time nor likely majority of us.
The thing is, this is subculture and past of some people. But not all people at the time nor likely majority of us.
I also skipped SA even though my friends loved it. I think it still represents the carefree promise of the old internet.
Well that’s too bad. I had a lot of fun trolling D&D and participating in photoshop Fridays. I remember loading that up and watching 9/11 footage set to the Benny Hill theme practically the day it happened. The forums were just brutal, and hilarious for a certain kind of mind. And the impact on the internet is clear and widespread.
> The forums were just brutal, and hilarious for a certain kind of mind.
I don't want to know that there are people with that kind of mind.
I don't want to know that there are people with that kind of mind.
Stopped reading and posting on SA when they started requiring members to pay to join. That was bullshit that went against the whole ethos.
Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it.
Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.
Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it.
Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.
> Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him.
Was he convicted? It’s very easy to file a domestic violence police report, and that does not remotely mean that the accused was guilty.
Was he convicted? It’s very easy to file a domestic violence police report, and that does not remotely mean that the accused was guilty.
One of his exes posted on SA [1]:
> In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc.
[1] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
> In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc.
[1] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
Divorce courts do not adjudicate domestic violence charges, and what you’re posting is a biased statement by the complaining party.
Meanwhile, he’s dead and can hardly defend himself.
Meanwhile, he’s dead and can hardly defend himself.
So, a civil court finding that Bill is a shitbag is not sufficient reason for a reasonable person to form an negative opinion of Bill?
Being convicted in a criminal court is just one of the more egregious ways to meet the bar for being a shitty human being.
Being convicted in a criminal court is just one of the more egregious ways to meet the bar for being a shitty human being.
> civil court finding
No civil court finding on this accusation has been presented.
What has been presented is a web forum post from the complaining party, who had a great deal of incentive to paint the guy in a poor light.
Is he a shitty human being? Quite possibly, but the mere existence of an accusation filed with the police is not evidence of it.
No civil court finding on this accusation has been presented.
What has been presented is a web forum post from the complaining party, who had a great deal of incentive to paint the guy in a poor light.
Is he a shitty human being? Quite possibly, but the mere existence of an accusation filed with the police is not evidence of it.
Someone on SA supposedly has access to the court documents (dozens and dozens of pages) and shared them, if you want to track that down and provide actual proof that isn't just hearsay. I haven't been on SA for nearly a decade now, and I intend to keep it that way.
[deleted]
Heh, SA was a huge part of my formative years, spent a ton of time (years / many many hours) lurking there. Sad to see the spiral that happened with Lowtax. Feeling very melancholic...
In the end, the Internet made us stupid.
Indeed, amid debates about whether or not he was visionary, you have to admit, looking at the past few years, he was spot on in this regard.
At the very least, the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale, and enabled the rapid spreading of ideas not backed by facts across borders.
As evidenced when people turn out to protests in my country with signs referencing political talking points from a nation 12500km away.
At the very least, the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale, and enabled the rapid spreading of ideas not backed by facts across borders.
As evidenced when people turn out to protests in my country with signs referencing political talking points from a nation 12500km away.
> the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale
No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings.
So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful.
Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings.
So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful.
Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
I mean, that filter had its benefits, but it is also a really bad filter in many ways. Plenty of people who are smart enough to set up Trumpet Winsock also took that to mean they knew everything, and at the same time, some of the greatest minds of the last generation struggle with email.
I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.
I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.
Apparently he abused his kids and wife. He had mental problems. It caused him to sell SA as a result.
The GoFundMe for his children is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding
The GoFundMe for his children is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding
I joined the SA forums when I was 10. I think it did more to mold my personality, sense of humor, and how I view the internet than anything else in my life. I was exposed to things I had no right knowing (it's a wedding band). I'm thankful.
I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Things I saw first on SA:
- Micro transactions
- Paid membership for content
- Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users)
- Image macros
- Let's play videos
- Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level
- Libertarian white men in engineering and technology
- Social justice warriors
Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.
I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Things I saw first on SA:
- Micro transactions
- Paid membership for content
- Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users)
- Image macros
- Let's play videos
- Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level
- Libertarian white men in engineering and technology
- Social justice warriors
Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.
I always thought his insight that the Internet will bring together every oddball idea people have that they used to keep private and it will be awful.
I had such great memories. I loved Jeff K! Photoshop Friday and almost all the content there.
Thanks for the eulogy Fragmaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8
Not to be overly dramatic, but SomethingAwful may have saved my life. I remember feeling rotten back in 2012 and doing a search and up popped a SA thread on keto. Probably one of the earliest threads on the new 'miracle' diet and lifestyle. I read through the thread recognized a bunch of truths and went low carb immediately. Sad to hear he's gone in such a grisly way.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me: So what was the impact on the internet then?
