Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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Null said:
They're funding custom made software but Lowtax wants to get away from PHP. I'd honestly suggest just waiting for XenForo 2 to come out and use that, but I guess he'd rather pay tens of thousands of dollars to hire a programmer to write in GoLang or whatever.

I doubt he gets much money from his announcements either. If you're asking people to donate without any sort of immediate gratification it rings hollow. Part of the reason Infinity Next got any traction with donors is because the live demo site was open and so was the codebase. You could check every single day to see what I was doing and test features live on the site. You're not going to get that if you're not writing the code yourself.

I could write out extensive ways to make SA more approachable from an outside perspective but it'd fall of deaf ears. I definitely think it's possible but it's a lot of work.
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When you're an actual business and you need to ask for donations on top of that, your business model is broken. You pretty much only get away with that in the online world. Bricks and mortar businesses can't really get away with selling you a product and then asking you for donations on top of that unless they're a charitable enterprise. It only works for SA (and other old forums which have done the same thing) because people have an emotional investment in the place.

Lowtax doesn't run it as either a business or a hobby. No amount of technical improvement is going to change that. He doesn't want to spend 10 hours a week on the place, much less 40 or 60.

KF is also a more dynamic place than SA. Change is painstakingly slow at SA. Here, a Gamergate forum springs up overnight to troll people. On an almost weekly basis I get up of a morning to find something has changed and it works. Changes that don't work are abandoned as quickly and as easily as they were adopted. There's not endless discussion before a change is made and endless whining afterwards, in part because you *own* your forum and your will prevails. You're not terrified that people will leave if you make a wrong move and don't view every change as a long term commitment.
 
A good site needs good direction from the top. And good direction is usually done by someone with a vision, not a council of losers who want to make themselves look woke and mature for the internet.
 
Well, I also don't view the userbase as customers. It's a bit different for SA because the forum is almost entirely premium access only. I imagine there's a sense that if you change something or take something away or add something that's not working right, you're depriving someone of something they purchased. It puts the development sphere on a versioned path a la enterprise software services instead of a community.

I tried adding 8tb of hdd a week ago and it fucked up so I just 302 redirected everyone to our Netherlands VPS where Lolcow TV is hosted so we can watch dogs being shot. SA is not afforded such liberty.

Judging from things both FUA, Tax, and LadyAmbien have said, mods have threatened to quit over these changes and there's a real fear the forum will become completely unmoderated. You know, that shit sucks, so there's a fear to change anything. I had a conversation with LadyAmbien about what my approach would be and I basically said re: mods leaving, let them. If a mod has somehow put their own interests over the interests of the community they don't deserve to be staff, and if they're not willing to advocate the change they want to see from that position of power they don't need to be staff at all. What good are they.

I'm not going to repost that conversation I had because I feel it may be more sensitive than originally intended, but in general my suggestion was to make the changes you want to see and fuck anyone who leaves because of it. If every single mod quits and it's just Tax and Miss Tax, then so be it. Make an announcement encouraging users to use the report button judiciously and then promote the people who make the most accurate reports. You'll have new staff in under a week, but you'll actually have to put in work and pay attention, like it's your job.
 
The people freaking out about no moderation are the tumblr types that clutch their pearls when someone says 'real women' and can see racist language in everything.

Let them fucking leave and let those shit mods leave too. Go back to tumblr.
 
I think one problem with the one-time fee model has always been that people will want the forum/website to stay much the same as it was when they first found it entertaining enough to join. People joined at very different times in SA history so they have very different, and often conflicting, expectations. Many of those people - myself included - have well and truly had their money's worth out of their tenbux and it's insane to claim that things shouldn't change because we paid tenbux long ago. SA didn't make a commitment to provide our particular style of humour in perpetuity and it's ludicrous to expect that it should.

That's one reason Lowtax needs to take much more of a "this is what I want SA to be now, take it or leave it" approach. There is no option which isn't going to involve some members departing, so 21st Century might as well sink or swim on what Lowtax wants.
 
I think the registration fee has become a problem whereas in the past it wasn't one. Their forum is shrinking and they don't really have incentive for new people to come aboard, especially not with how heavyhanded their moderation has become.

If I were the Taxman I'd drop the registration fee to $5 and introduce a sort of free-account 'proving ground' where people can sign up for free but they're restricted to the proving ground, and users can quite literally drop a fiver to let people they like into the rest of the forum. And that would most likely involve users creating content - which is what they want. Content has been scarce.
 
OwO What's This? said:
If I were the Taxman I'd drop the registration fee to $5 and introduce a sort of free-account 'proving ground' where people can sign up for free but they're restricted to the proving ground, and users can quite literally drop a fiver to let people they like into the rest of the forum. And that would most likely involve users creating content - which is what they want. Content has been scarce.
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There's a lot of alternative financial models available. When XF2 is out I'm probably going to explore some of them, depending on how things unfold. Though nothing like a registration fee should ever be considered because it's contrary to growth. You tax something you want to discourage, you incentive something you want to encourage.

Where I think SA's model works is custom emotes and fucking with people's profiles, where I think it fails is any time it makes a person pay money to see content or join the fun.

Maybe making people pay to search or view the archive made sense back when server resources were expensive and the Internet was young, but today it's a joke.
 
Null said:
There's a lot of alternative financial models available. When XF2 is out I'm probably going to explore some of them, depending on how things unfold. Though nothing like a registration fee should ever be considered because it's contrary to growth. You tax something you want to discourage, you incentive something you want to encourage.
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I'd worry that dropping the registration fee entirely after having it for so long would cause a stampede of shitposter registrations, honestly.

Null said:
Maybe making people pay to search or view the archive made sense back when server resources were expensive and the Internet was young, but today it's a joke.
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I'm not so sure it's inexpensive for Lowtax to maintain that. Their database is a lumbering behemoth that is far larger than it needs to be and unoptimized for the sort of heavy use it gets, requiring him to compensate with powerful hardware.
 
SA still has a user base and I doubt Lowtax can't pull some neutral janitors to moderate his forum. He needs to pull the plug on all of his current mods and admins and install those who aren't constantly undermining him.
They aren't disagreeing with his views in private, but actively fucking with his livelihood.
 
From SS

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See Lowtax, when you allow idiots to force people out of places they enjoy, they go elsewhere - kind of like you did when forced out of your own forums.
 
I like the idea from a few pages back about letting some KF people help clean house.

Lowtax, if you ever drag yourself back to this thread and see this, I'll volunteer to enact exterminatus for you for two weeks.
 
While the one sure way to effect unspeakable change is letting Kiwis run rampant on your platform, it would be some funny shit to see the current hotpockets react to an influx of co-mods from the Farms.

I'd pay $10 just to see the reaction of the first one to get doxed and sent a box of hornets.
 
repentance said:
They actually did this when SS was targeting their mods because they didn't want it to appear like the mod departures were the result of pressure from SS.



Nah, FYAD does this for their own amusement. I.N.R.I. concern trolls relentlessly. BBG, Sid and Synthy tend to do it only when they're in the mood for creating forums drama. The mods/admins are the tools/shields of FYAD, not the other way around.
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A thread on FYAD alone could probably be sustainable on this forum.

Look at skylark, daikatana ritsu, weird twitter, the time one of the mods was outed as a fat emo kid and embarrassed by an aging shitty 90's band, and the time a bunch of them went to some "comedy" gathering for weird twitter faggots and sam hyde crashed it so hard a few of them were dragged out during the show by their girlfriends

the cool kid attitude from those queebs always struck me as strange and undeserved
 
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