[HN Gopher] Richard 'Lowtax' Kyanka, founder of Something Awful,...
___________________________________________________________________
Richard 'Lowtax' Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
Author : elsewhen
Score : 245 points
Date : 2021-11-13 23:19 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| Reuzel wrote:
| 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.
| fao_ wrote:
| 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!
| Reuzel wrote:
| 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".
| artursapek wrote:
| Seeing history preserved on 20 yo threads like that is pretty
| nuts
| Reuzel wrote:
| :(
|
| _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...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Please tell me this wasn't the thread they were setting footage
| of the jumpers to Yakkety Sax
| dang wrote:
| There was a big thread about this already:
|
| _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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's right, there have already been enough ewwwlogies written
| about him.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > ewwwlogies
|
| This is an amazing word. Thank you.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| This is one of the times you could use title editing for good.
| ffhhj wrote:
| > "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".
| acheron wrote:
| Dupe
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198
| gfodor wrote:
| In the end, the Internet made us stupid.
| JanneVee wrote:
| The Internet did no such thing. It just amplified human
| propensities. But if you see stupid people on the Internet
| constantly you should reconsider what for and how you use the
| Internet.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| Good advice. I am reconsidering right now actually.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| 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.
| orionblastar wrote:
| 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
| oceanghost wrote:
| I guess the pusher robot got the last laugh.
| riffic wrote:
| best story going around so far is the one where he turned down 13
| million in 2006
| riffic wrote:
| imagine all the mangosteen he could have bought for that.
| pram wrote:
| By my calculations that is at least 13000 $1000 chairs
| cm2012 wrote:
| The Reddit thread has a lot more details
| https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...
| deltaonefour wrote:
| 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?
| Reuzel wrote:
| It's actually all very sad. Lowtax wrote funny columns about
| Uwe Boll's movies, and Uwe charged him to a boxing match.
| Lowtax got his manhood taken from him and never was the same.
| The domestic violence can be seen as him moving down in
| weight class. After a few he actually got pretty good at it
| for his weight advantage. And then this happens.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| What concerned me in that post was this bit:
|
| > His other ex and I got to tell our children that their
| father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved
| them
|
| Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie
| is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may
| be, will only traumatise them further than they may already
| be.
|
| I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic
| relationship with your ex.
|
| Source - based on all my research, and discussions with child
| psychologists, I tell my younger kids, when they need to hear
| it, that their Mom still loves them, she's just working
| through some stuff.
|
| The reality is that her conduct indicates no love whatsoever,
| merely an interest in using our kids to further her
| narcissistic goals ("Winning" against me, even though it's
| not a contest, and garnering sympathy from her well meaning
| but somewhat naive religious community).
|
| And she definitely isn't working through any of her stuff.
| She's only allowed supervised access, and hasn't used it once
| in the nearly 4 years I've had sole custody - because she
| "did nothing wrong", and using it would imply she had.
|
| But, my younger kids still need to hear that she loves them,
| from time to time. I admit that I dislike telling them she
| does, but it's not about me, it's about them.
| enneff wrote:
| I thought the implication was they'd have to tell the kids
| that he died. That he didn't say goodbye is something
| they'll immediately know themselves.
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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?
| whateveracct wrote:
| I mean.. something awful was a community and fixture for many.
| That in itself is special.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Well, one thing is the impact Goons have had on Eve Online. But
| it sounds like you don't want to be convinced, so...
| INTPenis wrote:
| It's a community so, you had to be there to understand I guess.
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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?
| pram wrote:
| Saying things only have relevance if your grandma knows
| about them is definitely not a bad faith argument!
| lazyfuture wrote:
| 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.
| kuraudoOishii wrote:
| You're talking about vilerat; great guy. There are writeups
| about him.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| The most well-known write-ups of the not great guy vilerat
| are his racist tirades against African people.
| david_allison wrote:
| > 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)
| strangeattractr wrote:
| 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.
| jfax wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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
| donatj wrote:
| 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.
| meerita wrote:
| I had such great memories. I loved Jeff K! Photoshop Friday and
| almost all the content there.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > 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.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| 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...
| teakettle42 wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| xenihn wrote:
| 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.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > 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.
| devonkim wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how
| they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.
| lotophage wrote:
| The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (well.com) is paid to post I
| believe, and has been around since about 1985.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > 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.
| ratww wrote:
| 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.
