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.
Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
111–120 of 185 posts
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#113Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#114What’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.
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
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#115Perhaps 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?
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.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#116Perhaps 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 ev…
You're talking about vilerat; great guy. There are writeups about him.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#117What’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.
Twitter is a soup of opinions all mixed together.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#118Perhaps 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?
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.
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?
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#119Lowtax 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…
> 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.
Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
#120I had such great memories. I loved Jeff K! Photoshop Friday and almost all the content there.