[extortionist]

He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside.

At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.

Many of today's well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it'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's Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).

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.

[antihero]

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...

"I have been sitting for hours debating whether or not to disclose this, and I feel like it's something I do need to get off of my chest. Frankly, I'm tried of being quiet. I've mostly had to stay quiet for years about things happening behind the scenes. I've held things inside so long and so hard my chest physically hurt the same way it is now.

I considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours.

Yesterday I recieved a divorce ruling that would help me and my daughter stay in our home in Canada and allow me to provide a good life for her as well as pay back numerous debts that had accrued during the past two years when I was receiving $350 a month in child support.

In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc. He would still retain custody settled on previously in mediation. He was due to get our daughter for Christmas.

An hour later I was contacted by my attorney who informed me that Rich had shot himself earlier in the morning.

So. There it is. His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them, or to my knowledge, left a note for them.

If you've made it this far thank you for giving me space to let this go so I know longer have to hold onto it. "

[kryogen1c]

"May the good he created stretch on, and the evil be buried with him."

[DonHopkins]

That's an apt ewwwlogy.

[EdwardDiego]

> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them

Wow. This is when I'd suggest indulging in a small white lie, for your children's sake.

[dotancohen]

Or don't say either.

Don't say "your father died without saying goodbye" and don't say "your father died and said goodby". Just say "your father died". No need for manipulation.

[EdwardDiego]

No need? I disagree, just based on my experiences of raising my children who have a mentally unwell absentee mother. I also disagree it's manipulation, as that implies lying to them to achieve a selfish goal of your own, whereas a white lie is intended to be for their benefit.

My younger children still need to hear from time to time that she loves them, even if the obvious reality (to me, and my older children) is that her behaviour demonstrates quite clearly that she doesn't.

But, to ease their young minds, and help them sleep when the doubts come, I tell them that she does love them, and always will so, but she's working on some challenges that make it hard for her to tell them in person.

To quote Thackeray's Vanity Fair - "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."

(She has supervised access, but won't use it because "she did nothing wrong", and using it appears to her, as an implicit acknowledgement that she did something wrong)

I dislike lying to them, and I'll admit I feel angry when I do so - they love her because she's Mom, but she doesn't deserve their love - but it safeguards their mental wellbeing until they're old enough to face the unvarnished truth.

I also think of the day my father died, twelve days before I was born. He died smiling (I'm told) despite the intense pain, because of a white lie.

He was dying of cancer, and they desperately trying to induce me so he could meet me before he died, but no dice. And they'd been unable to discern my gender via ultrasound. He was desperate to have a son. (this was the 80s, so you know, patriarchy was the norm, etc. etc.)

In his last hour, he asked the nurse if his child had been born, and she lied magnificently - yes, you have a beautiful baby boy, he's eight pounds five, congratulations. (Which was not a bad guess, I was eight pounds 10).

While they're wildly disparate circumstances, they share a commonality - the unvarnished truth isn't always the best option in some circumstances.

[ryanackley]

Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it's depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy's accomplishments without being like "oh but it has to be mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person".

Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you'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.

[zwaps]

Much of today'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.

So sure, Lowtax has had significant positive influence on many people.

This is why people on SA are so outspoken and disappointed. Lowtax is an "eminent figure" of the internet. He has had a personal impact on many people throughout their formative years, inasmuch as he impacted internet culture as such.

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 "crazy person" 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.

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.

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.

[Apocryphon]

This is an excellent and even-handed eulogy of Lowtax and his legacy.

[ryandrake]

> Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you'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.

We see this a lot in posts here and elsewhere: Some historical figure or someone with a lifetime of achievements and impact gets mentioned. Then, inevitably, a poster comes out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or "Buuuuuut he once cheated on his wife" as if that one fact nullifies everything else the person did.

I'm glad OP acknowledged that the person in question was "complicated". We all are complicated. People should not be reduced to a single dimension or a single bad thing they did. I hope when I finally pass away, my epitaph talks about the major things I did, rather than that one worst thing I ever did, that someone found by analyzing 40 years of comment history.

[Tronno]

There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.

Great achievements speak for themselves. In most cases, people readily adopt proven new practices or inventions, flock to groundbreaking ideas, and celebrate those who produce them.

Meanwhile, they will happily stay silent about uncomfortable truths. Who dares pipe up about the charismatic but incompetent colleague? The successful boss who skims a little off the top? The beloved politician who touches female staff? Etc. Mistakes and wrongdoing have a way of hiding in plain sight.

Yes, people are complicated. It's better when folks point out the complexity, instead of sticking to the sanitized version.

[debaserab2]

I feel like we’re in a period of overcorrection where we’re not simply acknowledging flaws with accomplishments, we’re now letting the flaw become the lead narrative about a person when it may be one of the objectively smaller details about them in the scope of their accomplishments.

[Apocryphon]

But in the case of Lowtax, the flaws- not only his abusive personal life but his petty webmaster dictatorship, his incompetent inability to monetize, his misanthropic persona- is part and parcel of his public profile. It’s how he’s always been regarded by the goons. Because Something Awful has always been a place to embrace misanthropy, antisocial ridicule, and looking at the crappy side of things.