Beyond a few meme templates or abbreviations or whatever, what has the actual lasting impact been?
People say this about 4chan as well, but beyond passing meme fads I have yet to see anything convincing?
Beyond a few meme templates or abbreviations or whatever, what has the actual lasting impact been?
People say this about 4chan as well, but beyond passing meme fads I have yet to see anything convincing?
I mean.. something awful was a community and fixture for many. That in itself is special.
Well, one thing is the impact Goons have had on Eve Online. But it sounds like you don't want to be convinced, so...
Pockets of internet communities shaped internet culture which shapes how society exchanges information online. That's the impact of any large scale forum.
Your question is like asking what the lasting impact of painting is beyond paint on paper.
Your question is like asking what the lasting impact of painting is beyond paint on paper.
Well I don't think many paintings are talked about as "having shaped the painting world/art". They are just some nice pictures or whatever.
Sure - some pieces have shaped art - like first real use of perspective, or that one with the weird stretched skull etc (can't remember names, sorry). Those were pioneers that changed how artists and people thought about and created art. That is what I am wondering about - what happened there first that is now ubiquitous across the internet or changed how people do things from that point onwards? I don't feel like just being popular at the time really changed anything of note.
Things like digg and early Reddit for example did introduce some new things like the social voting of stories (although I am sure they were not necessarily pioneers there but helped popularise it). Likewise YouTube made video sharing and consumption super trivial. Wikipedia, Google maps, Facebook, Flickr. Those introduced/popularized ways that shaped how people use (and built) the internet ... SA and 4chan were/are just popular forums and as far as I can tell (just like any of the other popular forums) were popular in their niche but haven't generated anything of note on how people use the internet apart from a few threads or memes that you only know about if you know about them - e.g. what happened on SA that my grandmother now does when using the internet today? Does my grandmother know about a particular thread about 9/11 or some random Donal trump meme on there? Of course not - but she does use slippy-maps (google maps) and social media (Facebook) and instant in-browser online video (YouTube), online photo galleries (Flickr)
I'm not saying they didn't introduce anything noteworthy, I am just wondering what it was they did because I can't work what is different from any other popular forum?
Sure - some pieces have shaped art - like first real use of perspective, or that one with the weird stretched skull etc (can't remember names, sorry). Those were pioneers that changed how artists and people thought about and created art. That is what I am wondering about - what happened there first that is now ubiquitous across the internet or changed how people do things from that point onwards? I don't feel like just being popular at the time really changed anything of note.
Things like digg and early Reddit for example did introduce some new things like the social voting of stories (although I am sure they were not necessarily pioneers there but helped popularise it). Likewise YouTube made video sharing and consumption super trivial. Wikipedia, Google maps, Facebook, Flickr. Those introduced/popularized ways that shaped how people use (and built) the internet ... SA and 4chan were/are just popular forums and as far as I can tell (just like any of the other popular forums) were popular in their niche but haven't generated anything of note on how people use the internet apart from a few threads or memes that you only know about if you know about them - e.g. what happened on SA that my grandmother now does when using the internet today? Does my grandmother know about a particular thread about 9/11 or some random Donal trump meme on there? Of course not - but she does use slippy-maps (google maps) and social media (Facebook) and instant in-browser online video (YouTube), online photo galleries (Flickr)
I'm not saying they didn't introduce anything noteworthy, I am just wondering what it was they did because I can't work what is different from any other popular forum?
Saying things only have relevance if your grandma knows about them is definitely not a bad faith argument!
I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.
Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on"
A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts.
The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and even briefly think about it) is that we would have avoided Donald Trump if lowtax had not banned hentai on the forums.
Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on"
A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts.
The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and even briefly think about it) is that we would have avoided Donald Trump if lowtax had not banned hentai on the forums.
You're talking about vilerat; great guy. There are writeups about him.
The most well-known write-ups of the not great guy vilerat are his racist tirades against African people.
You're confusing "great" with "good". They are not the same.
Genghis Khan was a great man. You cannot unify a nomadic people and conquer a shitload of Asia and not be a great man. Given that under his leadership, the Mongols literally reduced the carbon footprint of the whole planet based upon the amount of people they killed, you could easily claim he was not a "good" man.
Genghis Khan was a great man. You cannot unify a nomadic people and conquer a shitload of Asia and not be a great man. Given that under his leadership, the Mongols literally reduced the carbon footprint of the whole planet based upon the amount of people they killed, you could easily claim he was not a "good" man.
