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

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Tanner Glass said:
It isn't an unspecified payment, he clarified the situation.

It's NO PAYMENT for 8 weeks, and then (if you are kept on and aren't branded as a "Nazi") you are paid $40 per article, per week. In addition to this, the payments are all manual and Lowtax does not have a stellar reputation among writers for paying on time. You are expected to do exactly $320 worth of free labor just to have a chance of proving you are worth of the ability to earn piles of money (which breaks down to ~$2,100 a year). You may ask "but @Lowtax, can't you earn way more money writing for literally anywhere else?" and his answer is "shut up, thread closed" lol.

It's cool that Lowtax is trying to revamp the site and all, but holy shit Logan and him are the absolute worst people at it I've ever seen. They don't have anything that resembles a plan and can't overcome the simplest of objections. They have all of these plans and ideas but never once stopped to think about the main issue "why would people give content to SA for little/no money when they could just own the content themselves and grow their own brands instead, like Yahzee or Mega64?" and the answer seems to be "*crickets*".
Click to expand...

Didn’t you read? Because Bogan thinks the whole world has the same nostalgia for an SA that existed a decade ago in her imagination that was like the coolest thing in the world to a Mormon teenager in 2009 Utah.

Too bad we can’t hear the conversations where Bogan finally realizes everything everyone has been saying about Lowtax is correct. Even trying to talk to him about common sense shit, like not expecting writers to work for free for two months or only paying $40 an article will make Lowtax throw a tantrum or go radio silent.

Bogan can’t disagree with her manbaby boyfriend boss. She has to clear everything with him first. Lowtax will not tolerate any disagreement with his disastrous decisions that have fueled SA’s downward spiral for a decade. The minute she pushes back against any stupidity she has joined the army of his enemies. He will throw a tantrum or ignore her for hours/days.

Lowtax’s ego will never allow him to admit that what made SA an early internet phenomenon was the forums, a vibrant community. The front page just served to help some ppl find the forums. SA built a online community before tech platforms realized SM (ie online communities) were a goldmine. Lowtax did something novel 20 years ago when he created a forum to have fun and shitpost. (He wanted to create a captive audience for his front page and it grew from there.)

The value in SA was always the forums and the many communities that flourished within it. Lowtax let it all die on the vine via neglect and disinterest.
For someone who claims to have posted on the forums for years Bogan ignorant of the fact that forums created all the best content, not Lowtax. I guess pretending otherwise is how one gets to become SA’s unpaid brand strategist as a “passion project TM”

Lowtax killed his free content mill because he never saw its true value so he let a bunch of zealots and free forum janitors chase away all the funny with their petty egos, outrage politic litmus tests and hurt feelings. Dangling the juicy carrot of an eventual $40, and an e-cred platform that hasn’t mattered in fifteen years, ain’t going bring back the funny.

The irony is ppl used to pay Lowtax $10 to help create some of the funniest content on the internet. Maybe that’s why he’s so confused about paying ppl for content now - it was just freely given for years just from community interaction.

For a few golden years people paid Lowtax, to create content for him, that made him even more money. He will never not be angry that shit didn’t stay that way forever, but will also never accept that his bad decisions and neglect killed the golden goose.

He was given a tidy little goldmine with miners that worked for free! All he had to do was sit in a fancy front office and spend time managing the mine with some magnanimity and foresight. But running the mine and dealing with all the miners was too much trouble. So he pawned off the manger and foreman duties on whoever kissed his ass and would work for free. He hired whatever construction engineer promised the cheapest work. When miners asked for better working conditions, or even money, he told them to get fucked. He is now shocked his mine has collapsed and he can’t find any gold in the rubble.
 
Last edited:
I unfortunately expect a lot of "haha fellow trans have you also missed a dilation session isn't that just the funniest thing anyway here is an animal crossing gif" articles.

When I was perma'd off of SA, it was primarily for questioning the time wasted policing the community instead of producing actual content. Right now, you have a woman who thinks filing a 1099 on behalf of a non-employee constitutes a "contract" and her solution to revitalize the site is to...post articles? There are many sites that do this better, that have an audience, and are relevant, that have also gone under and tanked because in general print media is legacy media without a specific hook or very targeted audience.

I can only surmise that Rich/Logan want to pay $40 for an article that can drive more than that in traffic -- which would require journalistic excellence (lol) talent and a relevant topic (even less likely) or be heavily researched. If anyone were capable of those things, they wouldn't be writing for SA, and when you really come down to it, you're making peanuts an hour for a lot of work.

If they dove in on an entire gimmick, like, say, being an entire frontpage dedicated to Let's Play reviews of games (something they already let slip through their fingers but nonetheless) then they might get some traction, especially if the quality was good and the reviewers/writers were likable, but I see literally none of those potential factors happening.

