Question for ex- Something Awful forum fans

You mean the largely friendly group of people that posted and seeded torrents with a minimum of fuss? Idiot.

ex? Did Lowtax die?
― feminazi (feminazi), Tuesday, October 18, 2005 7:01 PM (sixteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah

Can you sue someone’s kids if the parent stole money from you by unfairly banning your forum accounts? Or at least get back at them in some legal way

— Don Hughes (@getfiscal) November 11, 2021

he owed a friend of a friend $500 that they're never getting now

on one hand, SomethingAwful probably did more than any other site to transform the way people talked online, even to the point where fucking brands online speak in a way that's derived entirely from the SA boards. they also "invented" the concepts of memes and shitposting, as well as perhaps the idea that the internet exists to make fun of people who look and act weird. at best you could argue a lot of legitimately funny shit derived from there and that it gave a somewhat welcoming space for people who felt like they didn't fit into normal society. at worst this was the origin of a lot of the post-truth bullshit that has led to some legitimately dangerous places, and while SA is predominantly left-wing these days but it did spawn 4chan, which arguably led to the rise of Trumpism. you could definitely argue that all this would've happened regardless, and you'd probably be right, but still. it started there.

on the other hand, whatever success SA achieved had little to do with Lowtax, who was consistently the least funny person on the site and often made choices that would sabotage and threaten to destroy the entire site. literally the only times when SA would run smoothly was when he got frustrated and fucked off. on the other other hand, he was also a domestic abuser and extremely manipulative. not going to excuse any of it but he also was clearly suffering from some intense mental and physical issues the last few years. as you may know he was forced to sell the site after some serious allegations came out about him and apparently he was in a real bad place after that. according to one of his ex-gfs he just woke up and shot himself. rest in piss good sir 55555

I did see “more like estate tax” and lol’d

i think the key contribution of SA was the early realization that the internet is a bad thing. but i guess it did manifest early as making fun of people who look and act weird. i'd also say SA contributed to the rise of the DSA etc

the fact that the only reporting of this is a bizarre article on getindianews.com is a pretty fitting tribute

https://getindianews.com/is-richard-lowtax-kyanka-dead-or-alive-social-media-death-hoax-explained/

The death cause of Lowtax Kyanka is being stated to be a zip line accident

looooool

Was Lowtax a good person? No.

Has SomethingAwful been a positive influence on the world? Also no.

Is the zipline thread still funny? Yes.

— Fresno Fred (@Suleyman_Grundy) November 11, 2021

i still use SA forums for some of my hobbies that don't get enough discussion on here to sustain me. these days it's pretty much just a chill unmoored-from-the-rest-of-online legacy forum the same way as ilx is, but 50x the size and with a slightly younger userbase. i'm glad they were able to wrestle ownership away from lowtax before he died so it can continue that way

i don't think SA is singularly responsible for weird internet humor, that stuff developed in parallel across a lot of online communities in the 00s. SA was just the biggest and had the most acerbic take on it

Usenet had brigading, trolls, and memes already by the mid-Eighties and probably even earlier. (BTW, when my Ultima porn site was made an Awful Site of the Day, out of the dozen or so emails I got telling me to kill myself, Lowtax's was the most detailed and perscripted.)

I was going to post something similar to Christine but it did not include the phrase "Ultiuma porn site" so it clearly has been made moot

Lol
Link pls

Found it. pic.twitter.com/mXuxikGIZX

— Matt (@Shatners_Ghost) November 11, 2021

It was up as recently as a year ago, but asstr.org seems to have purged it from the archives. I'll probably upload everything I personally wrote to AO3 for archival purposes, but there was other writers there (and in the archive for the small bandfic mailing list I moderated) who's work is now probably gone from the net unless the Internet Archive has it.

they also "invented" the concepts of memes and shitposting

the present-day on-line technology and practice of memes probably but hardly the concept, and shitposting is as old as writing

i mean the albini thread is currently circling round an earlier manifestation of both

There are hieroglyph shitposts ffs

Probably some cave paintings are about Sal pretending that boar he killed was a monster instead of a piglet.

