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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

#101

Post by lazyfuture »

mattlondon wrote: post #97

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?

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.

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

#102

Post by capableweb »

jychang wrote: post #86
JohnBooty wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "a…

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.

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

#103

Post by ocdtrekkie »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #73
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…

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 befor…

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.

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

#105

Post by vkou »

teakettle42 wrote: post #94
Ansil849 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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.

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

#106

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #53
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Derp! Wow, yes... Thank you.

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

#108

Post by teakettle42 »

vkou wrote: post #105
teakettle42 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

#109

Post by lotophage »

Apocryphon wrote: post #46
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…

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.

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

#110

Post by mejutoco »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #57
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.

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)

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