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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

#171

Post by eluusive »

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 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

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

#172

Post by astrange »

icehawk wrote: post #85
astrange wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts leading to 4chan According to people who weren't there at the time, yes. (That mostly happened several years later on SA.)

No that basically all happend around the same time. If you look at the SAclopedia entries for ADTRW, they're all from early 2004 and you see things like "The fact that Lowtax hates makes it the forum whipping-boy."

Those were written by random goons which aren't any better of a source. It didn't seriously affect ADTRW until the Helldump era - one of Lowtax's worst ideas where he just turned the forums into a circular firing squad, then after people made him delete it, whined about it for the rest of his life.

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

#173

Post by mountainb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #152
mountainb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a problem with the post-'60s post-Chatterly trial conception of free speech. Since then, amidst other developments, the concept of free speech has been conflated with a rabid opposition to any obscenity laws. The US and Great Britain have had a much longer history in which free speech had a meaning separate from the absence of prohibition against obscene material (with some small exceptions we have today like…

> There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech. Yes, there is. There is, in fact, a fundamental contradiction between the idea that the State can declare content “illegal” and “free speech”. The obscenity exception turns free speech from “the government cannot ban content” to “the government cannot ban content unless both…

For most of American history, neither the legislators nor the courts saw a contradiction between censorship on obscenity grounds and free speech. And in principle, we still recognize that principle: it's just we define the line arbitrarily and subjectively around things like snuff films and child porn. The current interpretation of free speech is a mutant interpretation of the concept as written by the founding generation.

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

#174

Post by newbie789 »

tylersmith wrote: post #19
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.

Having rules against certain content means you are not a platform for "unfettered free speech". That's not some sort of moralistic slur it's just a fact that runs contrary to the post I was responding to. It's not "against the concept of free speech" to run a platform with censorship/moderation, it just means your platform isn't a place to practice it.

I’m still waiting on your publicly accessible upload portal for tentacle porn. At this point, your reticence to give me access to your personal website’s storage has crossed from censorious to violating the non-agression policy. It’s quite telling that you’re aggressively anti-free speech.

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

#175

Post by devonkim »

anm89 wrote: post #166
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 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.

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

#176

Post by FranksTV »

capableweb wrote: post #102
jychang wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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

#177

Post by mountainb »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #154
dragonwriter wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech. Yes, there is. There is, in fact, a fundamental contradiction between the idea that the State can declare content “illegal” and “free speech”. The obscenity exception turns free speech from “the government cannot ban content” to “the government cannot ban content unless both…

These arguments take a form which implies that each right operates in a vacuum. But, of course, if we were to allow any right without exception, then we would soon find that we have no rights. Not only would the limitless interpretation of one right eventually decimate other rights but, apart from that, it would also undermine society's solvency; hence its ability to enforce even the expanded right. Rights, as ideas,…

They don't operate within a vacuum: the historical context matters. Over the last 400-500 years, the Anglo-American elite mostly decided to support the free exchange of ideas relating to politics and religion to support vigorous debate and an open public sphere. That's the primary value that the first amendment is supposed to protect. It's also supposed to act as a sort of political safety valve that prevents civil war and that tends to privilege parliamentary procedure over arbitrary executive/royal rule.

The intention was not to enshrine a right to smut in the constitution, nor was it to legalize criminal harassment, threats, or defamation. That's something that was read into it by judicial activism.

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

#178

Post by maskaler »

eluusive wrote: post #171
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 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

It's possible your comment brought the site down?

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

#179

Post by Breza »

JohnBooty wrote: post #56
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 "a…

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."

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

#180

Post by Breza »

watwut wrote: post #131
JohnBooty wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I also skipped SA even though my friends loved it. I think it still represents the carefree promise of the old internet.
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