Absolutely all of this shit existed in some format before SA, but I also think the argument "well people did shitty stuff before too" shouldn't excuse the very real part those forums played in making the internet even more toxic.

No one is making any excuses? Just noting that the statement "SA created memes" is wrong?

A way to do some good:

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

xpost = I was just more reacting to frogbs' very otm post above being immediately tagged on with a bunch of "but that wasn't new/unique to SA" posts. I just found SA to be a disgustingly toxic shithole and I don't like to see their impact on the more cesspool corners ignored just because it wasn't the "first" troll breeding ground.

"ignored"

ffs, forgive me for expressing my thoughts imprecisely on an internet forum.

Memes and shitposting are not inherently “shitty stuff” so nobody has said “well people did shitty stuff before too”

I feel like you are willfully misreading people saying "Something Awful is a quantifiable data point that describes a problem much larger than that specific site"

I forgive you Jon

ffs, forgive me for expressing my thoughts imprecisely on an internet forum

tbf this existed before ILX

(sorry, really I am, I found that irresistible)

holy shit, anyone else want to pile on? it was a tossed off point, thoughtlessly worded because i was rushed.

Forgive all of us for responding to a thing you said

To give more context here, then I'll bow out, I had a good friend that somehow, unwittingly, had some of his photoshop work stolen by some SA goons and when he pressed the issue, ended up receiving a lot of shitty death threats and harassment for weeks. It was a really rough time for him, so I've long had a very specific, personal issue with those forums on his behalf.

So I was annoyed to see implications between here and Twitter that, "SA really wasn't that bad because x, y, z" and I was more intending to just emphasize that just how shitty if was shouldn't be minimized just because others got there first/worse, whatever.

The reason everyone is reacting to you is that you were the one who introduced "SA really wasn't that bad" into the conversation so you could yell at us.

Yeah I don’t think that implication has really featured itt

If anything ppl were elaborating on frogbs’s quote marks round “invented” more than rebutting his general point

Thread got really cringey

I'm not yelling at anyone?

The beach house thread has a lot more yelling than this one

lol actually I’m perfectly willing to believe “holy shit, anyone else want to pile on?” is you in soft-spoken, reasonable mode

I was explaining my very specific reasoning for wanting to hold SA accountable for being a breeding ground for really toxic shit and I certainly didn't intend to call out anyone itt, it was more a comment on the general vibe I was getting from some posts. I'm genuinely very sorry for upsetting anyone or anything, it was just one rushed and tangential comment. I don't think I deserved to get piled on by multiple posters for it tho.

You didn’t

lol actually I’m perfectly willing to believe “holy shit, anyone else want to pile on?” is you in soft-spoken, reasonable mode

fwiw, this was meant in a tone of confusion

More than one person responding to you is not getting swatted

show me where I said I was "swatted"

I'm just glad I've never heard of SA before today and shall carry on in almost complete ignorance of what is still, with this pointless irrelevant post my last word on the subject.

this is why I put "invented" in quotes, memes obviously were around before that but I think SA might have been the first organized community to lean hard into shitposting culture. I posted on FYAD for a while and the way people spoke there - like the phrasing, diction, all that - is very similar to how Twitter sounds now. obviously there's been a ton of bad shit to come out of SA, it's almost certainly done more bad than good, but it's still kind of a formative part of a lot of people's lives (for better or worse) and I think the current community is better than it used to be, for whatever that's worth

show me where I said I was "swatted"

Funny, you are the only one who used the word "attack".

“Or pile-on”. I can show you where you said pile-on

You are hard to engage with kindly because you are very careless at reading what other people say and your skin is thinner than the cell membrane of a SARS-COV-2 virion and nobody has the energy to constantly soothe a superannuated toddler’s persecution complex in 2021

What the actual fuck. That was uncalled for.

