The SA forums were so amazing from 2000-2004. I spent some of my most formative years posting there (no regrets!). It's pretty crazy to think how many people wh

The SA forums were so amazing from 2000-2004. I spent some of my most formative years posting there (no regrets!). It's pretty crazy to think how many people who were active on SA around then went on do Big Things: - CliffyB - moot - notch - deadmau5 - llamaguy (guessing most people here don't know who he is, but he created a Gamefaqs spinoff called Luelinks/EndOfTheInternet, and was one of the first 100 employees at Facebook and is now a 9-figure millionaire) - vilerat (aka Shawn Smith, one of the Americans who died in Benghazi) - garry (of garry's mod and rust fame) - Yahtzee Stuff that can trace back to SA around that time: - 4chan itself - Memes ("image macros") - Let's Plays - Weird Twitter - That shitposting/shittexting ironic writing style that is now beloved by modern middle/upper class American teenagers everywhere Nearly everyone that I met as a teenager and still keep in contact with is really successful. Sadly, I think Lowtax is the most incompetent businessperson I've ever encountered. It's frankly amazing how badly he mismanaged the SA forums, and how much he took all of that amazing talent that was creating free content for him for granted. I think the best example is how he initially offered Yahtzee some insultingly paltry compensation for doing Zero Punctuation. IIRC it was like $100 per episode. Zero Punctuation alone could have kept SA relevant, I think. The stuff that went down in 2005 and beyond drove all of the best posters away, IMO.