Inactive Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka - Deadbeat (emphasis on "Dead") founder of Something Awful, forced out of his own community, on his second divorce, stuck his dick in crazy, "Birth Giver"

[BordrlinePersonaltyDisrdr]

Anyone who offered to fix the forums for free was too re.tarded to actually be able to do it. All those free offers were compsci 101 kids or fedora Lords with dunning Kruger.

You are severely underestimating the caliber of SA forums posters during its peak.

A decade of forum advice from Something Awful

When we started Discourse, I began by studying a bunch of forums that have been around for 10+ years to figure out what they did right. And I’ve always enjoyed this ten year retrospective from Something Awful. Some real gems in here. What do you see that you agree with here? What do you see...

meta.discourse.org

This is the guy who founded Stack Overflow. He was an SA poster back in the day. He co-founded Discourse with eviltrout: https://twitter.com/eviltrout/status/1458633404736487426

You wouldn't realize it due to branding, but odds are good that any modern comments section or bot interface that you interact with on a business site nowadays is running Discourse under the hood. Lots of sites use their forums implementation too, which is much more recognizable, even without branding.

Both of them had offered to help Lowtax out, and both were turned away, as were countless others.

 

[Bear Powers]

There also used to be a website out there somewhere where you could see someone's avatar history, because old avatars were saved forever and new ones were just named something like (n)-2.jpg, with the number incrementing for each avatar.

If the avatar's of a different file extension, it'll be named (n).png or .gif, and then incremented whenever they get a new avatar with that same extension, so if someone had five avatars total, two PNGs and three JPGs, with the 5th being a JPG, their newest one would be named something like (n)-3.jpg.

I really wish I still knew that site, because I checked around and found some people with just, endless numbers of them. Not even mods, either, who I guess could change theirs for free, but I'm sure there are dozens of retards out there that have dropped four figures on avatar changes alone.

I remember this site, agreed it was pretty cool, but unfortunately it stopped working quite a while ago, something like four-five or so years ago. Something changed on SA’s servers so new avatars couldn’t be retrieved.

Edit: apparently the one I had in mind stopped working but there seems to be a different one that still works. Has limitations though - https://goons.neocities.org/

 

[Thumb Butler]

They would do other stuff, like probate your account for 30 days AND ban you so you have to pay $10 but you still cannot post again for 30 days

Then they would watch cartoons and dilate.

 

[Baggywrinkle]

Again, when Radium tried to build the Titan forum, he got paid 40k a year and all we got out of it was a doctored screenshot. Lowtax has no managerial ability. It would take an able bodied developer about 6-10 weeks to shit out something similar with modern tech.

Having been active on SASS, it became obvious that he surrounded himself with enablers, exactly what happens when you run a secret club for 20 years. SA wasn't just a place for aspies with disposable incomes. It was a loudspeaker for the depraved.

That's the thing. I wouldn't do it for free even if they were good. Never do a damn thing without getting paid. That's my motto. And never fucking do it without a list of milestones. These are things you learn if you don't drop out of college, and make a living off edgy articles and a message board of spergs.

Given a choice, I would rather provide unpaid work for lowtax than get paid. For one thing, the amount he was willing to pay couldn't even top what a 10 year old makes for raking leaves. But more importantly, he would absolutely call out any slippage or problem and even make shit up to shift blame from himself or get out of paying. I can't think of any case where he was ever complimentary of someone's services. At least if you did it for free, he can't really claim any expectation of quality.

Radium was shit, but it's lowtax's fault for not managing his incompetence vs turning his name into an epithet. That's what happens to anyone around lowtax.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Uh Oh, this is Dangerously Stinky

> "Legal paperwork was too expensive at the time"
> Was making ~$150,000/year during the "bad times"

> "When I acted out against my abuse I was arrested by ICE and only not deported because of Lowtax and his mom"
> "Which isn't something he could hold over my head though"

> "His creativity dried up so much it cause him physical pain, that's why he needed the drugs"


What a moron. Rich killing himself really was a way for him to fuck with his ex-wife's mental state one last time.