Look at what Something Awful is doing to us!

truly, it was something awful

xp I'm going to point out, just as a point of fact, that alt.syntax.tactical and (IIRC) the GNAA both predate SA as organized shitposting groups. But neither had had the damaging effect that SA did.

don’t forget Stile Project

Garbage Day today says

Much of the way we talk about platforms comes from Facebook. It launched its News Feed product in 2006 and there is now an entire fields of study and disciplines of journalism focused on what feeds and the algorithms that power them do to us.

But because Facebook is the starting point for a lot of this work, I feel like many of problems of the internet before 2006, or outside of the Facebook orbit, are left out of the conversation. It feels especially on point to be writing this on the day it was announced that Something Awful founder Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka died. There’s a good argument to be made — and many have — that his web 1.5 message board has shaped the sociopolitical evolution of both the global internet and global democracy more than even Mark Zuckerberg. I’m inclined to agree.

I think that era of MySpace, big message boards, Flash cartoons, and LiveJournal drama is in desperate need of a reevaluation through a modern lens. Particularly because TikTok, in many ways, may not be the direct descendent of Vine as many consider it, but actually a glimpse at what an algorithmic MySpace would have looked like if it had been able to achieve Facebookian scale.

I've definitely been seeing massive overstatements of the "SA invented memes & shitposting" variety, but I don't think it's an overstatement to say that they were instrumental in fostering and spreading that culture. It is a foundational place for the way in which the internet works today, whether by accident or design.

My exposure to SA was only tangential and incidental, but that little was enough to convince me it was true to its name. I stayed away.

lol tracer, the last sentence of that is so annoying

im not entirely sure what something awful is though

something awful this way comes

thank you for your time

I'm just glad I've never heard of SA before today

+1

maybe it's time for a Truth & Reconciliation committee

don’t forget Stile Project

oh GOD that shit

Ugh I haven’t seen those words together in 15 years.

another thing about SA that seems kinda unique in hindsight is how weirdly fascist it was for a message board. not in the sense that they harbored fascist views (usually the opposite in fact) but rather the fact that you had to pay money to register and the mods could randomly ban you for any reason they felt like. Lowtax did that shit all the time. I think the fact that there were real "stakes" involved to some extent kept the general shitposting quality high. idk. there really wasn't another community like it.

and the mods could randomly ban you for any reason they felt like

Yes, certainly different than ILX

*Of course* there's a Esteban Buttez post in this thread.

Speaking from personal experience (poster there during a not-at-all healthy time in my younger life, which certainly didn't help things): vast swathes of the SA forums were a particularly dreadful place during its Web 1.0 heyday and in retrospect, quite damaging. Did it have any sort out of influence on The Internet as we know it today? Kinda, but I personally think it's being overstated in the last 24 hours.

one thing I did kinda like was the implicit idea that everything on the internet was stupid and bore no relationship to real life. I think that's something we could use a bit more of in 2021

facebook broke that by bringing a bunch of people online but setting the expectation that they should use their real names/identities rather than WEEDLOVER NARUTO or whatever

lol yeah, I remember being a teenager and thinking it was insane that some people used their real names online

How do you feel about it now, Fr. Ogbs?

honestly given how hot button some political issues are rn I don't really like having my name associated with anything, but it's not very hard to figure out who I am. hell, I'll give you my address right now if you want it

frogbs is short for 'from gbs'

i have some thoughts on a few random things posted here

was stileproject more popular among tech people? i socialize with tech and non-tech people and it always seemed more prevalent among tech people. also, i didn't follow the site closely but i believe it started in 1999, as well. did it change to sensibleerection or was that a sister site? if i recall correctly, around that time there was a british lad's magazine that had obviously nude women in it, but their "thing" was that they also had images of bloodied people either dead or blown up or torn to pieces and stuff. it was all uncensored. our biggest bookstore sold it and it wasn't even in one of those black plastic covers adult magazines would come in. it was very weird

also, regarding memes and shitposting, totally existed way before SA. people were doing that stuff way back in the BBS days, usenet, yahoo groups, and stuff. it's maybe way more widespread now, though, but it was definitely a thing in the 90s

Back when I was writing for
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/~6QAAOSwRMtgDHGP/s-l400.jpg
in 2001, Stile was like the biggest dog in the game

He was straight up like the undisputed king

There was no Issue 2

Are we just tastefully avoiding discussion of the circumstances surrounding and reason for lowtax's death?

