Steve Pavlina is one of the first superstar of the online self-help world (dating back to 2004 or 2006). It started with an article on a famous website for programmers (can't remember the name atm) about how he dig really deep with his first game and so others were playing catching up but he was raking in a steady monthly income (see where we are going and who would be interested ?).
Then he started his personnal weblog (yeah, we used to call'em weblog in my days) about self help and how he experimented with polyphasic sleep (sleeping 3 or 4 hours a days in twenty minutes increment, see the kind of folks that would bite that bait ?). So far, so good.
Then he went full crazy with psychic powers like talking to bird, being a telepath, reality shaping (aka the secret), etc.
His article were 10 or 12 A4 pages long (wonder how that goes nowadays) and it was kind of mesmerizing to see all that happening in real time (I admit I got first intrigued with his time management article and I kept reading for the crazy).
There was a funny experiment with polyamory and it ended with a divorce.
His forums were a pure gold mine of fun. There was the same kind of diverse mix of people you'd see on a huge site like 4chan or Reddit, but it still felt really intimate. Like the Tucker Max forum but not quite as hyper-masculine.