If anything, to remember his flaws is to engage in the same spirit of mockery that he pioneered. It’s completely apt in this case, and to do otherwise and to whitewash would be to completely miss the point of this man’s life and accomplishments.

[everdrive]

> There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.

This may lead to progress, but I don’t believe this is WHY we do this. People are moralizing creatures. Much like we are “programmed” to recognize faces, (even when they’re not there) so too are we programmed to see issues in moral terms. Once you start paying attention to what people say, this conclusion is almost unavoidable: often discussion will never get into the details of things, but simply focus on the question of whether something is “good” or “bad.” (Other times it will focus on who is to “blame,” and who is the “victim.”)

Hopefully my tone hasn’t come off too harsh, since evaluating moral claims is one of the most fundamental things which make us human. Like all those other traits though, sometimes we focus on it too much, or else can’t see past the moral part of the argument.

[ryanackley]

By your logic, funerals should be more like agile retrospectives where we examine every mistake a person made or person they hurt so people at the funeral don't repeat the same mistakes.

The reason people commit violence is not because of a lack of social pressure or not understanding the difference betweeen right and wrong. They have something broken inside.

[Dylan16807]

Funerals are different from biographies, and this seems more like a situation for biography.

Especially because the people at a funeral already know the person well.

[brodouevencode]

Interesting points. It's too common now to lump a person's strengths and weaknesses into one big package. Right or wrong, that is the common way of judging people it seems.

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's his site, his rules, and opted (since phpBB was free and had "access" to university servers) to set up something just for me and my friends. Apparently I wasn'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).

[stonogo]

"Complicated and flawed" sure is a different thing than "serial wifebeater." We're supposed to let that get overshadowed by the fact that he happened to start a web forum where funny people posted? I don't think that there's anything subconscious about the desire to frankly evaluate someone's life. Even before his passing, for decades he was known as someone who would reliably make bad decisions at every opportunity. The web forum he started eventually banned him.

As others have said, SA was successful despite him, not because of him.

[lamontcg]

I don't think SA is something to be celebrated. The abuse and the manner he chose his exit seems relevant. Its a bit disturbing that so many people wax lyrical about SA even after giving it a decade of space, even while they acknowledge the way that the misanthropy led to punching down and bullying behavior.

[moopie]

I think it's important to remind people that despite his achievements he was still a domestic abuser.

[creamyhorror]

It's true, his forums had a huge indirect influence on modern US online culture, giving rise to so many projects and careers.

Ironically, he failed to capitalise on his influential position unlike so many of his peers who sold off their online properties and disappeared from the public eye. If he'd taken a different approach, he'd probably now be sitting on media properties (or a fortune) worth tens of millions, and minting millions more in cryptocurrency/NFTs. And also possibly have a very different family life.

An example of someone with huge opportunities but not the inclination/mindset or skillset to grasp them.

(Also, I never understood the absurdist humour of Doom/Mood House back in the day. Weird stuff.)

[jessaustin]

If he'd taken a different approach...

For some reason, imagining this individual with lots of money calls to mind the life of John McAfee.

[bigbillheck]

> Ironically, he failed to capitalise on his influential position

It wasn't for lack of trying (mangosteen).

[Apocryphon]

A Tony Hsieh ending, perhaps

[boomboomsubban]

I'm unfamiliar with BitTorrent Barnyard, despite knowing of both SA and BitTorrent for nearly twenty years, and a search just gives me torrents for a 2006 movie. Someone mind telling me what it was? Guessing a tracker?

[dwater]

When the forums went paid and semi private, a few boards were created for sharing music, porn, and torrents. AFAIK you could never see they existed without a paid account. The last time I logged in with a paid account was more than 15 years ago though so I can't say how it evolved.

[nerevarthelame]

The mods/admins shut them down after year or two, before there were any real legal consequences. As a result of that, there were a number of private spin-off sites dedicated solely to piracy, some of which continue today.

[Threeve303]

I think a lot more happened there than just piracy. Just based on what I heard, I certainly never had an account on any of the sites... . Perhaps over time, more will be known publically. SA lead to 4chan and 8chan, many conspiracies started on these sites as memes. Look at 8kun for example. Behind the scenes of sites like SA existed a large collection of questionable groups. Just imagine the bandwidth needed and the kinds of political connections required to keep it off of the radar. Also consider how the whole Warez scene operates in general. Experienced programmers writing cracks, leaked movies and tv shows, drugs, etc.

Kind of like the silk road before the darkweb.

Hopefully more will be known over time because there are some crazy stories.

Not that I would know anything about any of it

[albedoa]

> I think a lot more happened there than just piracy.

The comment you are replying to is referring to the sites dedicated solely to piracy. You have a pretty fantastical idea of what happens there.

[Threeve303]

Yeah, I think you're right. You can't believe everything you hear.

