I was being hyperbolic about the billionaire claim. Mainly SA was ahead of its time on what the internet could be. What people were willing to pay for and what makes a good community. It failed to take any of those ideas outside the realm of a comedy forum, which isn't a bad thing, maybe Lowtax was happy with that.

I'm wistfully in what-could-have-been mode since the products I use these days (Reddit, Twitter) are a poor approximation for what SA was at its height.

I'm not so sure, plenty of people became billionaires from the trends that directly originated at SA.

Examples?

Tyler Malka (Evilore) of Neogaf (gaming forum) boasted many times about being a millionaire from ads.

tumblr was sold for $1.1 billion, and it's largely obscure Internet comedy.

Tumblr is a lot closer to a social network than a forum, and I'd say only a small subset of it is comedy. Also, Tumblr has 460 million registered accounts and SA has 200k. That's probably partly because it costs $10 to sign up on SA, so alt accounts are uncommon, whereas accounts are cost-free on Tumblr, so some people may have many alt accounts. But Tumblr still gets way more traffic.