As MirnaMinkoff said, the draw was always the forums, never really the frontpage. Forums themselves are kind of a legacy and niche concept now as well, with the diffusion of communication across many different platforms online and the much wider availability of voip and video. I don't really see a way out for them -- they are a front page no one uses, a forum no one wants anything to do with at this point except some mentally ill squatters, and leadership that is nonexistent in every way.
 
Learned Hand said:
If they dove in on an entire gimmick, like, say, being an entire frontpage dedicated to Let's Play reviews of games (something they already let slip through their fingers but nonetheless) then they might get some traction, especially if the quality was good and the reviewers/writers were likable, but I see literally none of those potential factors happening.
Click to expand...

There's still the problem that even if SA had the talent to do exactly what you're describing - there's no way that the talent can't just make content themselves and put it on Twitch/Youtube/Mixer and keep 100% of the profits for themselves.
 
Looking forward to restroom reviews being hosted on the something awful front page and making some much needed scratch......
 
I just caught up on Lowtax offering the sweet deal of working for him for free for two months before paying you minimum wage.

He could actually get rid of the probationary period by searching the forums for content but there are two problems with that

1.) He would have to spend one molecule of effort actually reading the forums that have paid him millions of dollars
2.) Anyone actually funny has been driven off of the forums by mods allergic to comedy like Ozma and FAU.

It's astonishing how consistently incompetent he is though. He recently picked the stupidest possible option to sell merchandise and is now choosing the stupidest imaginable route to his side piece's already stupid simple plan.
 
Learned Hand said:
Right now, you have a woman who thinks filing a 1099 on behalf of a non-employee constitutes a "contract" and her solution to revitalize the site is to...post articles?
Click to expand...

The "1099 contract" thing is a load of shit and strongly indicates that she has no idea how any of this works. Of course, once she finds out that 1099 workers have to send her an IRS form listing their full name, address, and social security number she'll probably just go right into scheming mode.
 
It’s not even the front page content per se that brought him money. Perhaps way back in like 2000-01 the front page was interesting/different/whatever enough to justify a forum for readers as many sites both large and small did in that era.

Later on the forums outpaced the front page “works” in terms of relevance/overall draw to the site. So it became “hey here’s a neat thread about x or y someone made, I should pay the ten bucks for an account so I can interact with the op/add my two cents.”

I originally joined way back during the AI Mustang fiasco that some might remember back in I think 2009. Arguably the forums most relevant years were behind it but there were so many interesting car projects being posted about and documented well on a largely bullshit free forum that it was worth the ten bucks to not see (as many) ads. This was content that other people made at their own expense and took their own time to document on the forums.

To that end it sounds like I’m justifying Lowtax’s braindead new writing scheme. I’m not. People did it as a hobby in the first place; it was a place to describe how you rebuilt the cylinder head of your 1974 Bricklin or photoshop Donald Rumsfeld on something. The approaches he’s taking is misguided in a million ways, from trying to draw attention back to the irrelevant front page or making it about comedy again. A dime per ten thousand ad clicks on some dumbass front page article means nothing. The community is gone and there’s nobody to post with anyway. The old days of people willing to make interesting content for free that Lowtax monetized are long gone, and everyone has decamped to Reddit or whatever by now.

And these days $40 doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think I could be bothered to type up a handwritten comedy article someone else made for $40, it wouldn’t even be worth my time and I’m just a blue-collar scrub.
 
logan might be the dumbest idiot ever and i dont know why she is not getting the message that her ideas are fucking bad
hey we are going to sell ad space
hey the pill popper im banging is going to pay 40 bucks for writting shitty jokes
TRUST ME IM A BIG GIRL BUSINESSWOMAN
 
So I wonder if this is the the new Lowtax cycle:

Logan comes on the forums trying to pretend she is a businesswoman instead of a married man's side piece.
Goons question what the hell is going on
Lowtax is awoken from his slumber
Interacts with goons, and upon not receiving praise for his early 2000 ideas gets bitter and ban happy.
Lowtax retreats to his slumber once again.
 
CaptainShitlord said:
Advertisers are lining up to throw money at a dead site that gets no traffic! Even in SA's heyday no one gave a crap about the front page.
Click to expand...

J-list sure liked to advertise there, from what I remember.

"In this week's hentai game, Little Red Riding Hood is brutally raped by the Big Bad Wolf. Buy this game on J-List! It's really fucking disgusting and she's literally a small child. Buy this game on J-List! Oh well, at least it's not as disgusting as Water Closet. Buy Water Closet on J-List!"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom