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"

[Tanner Glass]

how would Lowtax deal with kiwi farms if he was in Nulls shoes?

The same way he always dealt with drama.

- Passive-aggressive whining (a front page article or forum post) that paints him as the victim
- Leaving the forum for a huge period of time
- Foisting the responsiblity onto the #2 person at the time (Fragmaster, Jeffrey of YOSPOS, etc)

Lowtax would never be in Null's actual position - he doesn't have Null's integirty. If Something Awful ever negatively impacted Lowtax's life (as in his family was getting harassed, the site wasn't making money or wasn't allowed to make money, getting huge negative coverage on the news, etc) he would just shut it down.

 

[Spunt]

Lowtax would always do whatever it took to make the problem go away the fastest so he could get high. That was as far as his forward planning went. Very often that would involve ignoring the problem completely and hiding like a bitch.

When a scandal finally hit SA that he couldn't just leave to the assorted political extremists and sex offenders that constituted his moderation staff, he just sold the forum to the first person who made him an offer. If he was in Null's position he'd probably try to offload the Farms to one of the more prominent posters so it would be somebody else's problem.

 

[Pissmaster]

how would Lowtax deal with kiwi farms if he was in Nulls shoes?

Null handled the time Sigsegv fedposted a hell of a lot better than when someone fedposted on SA and Lowtax got visited by the Secret Service. That seemed to be a big nail in Lowtax's coffin.

 

[Maude Snew]

Null handled the time Sigsegv fedposted a hell of a lot better than when someone fedposted on SA and Lowtax got visited by the Secret Service. That seemed to be a big nail in Lowtax's coffin.

Well the Secret Service was less of a problem for him personally and the site than the secret pedos. So many secret pedos. I'm still 50/50 on his story that Schmorky was never alone out of sight with his children. And that's only because I really fucking hope so not because I trust anything he said.

 

[Ghostse]

Null handled the time Sigsegv fedposted a hell of a lot better than when someone fedposted on SA and Lowtax got visited by the Secret Service. That seemed to be a big nail in Lowtax's coffin.

"<insert name here> handled <any situation> better than Lowtax" is nearly guaranteed to be a true statement.

 

[Maude Snew]

"<insert name here> handled <any situation> better than Lowtax" is nearly guaranteed to be a true statement.

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you but we have an entire repository of people here that do their best to defy your statement every single day and also recent events made me lose a lot of faith in the human race in general. Shit's all 'tarded.

 

[Ghostse]

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you but we have an entire repository of people here that do their best to defy your statement every single day and also recent events made me lose a lot of faith in the human race in general. Shit's all 'tarded.

That's fair. to be correct "better" should be replaced by "no worse than".

 

[Terrorist]

Josh dodged a bullet when this guy didn't follow up with him about upgrading SA to Xenforo. Imagine what a pain in the ass Rich would've been to work with. Imagine what a pain in the ass Rich might be right now, if he was still alive - he'd absolutely turn on Josh to please the tranny squad.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Josh dodged a bullet when this guy didn't follow up with him about upgrading SA to Xenforo. Imagine what a pain in the ass Rich would've been to work with.

Owetax would have written the check and then wouldn't have been heard from again for at least six months, or whenever the troons started getting too uppity again, whichever would have come first.

 

[Spunt]

It would never have happened, because Lowtax would have never offered an acceptable amount of money to Null for the work. Lowtax just didn't believe in paying professional rates for professional services, because he hated spending money on anything that wasn't drugs, booze, food or sex. He offered Yahtzee $40 a video to do Zero Punctuation for SA, so Yahtzee understandably told him to fuck off and is single-handedly propping up The Escapist to this day. He wouldn't pay for professionals to work on SA's codebase, and when you pay peanuts you get monkeys. First he hired Radium, who didn't have any idea what he was doing and turned the site into broken, undocumented spaghetti code, then Zen Death Robot, who scammed the users with a fraudulent GoFundMe then tried deleting all his posts on a database level to cover his tracks only to break the SQL tables so thoroughly they had to do a roll-back.

 

[Ghostse]

First he hired Radium, who didn't have any idea what he was doing and turned the site into broken, undocumented spaghetti code

I'm pretty sure Radium knew exactly what he was doing.
A developer who deploys undocumented spaghetti code (with load-bearing slurs) has a job for as long as he wants it.

 

[Maude Snew]

I'm pretty sure Radium knew exactly what he was doing.
A developer who deploys undocumented spaghetti code (with load-bearing slurs) has a job for as long as he wants it.

You don't actually need to be competent for that you just need to be able to bamboozle retards which is not limited to IT, it's the cornerstone of any good scam. Pretty sure a five year old could outsmart the tax man so I'm not inclined to give Radium that much credit. These days that also doesn't work too well anymore since the people in charge are often so completely retarded they will get rid of load bearing employees a lot in favor of someone they're fucking or to virtue signal or whatever else goes on in their little minds. See the entire games industry for a good example. I've known a guy who got laid of after some dumb milestone was reached because he wasn't part of whoever was in charge's friend group and they figured out later that nobody else actually knew how to do his job so he was laughing all the way to the bank as they had to pay his massively inflated contractor rate for six months just to keep shit going.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Josh dodged a bullet when this guy didn't follow up with him about upgrading SA to Xenforo. Imagine what a pain in the ass Rich would've been to work with. Imagine what a pain in the ass Rich might be right now, if he was still alive - he'd absolutely turn on Josh to please the tranny squad.

