From a psychological standpoint it's legitimately fascinating to me, having been around SA since ~2005 and seeing how brutal and "lol bye fag" LowT has been to literally every conceivable person who has dared cross him. But somehow, a bunch of chicks with dicks come along and begin shrieking YOU BANNED MY TRANS FRIEND AND HIS TRANS WIFE!‽‽ suddenly makes him literally start groveling and simpering before their insatiable feet? What the FUCK happened lol!?
He didn't do this for the poor liberals, he didn't do this for the poor queer faggy people, he didn't do this for anyone. I guess I'm struggling to understand how he went from "LOL MOD SASS IM BANNING U BYE" to "OH GOD IM SO SORRY IM SO SORRY GUYS GALS PLEASE LET ME PROSTRATE MYSELF BEFORE YOU
Lowtax is the same person now (2020) as he was then (2005) - but he's in a vastly different situation.
Lowtax (2005) - Has a website that generates roughly and easily, $50,000 a
month or $600,000 a year. User numbers are through the roof and nearly all of his content is generated for free. Lowtax during this time is considered to be an internet pioneer for making SA so profitable (ads, pay for posting, merch, etc) and is not widely regarded as a tremendous piece of shit. He has wasteful spending habits (mansion, sports car) but no massive liabilities. Any specific user's spending (~$10/month) means literally nothing to Lowtax and is a drop in the bucket.
Lowtax (2020) - Has a website that (roughly) generates $200 - $4000/month in profit, or roughly, at best, about 10% of what he was making a decade and a half ago. User numbers have been completely depleted as SA mismanagement has driven users to Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, and of course Kiwi Farms. Lowtax has also shredded his reputation as internet pioneer as he now is consistently late in coming to market with new ideas and is generally regarded as extremely unpleasant to deal with in any significant way.
Lowtax, despite owning a website that has likely generated several million dollars over it's lifetime - has apparently saved
none of it. He still has horrendous spending habits, but generates much less income on top of the following.
- He has an ex-wife and two kids that apparently don't want anything to do with him (Alimony and Child Support)
- He was hospitalized for having a bad spine and had to crowdfund the cost, repeatedly.
- He apparently, despite there being a time where he made millions, never dealt much with taxes and as a result owes huge amounts of back taxes. This doesn't happen if you have a tax guy.
This forced Lowtax to go, hat-in-hand to his users, and start a Patreon page - where he currently collects ~$9,000 each and every month. His business model is no longer a business model, he's basically living on donations at this point - hence the major shift in his attitude, the users now hold much more power over him than they did years ago. Lowtax knows this - it's only going to get worse as he's working on his
second divorce and
third child support payment.
It happened in stages - it wasn't just 2005 and 2020, but every chance Lowtax got to do something smart/correct, he chose the opposite. Primarily, the #1 thing that did him in was just assuming that Something Awful would just run itself, for free, forever. Lowtax for some reason hated doing anything that resembled work but was also too cheap to hire a Webmaster/Manager for Something Awful when he had people (like Fragmaster) who could have done it for him. Lowtax was so lazy that even when SA was making $600,000/year all people could think was "how much more could this make if there wasn't an absolute pile of shit running this website?".
