A lot of the humor that made Something Awful extremely popular in early internet history was either direct from Lowtax or indirectly curated by Lowtax. The front page for many of those early years was almost nothing but Lowtax posts with few other direct contributors to the front page. Even in curating "the best of what the forums did", his voice was often in (meta-)commentary between and among the curated items.

Eventually you weren't 18 anymore and that "edge lord" persona that Lowtax brought to everything wore thin, or other "edge lords" started to get more attention, and also then eventually we all found out that Lowtax wasn't an act and actually lived his life that way too. But I know for me the era of Something Awful I most paid attention to SA, most of that was for Lowtax's sense of humor and the young naive kid both I and the internet itself was at the time.

I disagree with this. As someone who started visiting the main site when I was a teenager, Lowtax's comedic writing was what drew me in. AFAIK he retired from writing for the site a long time ago, but in his prime he was cranking out hilarious essays, absurdist listicles, and entire parody web sites pretty frequently.

Hard disagree; early Something Awful was hilarious and it was mostly becuase Lowtax was more involved with front page posts.; I'm still chuckling just remembering some of those posts.