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| > 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| jychang wrote:
| I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into,
| although not quite the same obviously.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| syshum wrote:
| 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....
| nefitty wrote:
| I think they meant that Substack is about giving people
| the tools to do the niche stuff. It's not doing niche
| stuff itself.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Twitter is a soup of opinions all mixed together.
| mejutoco wrote:
| 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)
| mavhc wrote:
| 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
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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
| genewitch wrote:
| They also bought vbulletin itself, and then developed future
| versions in house.
| grammarnazzzi wrote:
| In this topic, pstuart wrote:
|
| > Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss
| over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I'm not
| trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's
| certainly nothing to be celebrated.
|
| When I tried to reply, hackernews responded with: "[flagged]
| Sorry, you can't comment here."
|
| I curious why the system panders to the censorship-assholes who
| flagged a perfectly reasonable discussion point.
| rotoole wrote:
| Thanks for the eulogy Fragmaster:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8
| sidlls wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > 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.
| redisman wrote:
| You're just learning about the concept of dark humor today?
| pstuart wrote:
| Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss over
| the fact that a lot of that shit is _not_ healthy. I 'm not
| trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's
| certainly nothing to be celebrated.
| sennight wrote:
| Advocates for <insert thing you dislike> always seem to gloss
| over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I doubt
| that is a conversation that can really be had online by people
| who aren't pseudo-anonymous - measuring a thing's healthiness
| by the adherent's propensity to kill themselves at elevated
| rates...
| pram wrote:
| Lowtax wasn't an advocate for unfettered free speech lol. He
| encouraged and enabled arbitrary and capricious punishment for
| pretty much anything the forum moderators didn't personally
| like.
| flomo wrote:
| Yep, in fact the SA Forums entire business model was
| "arbitrary and capriciously" banning people so they would re-
| register and pay the 10bux. They had rules, but they were
| fungible enough so that intelligent and hilarious people
| wanted to see what they could get away with. Racism was
| strictly against the rules, but some people could post the
| N-word "because they are funny" (and friends with the
| admins).
|
| Around 2007 or so, SA stopped being an "internet comedy
| forum" and started being "serious internet business" and
| that's when I lost interest.
| bagels wrote:
| Yes, capricious indeed. I paid for forum access, never
| posted anything, and got banned. Last visit to the site.
| [deleted]
| redisman wrote:
| I remember he would run threads that were something like
| "comment to get banned" (or account renamed on milder days).
| And of course everyone including me piled on
| newbie789 wrote:
| Moderation on a private forum is a form of (free) expression.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| If this is your best evidence that this guy was an advocate
| of unfettered free speech, that seems very nebulous and
| weak.
| newbie789 wrote:
| 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]
| pram wrote:
| Wow so true and yet that still doesn't make Lowtax an
| advocate for unfettered free speech.
| newbie789 wrote:
| Lowtax isn't an advocate for anything, he's dead.
| tylersmith wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but Something
| Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts
| leading to 4chan so unfettered free speech isn't something SA
| has ever really been known for.
| astrange wrote:
| > 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.)
| icehawk wrote:
| 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."
| newbie789 wrote:
| 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.
| tylersmith wrote:
| 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.
| newbie789 wrote:
| The phrase "unfettered free speech" only appears in the
| comments here and not in the article. I can also make up
| stuff he _could have_ said but didn't. As far as I know,
| he didn't advocate for changing the name of Myanmar back
| to Burma, so that's an indicator that he supported
| military-run governments?
|
| That being said, if you're not willing to host me and my
| friends' tentacle porn libraries, you're not an advocate
| for free speech at all, so what are we actually talking
| about here?
| tylersmith wrote:
| > The phrase "unfettered free speech" only appears in the
| comments here and not in the article.
|
| Yes, and I responded to that comment and not the article.
| newbie789 wrote:
| So how do I move my tentacle porn collection to your
| personal website? SFTP? Git? Rsync?
|
| I would love to hear your position on free speech
| newbie789 wrote:
| Oh okay.
|
| Here, I'm going to say "Lowtax was a huge fan of K-Pop".
| Since now that's been posted, you can accept it as fact
| and argue that you went through his post history and give
| me your thoughts.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| ???
|
| The analogous response would be "no he wasn't, what are
| you talking about".
|
| You're going after the wrong person here.
| newbie789 wrote:
| What exactly are you trying to have a discussion with me
| about?
|
| Edit: it's wrong of me for uh, responding?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You're harassing someone for basically saying "your
| mention of 'unfettered free speech' is off topic".
|
| While acting like the person that said that is the one
| that brought up 'unfettered free speech'.
|
| You are wrong to do that.
| newbie789 wrote:
| I made an equally arbitrary comment to the one you
| responded to. To save time, Why are you responding to my
| posts? Do you have any personal opinions about Rich
| Kyanka? If so, do you care to share? If not, am I
| expected to debate your position? If so, (again because I
| don't know why you're responding) what exactly is your
| opinion on this topic aside from... not liking what I
| said?
