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"

repentance said:
View attachment 1074660

It's dropped about $700 since Ashli left him. It's still plenty of income for doing nothing, but if the trend continues he could have a problem a few months from now.
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He will just pin a post on SA and his paypigs will donate more.


Also its fucking hilarious he posts on Facebook and not his own forums
 
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Dude was libertarian as long as he had a lot of money and any other political orientation meant sharing that money with someone. Now that he's got a dead web 1.0 forum he's suddenly all about social safety net stuff and ebegging. Like with many lolcows, the political orientation is whatever brings them the most advantage at the moment quite transparently.
 
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Back in the AOL dial up days, my main internet haunt was a site called Portal of Evil. It was kind of like a very proto-Kiwi Farms... people could submit weird websites run by early internet cows, and people discussed them. I understand there was a fair bit of discourse between Chet, the founder of PoE, and Lowtax. Apparently Lowtax really enjoyed Chets other site, one of the earliest gaming review and satire sites, Old Man Murray, and cited it as one of the reasons he started SA.

None of this really matters, but I found out today that Chet is Chet Faliszek. The guy who wrote the Half Life 2 episodes, both of the Portals, and both of the Left 4 Deads. Valve hired him, in part because they liked his writing on Old Man Murray. He just started his own studio to work on his own vanity project, which is being backed by Riot Games. PoE and OMM were never nearly the power houses that SA and Lowtax were, and Chet never had the name recognition that 2000s Lowtax did. But Chet managed to turn his writing on OMM into a long term, sustainable career that's netted him millions of dollars and real world success. And Lowtax squandered his, fried his brain on xanax, and is now begging trannies for $10s of their SSI bucks. It's really sad.
 
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RJ MacReady said:
"Where it all went wrong" was the exact moment the internet's standards became too high for SA to grow and survive with no effort on its management's behalf, which is pretty abstract. I don't think it wasn't any singular event or decision, just Lowtax's attitude. Every alleged breakwater moment in SA's history is rooted in things he could've, should've or didn't do years prior.
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I don't think it's all that abstract. Lowtax is just fell into a good thing and then never did anything with it.

When the internet just started to take off (late 90s, around the time of Lowtax's first "webmaster job") there was a lot of confusion around how businesses would exist on the internet - there wasn't a lot of money there initially and no one really knew what to do. Ads were the only source of revenue but it was in no way the same as it is today; for a number of reasons (poor tracking, poor ad loads, no where to drive traffic to, etc).

Something Awful thrived in this envrionment - when having an active message board was a "big deal" as well as constant content generation that Lowtax stumbled into. It was such a "hot spot" Lowtax wound up being able to charge $10 for new users to sign up and participate in the forums. He was able to essentially segment out his users into subforums and inadvertantly created specific, targeted advertising groups. With his new found windfall, he hired an IT person (Radium) and was able to pay (not a whole lot) actual money for people generating content by paying the front page writers - he had essentially turned Something Awful into a business.

But then he just kind of stopped for reasons we'll never know and while he was one of the first to market, he gave up that lead and started his long slide into obscurity. His main issue is that he never kept pushing forward - he never grew the business while his competitors did. He watched as his content creators went over to other sites (youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc) and were able to monetize much more effectively without him. Everyone seemed to like him, but the story was always "I wanted to work with him, but the money wasn't there" - even when the money was there; as SA was making gigantic stacks of cash for many years - Lowtax simply wouldn't part with it. He got used to the idea that everyone would do everything for free. He also did dumb shit like buy a big house, a fancy car, and got married without (allegedly) any kind of pre-nuptual agreement.

As the web continued to evolve, money became a larger part of it - if you're running a "serious business" you need to pay your people. Not just content creators, but also your moderators and merchandise people - which Lowtax was just unwilling to do. Merchandise became (and still is) a huge revenue stream for websites, but Lowtax half-assed it to a point where he lost tons of business and became regarded as a joke. 90% of this thread is pointing out what an absolute shit job that his unpaid staff (moderators, admins, and volunteer systems administrators) but it bears repeating - even kickstarter games have paid moderators for thier forums.

TL;DR = Lowtax always did the bare minimum and didn't even do a good job of that - where as all of his competition grew to be much more attractive to professionals, audiences, and creators. They all left him because he was stingy and lazy.
 
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The dumb bitch just needs to *work*. Most of us have our jobs we have to get our asses up, stay some bit frosty and cogent for, try to do a job other people will say 'hey man, that was good work you did there', and come home at the end of the day to fuck around for a bit, because fucking around for a bit has a lot more meaning when you're a hard worker.
Dude doesn't even write articles for his own website, any more. It's just a tepid piss-trickle of nonsense these days barely worthy of being in a bad blog, from people that still thinks an SA front page means anything.

He's sat back on his laurels for years, and completely lost momentum. He's probably got a folder full of 'time for a comeback' articles he's started and abandoned. I'm surprised he can even get his dick up to use Facebook lately.
 
