<story><title>Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died</title><url>https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3984488</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanackley</author><text>Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it&amp;#x27;s depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy&amp;#x27;s accomplishments without being like &amp;quot;oh but it &lt;i&gt;has to be&lt;/i&gt; mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you&amp;#x27;ve lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.</text></item><item><author>extortionist</author><text>He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It&amp;#x27;s important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can&amp;#x27;t be set aside.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, SA&amp;#x27;s influence on the modern internet can&amp;#x27;t be understated. The &amp;#x27;image macro&amp;#x27; of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today&amp;#x27;s common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.&lt;p&gt;Many of today&amp;#x27;s well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it&amp;#x27;s hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let&amp;#x27;s Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).&lt;p&gt;The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwaps</author><text>Much of today&amp;#x27;s internet culture is directly on indirectly influenced by SA to some degree. Beyond this, however, SA remains a unique community, perhaps even more so today. It is quite large compared to specialist boards, but it is insular, exclusive and high trust: It is not monetized and overrun by fakes compared the reddits, chans or imgurs of today.&lt;p&gt;So sure, Lowtax has had significant positive influence on many people.&lt;p&gt;This is why people on SA are so outspoken and disappointed. Lowtax is an &amp;quot;eminent figure&amp;quot; of the internet. He has had a personal impact on many people throughout their formative years, inasmuch as he impacted internet culture as such.&lt;p&gt;Lowtax had a place of high status and influence that betrayed how deeply flawed he was as a person. People literally grew up with him as a central player in internet culture. When he (and SA) went and mocked some &amp;quot;crazy person&amp;quot; or fought against a perceived evil, then this was part of valiant, stupid, maybe wrong but nonetheless memorable childhoods and teenage years for many people.&lt;p&gt;When Richard posted that he was seriously ill, the outpouring of support was far and wide.
When we then learned that not only was all this fake, but Richard was privately a person hardly deserving of the immense respect he had, people got unreasonably angry.&lt;p&gt;Today, I think people are mourning. On the one hand, the real person who died, on the other hand, many people are mourning the loss of a childhood hero - a hero who metaphorically (and now literally) died, because he was never a hero to begin with.</text></comment>
<story><title>Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died</title><url>https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3984488</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanackley</author><text>Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it&amp;#x27;s depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy&amp;#x27;s accomplishments without being like &amp;quot;oh but it &lt;i&gt;has to be&lt;/i&gt; mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you&amp;#x27;ve lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.</text></item><item><author>extortionist</author><text>He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It&amp;#x27;s important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can&amp;#x27;t be set aside.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, SA&amp;#x27;s influence on the modern internet can&amp;#x27;t be understated. The &amp;#x27;image macro&amp;#x27; of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today&amp;#x27;s common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.&lt;p&gt;Many of today&amp;#x27;s well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it&amp;#x27;s hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let&amp;#x27;s Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).&lt;p&gt;The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brodouevencode</author><text>Interesting points. It&amp;#x27;s too common now to lump a person&amp;#x27;s strengths and weaknesses into one big package. Right or wrong, that is the common way of judging people it seems.&lt;p&gt;I enjoyed SA at first, until it became quite clear the moderation was heavily skewed to Lowtax and his friends, Photoshop Fridays were largely rigged, accounts would be locked for no apparent reason and good luck getting a response from that cancer guy that never checked email. And fine - that&amp;#x27;s his site, his rules, and opted (since phpBB was free and had &amp;quot;access&amp;quot; to university servers) to set up something just for me and my friends. Apparently I wasn&amp;#x27;t the only one because the user base slowly declined with some hardcore hangers-on sticking around to form the shell of a community it is now. Lowtax was always an asshole, but he did build something that greatly influenced internet culture (again, for better or worse is left up to the reader).</text></comment>