and then talking shit about Lowtax and SA's payment models at the bottom of the page while his own mods can ban and tag any poster they dislike as they please.
I mean you and he both aren't wrong. SomethingAwful has been *cough*"awful"*cough* since the mid-00's. Sometime around Web 2.0 it started to lose it's luster and most of it's forum userbase has dwindled/left. Paying :10bux: to get the NeoGAF user experience from SA's moderators isn't my idea of fun, personally.
SA is fucking terrible these days, don't get me wrong. It's :10bux: I'm never getting back. But the whole "but you can pay to change the username/forum title/avatar" of another poster tangent was hilarious because at least SA keeps it's forum economy going by letting people buy titles etc in microtransactions and if someone's roasting you, you can roast them back by buying an avatar, just change it back with your own money or be smug in the knowledge that your trolling is so successful you got someone to pay to give you a shitty avatar with big red text. While on neogaf if you have the wrong opinion, the mods will tag you for whatever they want and act smug because they can tag the peasants for the wrong opions how they please and they can't change anything back (Or ban them). So Evilore calling SA "Toxic" is pot kettle black since he's let mods run riot with their own petty vendettas and agendas.
SA is a shitshow and it's decline is down to it's woeful administration who were dedicated to putting down any dissent in their job as a forum hall monitor and letting alternatives like Reddit and 4chan take over. But the business model is theoretically better than neogaf. Just that Lowtax pissed it away and will never get it back. And neither will Evilore get his old business model back. And it's their fault, even though they blame everyone else for it.
At the same time, SA had an actual convicted pedophile on their mod staff and someone actively sharing child porn on their mod squad compared to an alleged pedophile rights advocate on Neogaf. So SA always the lead in "Shitty moderator staff and shitty website".