20 ms·

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

256 points by elsewhen 5y ago

acheron 5y ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198
pstuart 5y ago
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.
- theknocker 5y ago
  Yeah great time for you to air your grievances about the bill of rights. Thanks.
- sennight 5y ago
  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...
- tylersmith 5y ago
  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.
  - newbie789 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        ??? The analogous response would be "no he wasn't, what are you talking about". You're going after the wrong person here.
        5y ago
  - astrange 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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."
      - astrange 5y ago
        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.
- pram 5y ago
  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.
  - newbie789 5y ago
    Moderation on a private forum is a form of (free) expression.
    - noah_buddy 5y ago
      If this is your best evidence that this guy was an advocate of unfettered free speech, that seems very nebulous and weak.
      - newbie789 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - pram 5y ago
      Wow so true and yet that still doesn't make Lowtax an advocate for unfettered free speech.
      - newbie789 5y ago
        Lowtax isn’t an advocate for anything, he’s dead.
  - redisman 5y ago
    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
- Svperstar 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
stolenmerch 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Fuck it all and fucking no regrets... - Metallica; Master of Puppets; Damage, Inc;
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
dang 5y ago
There was a big thread about this already: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 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.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  This is one of the times you could use title editing for good.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  That's right, there have already been enough ewwwlogies written about him.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    > ewwwlogies This is an amazing word. Thank you.
sidlls 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    You’re just learning about the concept of dark humor today?
  - sidlls 5y ago
    Absurdist and dark humor have been around as long as humans have lived. They’re all around you, right now.
newbie789 5y ago
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)
- cortesoft 5y ago
  "Auto banned" by somebody seems like a contradiction?
  - newbie789 5y ago
    “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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    > multiple garbage bags Sounds like a remarkable suicide
    - Reuzel 5y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/ZHqJSwL.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/ZHqJSwL.jpeg
      - newbie789 5y ago
cm2012 5y ago
The Reddit thread has a lot more details https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/something_awful_founder_richard_lowtax_kyanka/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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 naïve 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.
Reuzel 5y ago
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 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.
- artursapek 5y ago
  Seeing history preserved on 20 yo threads like that is pretty nuts
- Reuzel 5y ago
  :( 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-space/1/ https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-spa...
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Please tell me this wasn’t the thread they were setting footage of the jumpers to Yakkety Sax
- fao_ 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 https://jaytholen.net/dropsy2.html And, the collective scam baiting, with the p-p-p-powerbook. http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf I still shiver at the words "keyboard goop".
ffhhj 5y ago
> “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".
gfodor 5y ago
In the end, the Internet made us stupid.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  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.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    > the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings. So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful. Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
    - gfodor 5y ago
      I mean, that filter had its benefits, but it is also a really bad filter in many ways. Plenty of people who are smart enough to set up Trumpet Winsock also took that to mean they knew everything, and at the same time, some of the greatest minds of the last generation struggle with email. I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.
oceanghost 5y ago
I guess the pusher robot got the last laugh.
riffic 5y ago
best story going around so far is the one where he turned down 13 million in 2006
- riffic 5y ago
  imagine all the mangosteen he could have bought for that.
  - pram 5y ago
    By my calculations that is at least 13000 $1000 chairs
devonkim 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > 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.html 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.
grammarnazzzi 5y ago
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.
plif 5y ago
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 5y ago
RIP to a real one.
meerita 5y ago
I had such great memories. I loved Jeff K! Photoshop Friday and almost all the content there.
Ansil849 5y ago
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.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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&threadid=3984488&pagenumber=120&perpage=40#post519160186 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
    - teakettle42 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
orionblastar 5y ago
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 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding
mattlondon 5y ago
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?
- RangerScience 5y ago
  Well, one thing is the impact Goons have had on Eve Online. But it sounds like you don't want to be convinced, so...
- whateveracct 5y ago
  I mean.. something awful was a community and fixture for many. That in itself is special.
- vasco 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?
donatj 5y ago
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.
rotoole 5y ago
Thanks for the eulogy Fragmaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8
nemo44x 5y ago
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.
jaggs 5y ago
Not to be overly dramatic, but SomethingAwful may have saved my life. I remember feeling rotten back in 2012 and doing a search and up popped a SA thread on keto. Probably one of the earliest threads on the new 'miracle' diet and lifestyle. I read through the thread recognized a bunch of truths and went low carb immediately. Sad to hear he's gone in such a grisly way.
ctvo 5y ago
I joined the SA forums when I was 10. I think it did more to mold my personality, sense of humor, and how I view the internet than anything else in my life. I was exposed to things I had no right knowing (it's a wedding band). I'm thankful. I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Things I saw first on SA: - Micro transactions - Paid membership for content - Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users) - Image macros - Let's play videos - Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level - Libertarian white men in engineering and technology - Social justice warriors Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.