 

[Never Scored]

On the fixing the forums redesign thing:

They could have easily just switched to something open source like Simple Machines that I've seen a million retards set up and set up before, Something Sensitive used it for example, and then paid someone to code in paid accounts and avatar changes, or even set up some system where only admins can make accounts and if you subscribe to a Patreon they'll set one up for you and if you cancel your patreon they ban you or some shit. Hell, someone's already been working on a paid subscriptions add-on for Simple Machines.

At the end of the day though, it wasn't just about being something being simple to set up and monetize. Sticking with decades old forum software was just as much about SA superstars not wanting to lose MUH Post History and reg dates as it was about Rich being lazy.

 

[Leonard Helplessness]

> "When I acted out against my abuse I was arrested by ICE and only not deported because of Lowtax and his mom"
> "Which isn't something he could hold over my head though"

Really? From late 2019:

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Again, when Radium tried to build the Titan forum, he got paid 40k a year and all we got out of it was a doctored screenshot. Lowtax has no managerial ability. It would take an able bodied developer about 6-10 weeks to shit out something similar with modern tech.

Having been active on SASS, it became obvious that he surrounded himself with enablers, exactly what happens when you run a secret club for 20 years. SA wasn't just a place for aspies with disposable incomes. It was a loudspeaker for the depraved.

That's the thing. I wouldn't do it for free even if they were good. Never do a damn thing without getting paid. That's my motto. And never fucking do it without a list of milestones. These are things you learn if you don't drop out of college, and make a living off edgy articles and a message board of spergs.

I’ve really come to believe that most of Lowtax’s “tech guys” actually were just his drug dealers. Some actually pretended or had hopes of doing code but their primary and only actual use was hooking up Lowtax and he could pretend it was a business expense.

 

[AnOminous]

Really? From late 2019:

View attachment 2722434

I always wondered who Richard was writing this absolute bullshit for because so far as I know not a single person ever believed this absolute crap he was constantly spewing. It was like when he was slurring his words, absolutely trashed out of his mind, claiming he was dead sober and did no drugs. Who was this for?

What a moron. Rich killing himself really was a way for him to fuck with his ex-wife's mental state one last time.

I actually feel bad for her. I mean she's obviously nuts because nobody sane would be saying this shit, but I think she's at least partly motivated by not wanting her kid to realize her dad was an absolute piece of shit.

Sorry, darling, that ship sailed long ago.

 

[Lurk McDurk]

Anyone who offered to fix the forums for free was too re.tarded to actually be able to do it. All those free offers were compsci 101 kids or fedora Lords with dunning Kruger.

Agree.

If it was easy to supplant vbulletin in those years a bunch of Stanford nerds would have done so and made themselves millionaires. We're talking pre-cloud years when everyone was still on bare metal here. Redis wasn't invented until 2009, Memcached was the only widely available open-source cache afaik in the early 2000s and I don't know when vBulletin included support for it. I see guide posts about it starting around the same time (2008 / 2009).

If it was easy, someone would have done it before those dipshits even offered.

You are severely underestimating the caliber of SA forums posters during its peak.

A decade of forum advice from Something Awful

When we started Discourse, I began by studying a bunch of forums that have been around for 10+ years to figure out what they did right. And I’ve always enjoyed this ten year retrospective from Something Awful. Some real gems in here. What do you see that you agree with here? What do you see...

meta.discourse.org

This is the guy who founded Stack Overflow. He was an SA poster back in the day. He co-founded Discourse with eviltrout: https://twitter.com/eviltrout/status/1458633404736487426

You wouldn't realize it due to branding, but odds are good that any modern comments section or bot interface that you interact with on a business site nowadays is running Discourse under the hood. Lots of sites use their forums implementation too, which is much more recognizable, even without branding.

Both of them had offered to help Lowtax out, and both were turned away, as were countless others.

