Short of shutting the whole thing down, there's not a whole hell of a lot he can do. The launch of "GBS 2.1" was a good start, and GBS has been a lot better since then. But the various subforums are more or less set in their ways at this point. Unless they give him an active reason to shut the subforum down (like getting the Secret Service called on you), it'd be worse if he stuck his head in and started making arbitrary changes.
Lowtax is basically a victim of his own "success". He let the forums run themselves for a decade, and now he's more or less fucked when it comes to making any changes to the place. SA basically is what it is at this point.
Pretty much this. The audience Lowtax has now is basically a paid-for NeoGaf, with mods who are even more extreme. The problem is Lowtax needed to do a purge a LONG time ago if he wanted to keep his humor and standards.
The place is completely humorless now, with more handwringing, morons, virtue-signaling mongoloids and sophist 'debate' than I care to count. Who the fuck wants to deal with that shit? SA is never going to be the way it once was, better to contain all the shitty people behind a paywall and let them jerk each other off than release them into the wider world.
SA forum members don't give a fuck about him any more. He can't even post a thread without it dying after a few pages. He seems to be hellbent in becoming a success at things no one wants him to do like video game streamer and YouTube lets player.
The funny thing is that his mods and admins basically perma'd, banned, probated and ran off pretty much anyone who actually liked Lowtax. Nobody there actually cares who he is. It basically isn't his forum anymore. His 'hands-off' policy and not vetting his mods/admins and keeping them in line with what he wanted basically destroyed the place.
Lowtax's humor is not in line with SA, and they aren't going to watch or support his streams. They are more likely to watch that fucking faggot on PBS who wears lensless glasses play through a game or watch a Josh McGosh/Anita video rather than his.
Echoing what proteus said, the problem has been the mods rather than lowtax, when it came to "sculpting and influencing the culture of the boards", but I don't think it was deliberate. I think it was largely incidental as a matter of that being the end result of having mods who lean a certain way overall and don't have any particular drive or principal to act in good faith or be neutral, which is where you get a lot of the insane transphobia bans, for example.
Lowtax's only real attempts to shape things were when he and his wife finally responded to the cries of "The D&D mods are leftist babies who can't help but coddle the most insane users and stifle discussion of all other points of view".
The biggest example of that sort of thing being the case were the hellthreads which were effectively unmoderated containment threads where people could bring up all the controversial or weird points that would get you probated or banned if posted in D&D(or anywhere else really). And in the case of the one that Ralp and Fluffieduckie torpedoed, it was a matter of those threads being safe as long as they were out of the reach of those sorts of shitty mods who use their position to punish people for their ideas, Ralp at least should be commended for not having a meltdown immediately, but when he did have his it was spectacular(multiple 100,000 hour bans for being a "Garbate Pit bigot").
Yes, none of the mods or admins acted in good faith or were 'reasonable'. The number one rule is agree with the mods or get probated/banned. If you think differently? Probated. Keep thinking differently? Banned. Argue anything but far-leftist communist talking points in D&D? Probated then banned. They were so overly sensitive that they couldn't even handle one fucking thread that didn't agree with them and they didn't have to visit.
After the 100,000 probations (So hilarious), which were approved by Lowtax btw, I realized there was nothing left for me in that shithole. Lowtax just wanted that sweet, sweet, re-reg money. And fuck if he thought I'd spend any more money there after that happened.
I like to challenge opinions, general social mores and things that people deem 'offensive' or 'off limits' (which is pretty much everything these days). Its all in good faith, because things should be questioned. (And lets be honest, shit posting is fun). But when you have a bunch of cunts who are so mentally weak they cannot handle alternative opinions that they don't even have to confront, read or experience, what is even the point of posting there anymore? To whimper in a corner and participate in their mutual circle jerk? Fuck that shit.