| newbie789 wrote:
| What Are You Talking About
| dang wrote:
| You posted a bunch of flamewar comments in this thread.
| We ban accounts that do that. Would you please review the
| site guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit
| going forward? I'm not going to ban you right now, but
| you've been doing this repeatedly, unfortunately:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022715
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970746
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969532
|
| Posting like that will definitely get you banned if you
| keep it up, so please fix this. Btw, I suppose I should
| mention in a thread about SA that this isn't some sort of
| ethical or moral requirement. We just have those rules
| because we're trying to be a particular kind of website,
| and we need to do something about the sorts of posts that
| impede that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Talanes wrote:
| What conversation do you think you're trying to have
| here?
|
| You started out by getting very heated about a point that
| no one was actually discussing, and then proceeded to get
| very angry that people were responding to a comment chain
| in context with the first comment.
| newbie789 wrote:
| Wait are you part of this conversation? Edit: It
| literally can't be the answer to my question so
| newbie789 wrote:
| Sorry for the repost but: What exactly are you trying to
| have a discussion with me about?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I can also make up stuff he could have said but didn't.
|
| I think you're getting confused. pstuart was the one
| mentioning unfettered free speech, and tylersmith was the
| one saying it's not relevant to the article/SA.
| Talanes wrote:
| Wait are you part of this conversation?
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _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 their ideas, as testament to his
| committment to "free speech". Told him no one should
| believe his committment to free speech if he wasn't willing
| to advocate for those most universally loathed by society.
|
| Guess what I got? Downvotes.
|
| But, that's the heart of it. At the end of the day, these
| people like the _idea_ of "free speech" and they dislike
| the idea of speech they approve not being given the
| broadest possible platform. But, when it hits the fan, it's
| actually the latter that they're addressing with their
| platforms and pronouncements.
| newbie789 wrote:
| > 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.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Well, feel free to substitute something legal or more
| abstract, like tentacle porn.
|
| But, I did it exactly because it's a real-world example
| of near-universally abhorrent speech that I don't think
| they would support on their own platform.
|
| But, the deplatformed and other types who are recently
| lamenting "the great fall of free speech" _always_ offer
| the argument "who gets to decide what speech is
| acceptable?", which is a gratingly disingenuous position
| that pretends we don't have standards and laws, etc. as a
| society. And further pretends that they themselves
| believe there should be no limitations on free speech
| ("unfettered").
|
| We've always had deciders. These people just don't like
| the recent decisions. But, if that's not the case, then
| the only way to prove it is to truly allow all speech on
| their own platform and telegraph that intention by openly
| supporting the speech rights of the most abhorrent people
| in society.
| newbie789 wrote:
| Yeah, these "free speech at all costs!!" folks really
| don't think that individuals and private organizations
| should have the right to curate what appears on the
| platforms they own and pay for. Their version of "free
| speech" necessarily requires taking _away_ others' rights
| to property, which seems kind of odd because that same
| crowd is often going on about ~liberty~.
|
| Every time I see people shaking their fists and yelling
| "MODS!!!!" at the sky it gives me a laugh because that
| person almost certainly has never actually tried to
| provide an open forum or image hosting service. They're
| usually actually fully averse to the idea of doing so,
| hence why nobody has offered to host my collection of
| tentacle porn for free and in perpetuity.
|
| It's not an issue of what these people believe is
| _morally right_ like is often claimed, it's an issue of
| how they _feel_ entitled to be treated as an individual
| regardless of how that impacts the freedom of others.
| There's no ideological consistency of "freedom", just a
| tantrum about not getting enough free services.
| [deleted]
| freethrow_2001 wrote:
| 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.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Its interesting that you mention this infinite money
| problem. Have you ever noticed that the second a fully
| free speech site opens it is almost instantly crippled
| with CP? Do you really think that is just happening
| naaturally? How can something universally loathed also be
| so prolific that it needs to constanly infect venues to
| propogate? Its almost like its a tactic to suppress free
| speech but im just a nut.
| [deleted]
| mountainb wrote:
| 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 child
| pornography).
|
| There is actually no contradiction between moderating to
| remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting
| the principle of free speech. It's just our understanding
| of what free speech is has become deeply muddled.
| Depending on your understanding of free speech, the
| Comstock Law regime for example either contradicts the
| principle or fits within that principle.
|
| SA is a good example of the limits of the post-60s
| conception of free speech and the problems associated
| with a fanatical dedication to an only recently
| established reinterpretation of the first amendment.
| James Madison would not have recognized the post-60s
| speech regime as something he was establishing in Bill of
| Rights. He would have seen it as an odd stretch of a
| relatively ancient and well established principle under
| British law and political culture.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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 the judge [0] and a sufficiently
| large portion of the public sufficiently dislikes it [1]
| and it has to do with sex and/or excretion."