He already turned on Josh (and all of Kiwi Farms) to appease the tranny squad a solid few years before he unalived himself.

It would never have happened, because Lowtax would have never offered an acceptable amount of money to Null for the work. Lowtax just didn't believe in paying professional rates for professional services, because he hated spending money on anything that wasn't drugs, booze, food or sex. He offered Yahtzee $40 a video to do Zero Punctuation for SA, so Yahtzee understandably told him to fuck off and is single-handedly propping up The Escapist to this day. He wouldn't pay for professionals to work on SA's codebase, and when you pay peanuts you get monkeys. First he hired Radium, who didn't have any idea what he was doing and turned the site into broken, undocumented spaghetti code, then Zen Death Robot, who scammed the users with a fraudulent GoFundMe then tried deleting all his posts on a database level to cover his tracks only to break the SQL tables so thoroughly they had to do a roll-back.

Ironically he paid Radium an actual salary for what was essentially a part-time job (I think it was like $45,000 a year) and then apparently decided to never pay anyone ever again.

Mods and admins do it for free, writers would get like $10-40 per article (and would frequently just not get paid), and the $40 per video for Yahtzee was after he already found a massive audience - it's not even like a "this guy was just starting out and eventually got famous" thing, it was such a ballsy low-ball you kind of have to respect it in a way.

He would handle merch for Mega64, Moof, and SA but then just not hire anyone and would do it all himself "whenever he felt like it" - meaning anything you would order had a pretty good chance of showing up late/not at all. He could have had an actual competent storefront for content creators very early on and just couldn't be bothered to set one up (think Redbubble, Displate, Cloak) and lost out on an insane amount of revenue in doing so.

 

[Pissmaster]

He would handle merch for Mega64, Moof, and SA but then just not hire anyone and would do it all himself "whenever he felt like it" - meaning anything you would order had a pretty good chance of showing up late/not at all. He could have had an actual competent storefront for content creators very early on and just couldn't be bothered to set one up (think Redbubble, Displate, Cloak) and lost out on an insane amount of revenue in doing so.

Wasn't he even talking about publishing at one point? Early Mega64 DVDs of their first two seasons were labeled as Awful Video, and IIRC he had plans to do Awful Music, Awful Books, etc. And then that just kind of *poof* disappeared

 

[Tanner Glass]

Wasn't he even talking about publishing at one point? Early Mega64 DVDs of their first two seasons were labeled as Awful Video, and IIRC he had plans to do Awful Music, Awful Books, etc. And then that just kind of *poof* disappeared

It disappeared when Mega64 (presumably) realized they could make more money literally anywhere else and could have a different company produce a better product for physical DVDs.

They also realized that they could make a ton of cash (while growing a large audience) by putting a bunch of their stuff on YouTube for free - instead of relying on people buying DVDs from Lowtax and posting about it in one very specific internet forum.

Everything Lowtax did would go *poof* the second it looked like it would be any kind of work he didn't want to do. Awful Video was probably his big idea when he was shooting stupid movies (Doom House and Mood House) with Fragmaster - and became a lot less fun when it was about actual content distribution.

 

[Ghostse]

Ironically he paid Radium an actual salary for what was essentially a part-time job (I think it was like $45,000 a year) and then apparently decided to never pay anyone ever again.

The Ad Guy got paid.

SA's ad guy came on Something Sensitive when all the hot doxxes were dropping, and talked about it. SA was pulling in, iirc, nearly $100,000 of ad revenue in the glut days, and the Ad Guy offered his services as a part-time gig; his business was ad management so SA wasn't just another site he was doing the portfolio for. He got paid a modest salary of about $30,000 and when Ad revenue dropped that low (this was 2014 or so) the guy told Lowtax he needed to either work with him to drum up more ad business or he needed to let him go because the ads weren't paying his salary anymore. Lowtax by default let him go.

Didn't shit talk Rich other than what we already knew, which was he was completely asleep at the wheel and hard to get a hold of; SA was leaving a hundred thousand dollars or more on the table because Lowtax couldn't be bothered meet with potential advertisers.

 

[Maude Snew]

In these spooky times let me remind you that the spirit of Lowtax, doomed to roam the earth for all eternity, may be coming to sniff your toes.

 

[The Grognard]

Lowtax should be on every dictionary as the picture of what wasted potential looks like.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Lowtax should be on every dictionary as the picture of what wasted potential looks like.

Lowtax didn't have wasted potential - he had 0 potential and succeeded despite that. I could not tell you what he was good at (except for hitting women, but he isn't even great at that).

His claim to fame was making an internet forum where some funny people used to hang out and making money off of their success (until they left the site).

 

[Yezidi Fan Club]

Lowtax is still alive, he faked his death and moved to South America