> I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)
4chan's influence is not good but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In fact it's so influential that a lot of the garbage on there bleeds into the real world e.g. Pizzagate, QAnon, the OK symbol means 'white power' hoax. Most of the terrible stuff that people blame facebook or twitter for spreading usually comes from there.
4chan hardly had any responsibility for Qanon. Q poster was banned very early after most recognised it as a larp. It is overwhelmingly the legacy of infinity chan.
This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.
This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.
4chan was influential in many other ways, from all of Anonymous’s ops, to playing a role at Occupy and other protests. SA led to the rise of the Dirtbag Left, to Brown Moses and bellingcat, to r/wallstreetbets culture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185381
It's a community so, you had to be there to understand I guess.
Lotax was formative to our medium, like him or not, I think he deserves the black bar as his work has shaped the internet in no small way.
I guess the pusher robot got the last laugh.
RIP to a real one.
Lowtax was by all accounts a real piece of garbage by the end, but he undoubtedly created a place that changed the internet permanently.
I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though. For example, he was basically auto banned from Twitter by… somebody with the ability to make those decisions at their discretion. I’ve always wondered who that was. In my head, it’s always been a funny thought that Jack Dorsey is some embittered ex-goon that never got over losing $10. (I have no reason to believe this is the case, but it gives me a chuckle)
I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though. For example, he was basically auto banned from Twitter by… somebody with the ability to make those decisions at their discretion. I’ve always wondered who that was. In my head, it’s always been a funny thought that Jack Dorsey is some embittered ex-goon that never got over losing $10. (I have no reason to believe this is the case, but it gives me a chuckle)
Reuzel(1)
Lot of ire for him getting banned from a private corporation's service, yet not much ire for him doing him doing nothing to stop people on his forums from harassing the shit out of dozens if not hundreds of people - criminal behavior in many jurisdictions.
Or the fact that he apparently planned his suicide out enough that he purportedly intentionally spent all the money in the joint account he had with his wife before he killed himself. Made sure his lawyer got paid, but left his kids high and dry.
Dude was a piece of shit in real life and online, through both his own behavior and what he enabled and willfully allowed to happen.
Or the fact that he apparently planned his suicide out enough that he purportedly intentionally spent all the money in the joint account he had with his wife before he killed himself. Made sure his lawyer got paid, but left his kids high and dry.
Dude was a piece of shit in real life and online, through both his own behavior and what he enabled and willfully allowed to happen.
I felt real ashamed of the 10bux I gave Lowtax (years ago) after reading about how he treated his wife. There's a GoFundMe for her and her kids, and I sent them 10bux a couple days ago to make me feel better.
Something awful dot com was also blackholed by Google for many years because they did something to piss-off the internet overlords. (For most of the 2000s, you could google for "JeffK" and SA wouldn't show up until like page 20.)
I view Lowtax like Norm McDonald or many other people who provided me a lot of mirth years ago. I would rather not know if they turned out to be a terrible person or not. RIP internet funny man.
I view Lowtax like Norm McDonald or many other people who provided me a lot of mirth years ago. I would rather not know if they turned out to be a terrible person or not. RIP internet funny man.
> created a place that changed the internet permanently.
Not in a particularly positive way. It seems like every truly awful person I've interacted with online has roots back to SA.
Not in a particularly positive way. It seems like every truly awful person I've interacted with online has roots back to SA.
I know Tom Scott, known now for his YouTube videos, was on the forums (I produced a remix for a charity single he made). He's turned out overwhelmingly wholesome and level-headed.
SA's sweep was so wide that it encompassed both ends of the spectrum. A lot of good stuff also originated there, including the Welcome to Night Vale podcast drama series.
> I find it kind of funny the amount of ire he drew long before the abuse allegations surfaced though.
People have to deal with and react to abusive people years and years before big abuse happens and becomes public. That sort of behavior don't comes out of nowhere, but rather escalates over time.
People have to deal with and react to abusive people years and years before big abuse happens and becomes public. That sort of behavior don't comes out of nowhere, but rather escalates over time.
The Reddit thread has a lot more details https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...
deltaonefour(2)
pstuart(5)
> “I'm obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be shitty back in 1999,” Kyanka told Motherboard in 2017. “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.”
Yeah, obviously not a visionary, otherwise we would have said that about "metaverse".
Yeah, obviously not a visionary, otherwise we would have said that about "metaverse".
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 - Nov 2021 (304 comments)
But the current article goes more into the history and influence of SA, and perhaps that is worth talking about? The sordid personal stuff has already had a thorough treatment.