256 points by elsewhen 5y ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198

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.

theknocker 5y ago
Yeah great time for you to air your grievances about the bill of rights. Thanks.
sennight 5y ago
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...
tylersmith 5y ago
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.
- newbie789 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        ??? The analogous response would be "no he wasn't, what are you talking about". You're going after the wrong person here.
        5y ago
- astrange 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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."
    - astrange 5y ago
      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.
pram 5y ago
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.
- newbie789 5y ago
  Moderation on a private forum is a form of (free) expression.
  - noah_buddy 5y ago
    If this is your best evidence that this guy was an advocate of unfettered free speech, that seems very nebulous and weak.
    - newbie789 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - pram 5y ago
    Wow so true and yet that still doesn't make Lowtax an advocate for unfettered free speech.
    - newbie789 5y ago
      Lowtax isn’t an advocate for anything, he’s dead.
- redisman 5y ago
  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
Svperstar 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

stolenmerch 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Fuck it all and fucking no regrets... - Metallica; Master of Puppets; Damage, Inc;
JohnBooty 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

dang 5y ago

There was a big thread about this already: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29184198 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.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
This is one of the times you could use title editing for good.
DonHopkins 5y ago
That's right, there have already been enough ewwwlogies written about him.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > ewwwlogies This is an amazing word. Thank you.

sidlls 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  You’re just learning about the concept of dark humor today?
- sidlls 5y ago
  Absurdist and dark humor have been around as long as humans have lived. They’re all around you, right now.

newbie789 5y ago

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)

cortesoft 5y ago
"Auto banned" by somebody seems like a contradiction?
- newbie789 5y ago
  “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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  > multiple garbage bags Sounds like a remarkable suicide
  - Reuzel 5y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/ZHqJSwL.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/ZHqJSwL.jpeg
    - newbie789 5y ago

cm2012 5y ago

The Reddit thread has a lot more details https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/something_awful_founder_richard_lowtax_kyanka/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...

deltaonefour 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 naïve 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.

Reuzel 5y ago

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 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.

artursapek 5y ago
Seeing history preserved on 20 yo threads like that is pretty nuts
Reuzel 5y ago
:( 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-space/1/ https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-spa...
selimthegrim 5y ago
Please tell me this wasn’t the thread they were setting footage of the jumpers to Yakkety Sax
fao_ 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 https://jaytholen.net/dropsy2.html And, the collective scam baiting, with the p-p-p-powerbook. http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/thepowerbook.pdf I still shiver at the words "keyboard goop".

ffhhj 5y ago

> “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".

gfodor 5y ago

In the end, the Internet made us stupid.

EdwardDiego 5y ago
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.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > the Internet has enabled stupidity on a massive scale No, it was making access to the Internet easy that caused this. Used to be in the Windows 95 / 98 (and earlier) era, you had to actually have a fucking brain and read directions and do what you were told, i.e., setting up TCP/IP settings for your dial-up Internet connection. You had to read, and to think, because there wasn't always 24/7 tech support to clean up after you when you legitimately fucked up some settings. So you learned, and like all learning, it was hard and painful. Once things became as easy as just plugging something in and turning it on, then you had people who were not only not that bright, but also lazy, joining in. From 1995 to around 2005 was, I think, my favorite time using the Internet. I find myself increasingly distancing from the large social media sites precisely because they allow low-effort individuals access, or they've dramatically shifted from their own stated ethos (Reddit being a perfect example, imo - the shift from nearly unlimited free speech to hilariously moderated).
  - gfodor 5y ago
    I mean, that filter had its benefits, but it is also a really bad filter in many ways. Plenty of people who are smart enough to set up Trumpet Winsock also took that to mean they knew everything, and at the same time, some of the greatest minds of the last generation struggle with email. I think more than the setup filter, the filter of having people learn what it takes to host their own content on the Internet is actually quite a bit worse. Since not only do we lose the quality bar, but it also has led to centralization.

oceanghost 5y ago

I guess the pusher robot got the last laugh.

riffic 5y ago

best story going around so far is the one where he turned down 13 million in 2006

riffic 5y ago
imagine all the mangosteen he could have bought for that.
- pram 5y ago
  By my calculations that is at least 13000 $1000 chairs

devonkim 5y ago

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 5y ago
Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > 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.html 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.

grammarnazzzi 5y ago

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.

plif 5y ago

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 5y ago

RIP to a real one.

meerita 5y ago

I had such great memories. I loved Jeff K! Photoshop Friday and almost all the content there.

Ansil849 5y ago

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.

teakettle42 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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&threadid=3984488&pagenumber=120&perpage=40#post519160186 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.

orionblastar 5y ago

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 https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-friend-in-hiding

mattlondon 5y ago

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?

RangerScience 5y ago
Well, one thing is the impact Goons have had on Eve Online. But it sounds like you don't want to be convinced, so...
whateveracct 5y ago
I mean.. something awful was a community and fixture for many. That in itself is special.
vasco 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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?

donatj 5y ago

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.

rotoole 5y ago

Thanks for the eulogy Fragmaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UkcZ4LtSE8

nemo44x 5y ago

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.

jaggs 5y ago

Not to be overly dramatic, but SomethingAwful may have saved my life. I remember feeling rotten back in 2012 and doing a search and up popped a SA thread on keto. Probably one of the earliest threads on the new 'miracle' diet and lifestyle. I read through the thread recognized a bunch of truths and went low carb immediately. Sad to hear he's gone in such a grisly way.

ctvo 5y ago

I joined the SA forums when I was 10. I think it did more to mold my personality, sense of humor, and how I view the internet than anything else in my life. I was exposed to things I had no right knowing (it's a wedding band). I'm thankful. I haven't kept up over the years. This feels eerily like a scene from Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Things I saw first on SA: - Micro transactions - Paid membership for content - Fail whale (2000 -> 5000 concurrent users) - Image macros - Let's play videos - Moderation policies on racism, etc. way before anything else on the internet self-moderated content at this level - Libertarian white men in engineering and technology - Social justice warriors Some of these aren't unique, but we're talking early, early 2000s for many of these things.