I’m not sure people read that far in the thread. Me, well the affected parties aren’t responsible for his shit behaviour.

i didn't actually know until I just googled now

i think it was mostly covered in the first couple posts upthread but yeah he was a serial abuser who spent the past decade secretly being bankrolled by rich parents while pretending that he was going broke due to the forums not pulling in enough money anymore. when the new owner took over the forums a year or two ago and started posting the revenue numbers it was immediately clear that was all bullshit

i miss Portal of Evil tbh

now thats a name i havent heard in ~20 years

Just learned that the Slender Man phenomenon was born on Something Awful

Are we just tastefully avoiding discussion of the circumstances surrounding and reason for lowtax's death?

― lukas, Friday, November 12, 2021 11:33 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's not really a whole lot to say about it. he was a seriously "troubled" individual (to put it nicely) with an incredible knack for always doing the wrong thing in any given moment. dude was given a zillion chances to redeem himself and just couldn't be straight for a single moment, he lied through his teeth on everything and apparently developed a pretty serious addiction to pills which he never sought any help for. for all the people commenting on his death I think Fragmaster is the only person who expressed any fondness whatsoever for him. even when he was alive nearly everyone on the forums thought he was a scumbag.

How did Something Awful get so big, anyway? I've been hanging around online forums for almost 20 years and I somehow remained totally unaware of it.

the name drew em in

there weren't exactly a lot of websites that regularly produced content back then

yeah just funny articles / photoshops / etc in the first few years, then there was a couple year period where they had torrent/filesharing forums back before those were trivial to come by and a lot of people signed up for that, then Lets Plays brought in a lot of people once you got into the youtube era and those became popular

I thought he died in a zip line accident after suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome

i miss Portal of Evil tbh

did the "Lets Play" concept start with SA? that's the first time I heard of it.

I do wonder how many of those filesharing offshoots still live today. NMP3s has bit the dust but it had a pretty good run...suddenly I'm nostalgic for downloading -aps rips off a FTP server, but only 400 MB every 24 hours

yes Lets Plays are one of the things that unambiguously originated on there

the name and concept, at least

https://forums.somethingawful.com/announcement.php?forumid=1

As of this month, Something Awful is 25 years old.

In addition, for the first time in two decades, this is going to be a "free weekend" for account registrations. Free accounts will be limited - they can only view the forums visible to unregistered users, and can only post in a select few forums. Additionally, they will be strictly temporary - they won't become permanent accounts unless they purchase some sort of upgrade. I realize this is a radical departure from how SA has worked for all these years, and I am prepared to pull the plug if something goes terribly wrong. However, I would like to show the world how we've been doing things for 25 years, and this will make it easier to get new people to participate.

These free accounts will have full access to the celebration kickoff forum so come say hello and make them feel welcome in that special SA way.

I still post on there now and again. recently I forgot to log in and I found it's still doing that thing where, if you're not logged in, you see a picture of someone's grandma every 5 posts or so. I can actually remember when that started, like 20 years ago (!!) there was a post asking for grandma pics just because someone thought it would be funny to litter the forum with them if you didn't have an account.

I'm glad that's still active (though I suspect nobody really touches the forums code there), kind of a fun reminder of how silly the internet used to be. can't think of any website doing anything like that anymore, not that "websites" like SA even really exist anymore

though I suspect nobody really touches the forums code there

they have someone actively working on it these days and it leads to incredible stories like 'i tried to remove a decades-old slur in the code base but that somehow broke the whole login system for a while'

I do remember numerous folks asking 'how can it really be so hard to fix the search' and one of the admins (radium?) went over it and I got the impression that trying to fix it turned him into Kurtz from Heart of Darkness