Discourse is not very well liked, the main thing it has going for it is being newer at this point. People from old forms don't like it because it uses a phone-esque UI (there's no ctrl-F search, infinite scroll is dumb), and when I tried to use it 2-3 years ago it was more fragile than old PHP based forums were. They only distributed it in a Docker container and if you wanted to change anything in the core you can rest assured that the next "automatic" upgrade would fail miserably and leave you with a broken site. Unless something has changed the back-end is rails, which is not something I'd want to be stuck with in 2021 either. Sorry, I don't want to have to use a goddamned javascript build pipeline to change the layout of a forum. This is why despite much less initial polish, people are still working plugins for riot/matrix rather than rocketchat, because no one wants to have to recreate rocket's ridiculous javascript build setup to change something, nor do they want the database lock-in that meteorjs entails.

However you are on to something in pointing out that those projects came from SA users. In that respect SA is sort of the ivy leagues of the early internet. People from there with the right friends from there can get traction with spin-off projects that other randos would not get.

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

This showed up today

“I'm a KF Regular” - Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka

and I almost felt sad.

 

[Mendicant]

lol this was less than 2 years ago, from dec 2019.
fucker didn't even live for 2 years after this.

 

[That Chris Guy]

View attachment 2722708
lol this was less than 2 years ago, from dec 2019.
fucker didn't even live for 2 years after this.

Makes a lot of sense now. He was banging them, after all.

 

[Leonard Helplessness]

Imagine defending a man who decided to spend his last moments alive with a tranny on discord instead of his kids, or at the very least writing a suicide note to leave for them.

How was his death discovered, anyway? Ashli said her lawyer told her about it the same day it happened, and I’m not sure how chain of communication works/how the police would know to contact her attorney.

Did Richard get on a call with his own attorneys that morning where they told him about the judgment that had just been entered, and he stuck a gun in his mouth right in the middle of “so you’re looking at $6500 a month for 2.5 years, and she’s also getting the $92,000 held in trust, and you’ll owe attorney fees of—“

 

[Dean Pentel]

The thread has moved along over 100 pages since I last checked, so I'm being a lazy aspie about this: anyone know if he left a note or in any way indicated he was in the throes of horrible despair when he punched his own ticket? Asking for a friend.

Edited to add: thank you for the swift replies

 

[Ghostse]

The thread has moved along over 100 pages since I last checked, so I'm being a lazy aspie about this: anyone know if he left a note or in any way indicated he was in the throes of horrible despair when he punched his own ticket? Asking for a friend.

Not at this time, but given that he was just curb stomped in court its not exactly a mystery.

 

[Mola Ram]

The thread has moved along over 100 pages since I last checked, so I'm being a lazy aspie about this: anyone know if he left a note or in any way indicated he was in the throes of horrible despair when he punched his own ticket? Asking for a friend.

Nothing like that so far. All we know is he's dead and probably shot himself (said by ... leafwife, I think? not any official source).

 

[fenny]

Huh. Figured it'd be a lot slower burn than this. What a disappointment.

Actually, he was a known pillhead for like, 15, 20 years? That's a pretty slow burn I guess.

 

[AnOminous]

View attachment 2722708
lol this was less than 2 years ago, from dec 2019.
fucker didn't even live for 2 years after this.

This moron literally let himself get killed by troons. And he blamed us the whole time. Fuck you, idiot, hope you're enjoying sucking Satan's cock in Hell.

The thread has moved along over 100 pages since I last checked, so I'm being a lazy aspie about this: anyone know if he left a note or in any way indicated he was in the throes of horrible despair when he punched his own ticket? Asking for a friend.

Edited to add: thank you for the swift replies

Lmao what would he write? I was a gigantic faggot and now I'm killing myself because suicide is literally better than supporting my kids?

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

He had mentioned committing suicide in his videos and comments the last few months. That is the most note type thing he did. Also texted some dude “I’m sorry”. Not his kids though!