|
| That's not to say the founders wouldn't have agreed with
| it; the founders agreed that hereditary slavery had no
| conflict with the right of persona not to have life or
| liberty deprived without due process of law, so as a
| whole thet had pretty big blind spots in their conception
| of rights.
|
| [0] the official prong being that the work lacks serious
| literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
|
| [1] that the average member of the community would find
| it appeals to a prurient interest.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| 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, have no utility. They must be layered
| onto the substrate of a functioning society. Hence, there
| has always been work towards achieving balance, as every
| right must be circumscribed to some degree.
|
| This is why we have courts, reasonableness standards,
| etc.
|
| So, sure, we could interpret these as "contradictions",
| but that becomes a meaningless characterization in any
| practical sense.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is there more information about the changing definition
| of free speech? How did modern activists get it so wrong?
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Do you really think that is just happening naaturally?
|
| Yes, in the same natural way that water flows down a
| gravity gradient.
|
| As water will be found at the bottom of wells because it
| can't generally flow uphill, content that is excluded
| from every other location will only appear where it is
| not excluded. And the speed at which it appears is the
| speed of communication on the internet, which is fast.
|
| There's no conspiracy here, other than the very dedicated
| conspiracy that is the tiny minority of horrible people
| thirsty for a horrible thing desperate to find an outlet
| for it. It is, unfortunately, the natural consequence of
| _not_ excluding them that they show up and do their thing
| (disproportionately more on a site that allows it because
| no other site will).
| bagels wrote:
| I don't think providing a place where other people can
| say what they want is equivalent to being compelled to
| promote someone elses' speech.
| newbie789 wrote:
| So, how do I upload my collection of tentacle porn to
| your personal website? A true advocate for free speech
| would post their SFTP credentials in the open on this
| website.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| The suggestion was not to support the speech itself, but
| the _right_ to the speech. Big difference.
|
| Many of those who've been deplatformed for disinfo, or
| hateful speech, etc. couch their victimization narratives
| in the loftier ideals of free speech, with the
| disingenuous pronouncenent "who gets to decide?"
|
| My point is that society decides and must necessarily
| decide if we're to continue to have a society. And, if
| they disagree that anyone should have the right to
| decide, then they can demonstrate their committment to
| that belief by openly embracing the speech rights of
| those most _universally_ abhorred.
|
| Otherwise, they acknowledge the existence of and
| rationale for limits, and just want to be the decider.
| Svperstar wrote:
| SomethingAwful forums were NEVER about any kind of free speech.
| They had stifling censorship that drove a lot of the regulars
| off the forums for good.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yup. Unmoderated forums are a sanctuary and a blessing. I
| would never have one - I would run a _very offensive_ forum,
| but not one that annoyed me in any way or else I would
| _brutally_ censor and crush it.
|
| I honestly think the reason SA was so successful (other than
| the buy-in) is that the the only criterion for censorship was
| that you were annoying. That's an arbitrary and unfair
| criterion, though, so you had better be funny or interesting.
| It's certainly whatever the opposite of a free-speech zone
| is.
| theknocker wrote:
| Yeah great time for you to air your grievances about the bill
| of rights. Thanks.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| 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.
| codezero wrote:
| To each their own but I'll share a contrasting point of view,
| resolve to never settle your grudges, and never forgive your
| enemies.
| stoned wrote:
| That's right, amen. Too many people on this planet to deal
| with people you already know. Why bother going back when you
| can move forward. Burn all the bridges.
| djbusby wrote:
| Fuck it all and fucking no regrets... - Metallica; Master
| of Puppets; Damage, Inc;
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > 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)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| You have to press the calculate button. It reports it as
| around $16.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Derp! Wow, yes... Thank you.
| 93po wrote:
| They did respond to plenty of warrants asking for
| information on users, including from the secret service
| toast0 wrote:
| 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]
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| plif wrote:
| 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...
| qualudeheart wrote:
| RIP to a real one.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| newbie789 wrote:
| 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)
| watwut wrote:
| > 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.
| thrower123 wrote:
| > 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| flomo wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| "Auto banned" by somebody seems like a contradiction?
| newbie789 wrote:
| "Basically" was a modifier here, meant to indicate that he
| was not auto-banned in the traditional sense but rather
| quickly in a way that resembled being auto-banned.
| Reuzel wrote:
| > 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.
| vnchr wrote:
| > multiple garbage bags
|
| Sounds like a remarkable suicide
| Reuzel wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/ZHqJSwL.jpeg
| newbie789 wrote:
| HAHAHAHAHA that's a solid joke
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