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Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

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Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#51

Post by newbie789 »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #28
newbie789 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having rules on a private website is against the concept of free speech? How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.

> If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech. Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true. I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote…

> I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote their ideas

I wouldn’t do that. I’m not sure why anybody would.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#52

Post by Reuzel »

Reuzel wrote: post #17

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…

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".

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#53

Post by bcrosby95 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50
ethbr0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

You have to press the calculate button. It reports it as around $16.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#54

Post by [deleted] »

newbie789 wrote: post #16
noah_buddy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is your best evidence that this guy was an advocate of unfettered free speech, that seems very nebulous and weak.

Oh sorry, I didn’t realize that we’re talking about “unfettered free speech” which doesn’t appear in the article. Yes, it is true that he did not advocate for your flavor of “freedom” (forcing private entities to host and serve any and all content that you can possibly barf up in perpetuity)

[deleted]

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#55

Post by freethrow_2001 »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #28
newbie789 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having rules on a private website is against the concept of free speech? How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.

> If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech. Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true. I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote…

I absolutely would.

Because child porn is evidence of a crime and in of itself it shouldn't be a crime. Any more than owning snuff films, like the ones made by the Mexican cartels, should be a crime.

The more the evidence is hidden the more the criminals get away with it. The more public the crime is the quicker it is stopped.

Back in the dark days of 4chan you had child porn posted regularly on there and you would see people getting busted in real time from a bag of chips that was sold in one specific state. Today you hear about children who were abused for decades because no one from the general public saw the videos and did something about it.

The people who want it hidden don't care about children, they care about being holier than thou.

I can't host such a site because I'd get arrested. Sent from tor because society is insane enough that pointing something this obvious out will get you lynched.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#56

Post by JohnBooty »

devonkim wrote: post #33

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…

    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.
It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it.

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 feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#57

Post by Consultant32452 »

devonkim wrote: post #33

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…

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.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#58

Post by Reuzel »

newbie789 wrote: post #11

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…

> Lowtax was by all accounts a real piece of garbage by the end

Yeah, I heard his ex-wives had to carry the body outside in multiple garbage bags. Fitting.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#59

Post by ycombobreaker »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #49
Apocryphon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.

> 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: ClassMa…

> 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.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#60

Post by deltaonefour »

cm2012 wrote: post #26

The Reddit thread has a lot more details https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...

I want to hear the Moms' side of the story. An abusive man can wield power through domestic violence but an abusive women is far more insidious. An abusive woman does not have the strength to employ violence so she uses other means inflict damage. Manipulation, legal tactics, lies and other techniques are used. The key here is that most of these techniques are subtle.

I don't know what happened here, but I can almost guarantee that the full story hasn't been told by the ex-wife. This is not to say the ex-wife is wrong, but I am 100% sure that aspects of the suicide that she was a direct contributor to are deliberately not mentioned in her little comment there. Rarely is a story so one-sided.

One thing that really pisses me off is this:

"I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours."

Someone is dead. Some vitriolic wall of text from the mother of a person who just died is normal. You need to share private information just to feel better? That is not justification AT ALL. What the hell did she do to push him to put a bullet into his own skull without saying goodbye to his childen? What WAS on that vitriolic wall of text that she is deliberately not mentioning?

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