[xenihn]

I remember hearing that image macros originated on TribalWar (a forum for Starsiege: Tribes), but they were definitely popularized by SA

[marginalia_nu]

These proto-memes were probably independently "invented" on a lot of different forums. There was a much bigger emphasis on making content yourself back before content aggregators, which meant there was a lot of innovation going on in a lot of places. They'd sort of trickle through the internet through some sort of weird back-channel osmosis and merge and intermingle to create new formats.

I think almost anyone who spent a decent amount of time in forums aimed toward adolescents around 2000 will have had some small impact on the emerging meme format.

[busterarm]

Shazbot!

[aww_dang]

I heard they originated in Canadia

[mjfl]

I am the greatest.

[ghuntley]

VGH

[praxxis]

I mean while we're talking about the legacy of Tribes and SA and "old internet" culture we need to shout out a certain dancing gherkin wearing a pink inventory as a hat.

(hi Nexty, it's ParadoX)

[superkuh]

Hey guys. Don't just reminisce about Starsiege: Tribes, pick it up again (if you ever stopped playing). The community master servers and a couple dozen servers are still up. It's active with pick-up games on Fri+weekends. Join us!

http://playt1.com/

[busterarm]

Do you have stairs in your house?

Pak. Chooie. Unf.

[Mordisquitos]

I am protected.

[bigbillheck]

I think the success of Something Awful is, by and large, despite Lowtax, and not because of him.

[WorldMaker]

A lot of the humor that made Something Awful extremely popular in early internet history was either direct from Lowtax or indirectly curated by Lowtax. The front page for many of those early years was almost nothing but Lowtax posts with few other direct contributors to the front page. Even in curating "the best of what the forums did", his voice was often in (meta-)commentary between and among the curated items.

Eventually you weren't 18 anymore and that "edge lord" persona that Lowtax brought to everything wore thin, or other "edge lords" started to get more attention, and also then eventually we all found out that Lowtax wasn't an act and actually lived his life that way too. But I know for me the era of Something Awful I most paid attention to SA, most of that was for Lowtax's sense of humor and the young naive kid both I and the internet itself was at the time.

[swivelmaster]

I disagree with this. As someone who started visiting the main site when I was a teenager, Lowtax's comedic writing was what drew me in. AFAIK he retired from writing for the site a long time ago, but in his prime he was cranking out hilarious essays, absurdist listicles, and entire parody web sites pretty frequently.

[kuraudo]

Hard disagree; early Something Awful was hilarious and it was mostly becuase Lowtax was more involved with front page posts.; I'm still chuckling just remembering some of those posts.

[missinfo]

From his Patreon last year:

As you know my patreon has declined from like $9k to under $1k because of the fucking idiots who embrace the ideology of, "If You Read It On the Internet, It Must Be True!" Ironically, this was the original slogan for the site, before I changed it to "The Internet Makes You Stupid." Both apply equally in this case.

Nobody seems aware that anybody can allege anything. Nobody seems to give a shit that I built and maintained this community for 22 years; one single allegation destroyed all that good will. One single allegetion destroyed my entire career, site, job, and creation. And don't even try to say "BUT LOWTAX WHUT ABOUT THESE OTHER THINGS IN YUR PAST HURRRRRR" because I've never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit. Ever. Period.

A bunch of kiwifarms people easily whipped those gullible idiots into a frenzy of self righteous outrage, and nobody from SA even gave it a second thought. I've always been honest and open with everybody my entire life, which is also why I get easily manipulated. I cannot speak in further length about certain things, so I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Look at the background of both parties involved, look at their history, look at what they've literally and legally done. Not been ACCUSED of doing, but actually DONE.

We have a court of law to determine if allegations are valid. Rushing to judgement by simply acting on an allegation, something that has, by nature, not been proven at all, is pure idiot toilet fuck shit.

This event really shows who my true allies and friends are, and who are the people that don't give a shit about the things I've actually DONE and CREATED in the past 22 years are. I'm going to capitalize the word done here one more time. DONE.

An ALLEGATION. For fuck's sake, at least wait for me to be found legally guilty of SOMETHING. Innocent until proven guilty, except on the internet where it's guilty and then still guilty and always guilty because people make up their minds once and can never change them ever no matter what. Outrage is the currency of the internet, and by god nobody will ever be wrong!

Anyway I'm making a plea for logic, if there is any logic remaining on the internet. Thank you to the six remaining patreon members left, and a huge fuck off to the SA outrage culture reactionists that were apparently just waiting for any excuse or reason, no matter how idiotic, to turn on me. Congrats, you're betting on the wrong horse.

And yes, I'm aware that by writing this I'm just going to lose more donors but whatever, I'm not and never have done anything just for cash. I just wanted to point out how the site I used to run is now populated by the hand wringing, outrage culture warriors we used to once make fun of.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/still-amazed-at-39693289

[boppo1]

Were his Exes convicted of anything, as he alleges?

[astrange]

No, as you can see from his ex-wife's update, which I won't repeat here.

[dkersten]

I love how he called people who used to give him money but stopped "idiots"