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RapidUnplannedDisassembly said:
The dumb bitch just needs to *work*. Most of us have our jobs we have to get our asses up, stay some bit frosty and cogent for, try to do a job other people will say 'hey man, that was good work you did there', and come home at the end of the day to fuck around for a bit, because fucking around for a bit has a lot more meaning when you're a hard worker.
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I had this and the Obscurus Lupa thread open at the same time, and I had to get all the way through this paragraph before I knew which one I was in. It works for so many of these people!
 
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Lowtax is addressing his detractors live right now in chat.

www.youtube.com

CURSED VIDEO

This will be the original video people use as a source to create their own clips proving whatever it is they want to prove. THE ORIGINAL!!!! THIS IS THE HIST...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
 
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Frank N Berry said:
Lowtax is addressing his detractors live right now in chat.

www.youtube.com

CURSED VIDEO

This will be the original video people use as a source to create their own clips proving whatever it is they want to prove. THE ORIGINAL!!!! THIS IS THE HIST...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
Click to expand...


I managed about 4 minutes of his voice, and decided I could get better timbre, tone and thought quality by going to watch the Chantal Live Stream going on now.
 
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Rotogravure said:
I managed about 4 minutes of his voice, and decided I could get better timbre, tone and thought quality by going to watch the Chantal Live Stream going on now.
Click to expand...

I'd recommend checking out the Something Awful thread. It's been a heck of a night. Lowtax is currently drunk and banning people on C-SPAM live on his Gaming Garbage stream.
 
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Tanner Glass said:
I don't think it's all that abstract. Lowtax is just fell into a good thing and then never did anything with it.

When the internet just started to take off (late 90s, around the time of Lowtax's first "webmaster job") there was a lot of confusion around how businesses would exist on the internet - there wasn't a lot of money there initially and no one really knew what to do. Ads were the only source of revenue but it was in no way the same as it is today; for a number of reasons (poor tracking, poor ad loads, no where to drive traffic to, etc).

Something Awful thrived in this envrionment - when having an active message board was a "big deal" as well as constant content generation that Lowtax stumbled into. It was such a "hot spot" Lowtax wound up being able to charge $10 for new users to sign up and participate in the forums. He was able to essentially segment out his users into subforums and inadvertantly created specific, targeted advertising groups. With his new found windfall, he hired an IT person (Radium) and was able to pay (not a whole lot) actual money for people generating content by paying the front page writers - he had essentially turned Something Awful into a business.

But then he just kind of stopped for reasons we'll never know and while he was one of the first to market, he gave up that lead and started his long slide into obscurity. His main issue is that he never kept pushing forward - he never grew the business while his competitors did. He watched as his content creators went over to other sites (youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc) and were able to monetize much more effectively without him. Everyone seemed to like him, but the story was always "I wanted to work with him, but the money wasn't there" - even when the money was there; as SA was making gigantic stacks of cash for many years - Lowtax simply wouldn't part with it. He got used to the idea that everyone would do everything for free. He also did dumb shit like buy a big house, a fancy car, and got married without (allegedly) any kind of pre-nuptual agreement.

As the web continued to evolve, money became a larger part of it - if you're running a "serious business" you need to pay your people. Not just content creators, but also your moderators and merchandise people - which Lowtax was just unwilling to do. Merchandise became (and still is) a huge revenue stream for websites, but Lowtax half-assed it to a point where he lost tons of business and became regarded as a joke. 90% of this thread is pointing out what an absolute shit job that his unpaid staff (moderators, admins, and volunteer systems administrators) but it bears repeating - even kickstarter games have paid moderators for thier forums.

TL;DR = Lowtax always did the bare minimum and didn't even do a good job of that - where as all of his competition grew to be much more attractive to professionals, audiences, and creators. They all left him because he was stingy and lazy.
Click to expand...

Something Sensitive got a brief visit by Lowtax's former ad guy before the whole thing collapsed (EDIT: clarity, I mean before Lowtax's having an ad guy & not just some scummy affliate link situation collapsed). With almost zero effort, SA was pulling in 30-40 grand in ads as late as 2014. The guy kept trying to get Lowtax to get more involved, to get involved with advertizers and try to sell the forum, but Lowtax was having none of it.

Ad guy eventually got tired of the part time work and not really doing anything, so resigned-before-fired because of SA LLC's financial issues.



RapidUnplannedDisassembly said:
The dumb bitch just needs to *work*. Most of us have our jobs we have to get our asses up, stay some bit frosty and cogent for, try to do a job other people will say 'hey man, that was good work you did there', and come home at the end of the day to fuck around for a bit, because fucking around for a bit has a lot more meaning when you're a hard worker.
Dude doesn't even write articles for his own website, any more. It's just a tepid piss-trickle of nonsense these days barely worthy of being in a bad blog, from people that still thinks an SA front page means anything.

He's sat back on his laurels for years, and completely lost momentum. He's probably got a folder full of 'time for a comeback' articles he's started and abandoned. I'm surprised he can even get his dick up to use Facebook lately.
Click to expand...

Counter point 1: Lowtax is a pillhead failure. Why do you think he'd be more successful at work than he has been at "not cheating on the mother of his child with BPD flavor-of-the-month"

Counter point 2: Imagine Lowtax as a coworker. (or more horrifying,someone's boss) Why would you wish that on other people?
 
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His Patreon dropped another ~$300. He's in sub 10k territory now.
 

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