Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died
What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users that still post in the technical sections is incredibly high as a rule when most other communities tend to need a lot more attention to curate the content. So in an ironic sense, Something Awful is an irony to me in that it’s actually now some of the better community created content on the Internet.<p>I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.