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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Something Awful really set the stage for a lot of what followed in internet culture. "Let's Play" spawned from it. The template of the modern meme. 4chan's culture was really seeded with a lot of people kicked out of SA, which steered it in an interesting direction.

But it maintained quality via community, and through a simple $10 barrier. Rules were followed because they were simple and mutually agreed with.

I don't think anything like it could happen today.

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Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things.

But it's funny, I sort of have the opposite opinion of SA in regards to its content. Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it. Slowly.

A really interesting comparison of Reddit and SA takes place in Eve Online, where massive fleets clash on the regular. SA has a huge history there, and tons of political heroes (vilerat! rip) but they ended up sort of being the exclusionary bullies of the Eve universe. TEST/Dreddit (Reddit's corporation) ended up having that easy entry and encouraged a lot of growth from the people other companies in Eve were ignoring - the new player. This resulted in a lot of good fun and chaos. Now there are whole companies devoted to new players (Brave Newbies)

>>Once the 10$ barrier was in place I felt it lost a lot of the quality. I understood why it needed to happen, it got too popular for its own good. However, I couldn't help but feel that once it created a barrier to entry a lot of the "aliveness" got sucked right out of it.

Quantity went down, but quality increased.

I mean, that's what barriers to entry are about: they keep out the lowest-common-denominator trolls, while those who actually care about the community have no issues paying the entry fee (sometimes several times, as they get temp-banned).

I wouldn't say that quality increased at all, however it certainly made managing the forum a lot easier. I think around 2008 or 09 I shit posted a ban me thread with numerous images of god and the dinosaurs until I was culled. I had had an account since '00. I found by the time I had been banned that the quality (which is of course, subjective) had been lost by becoming exclusive. Sort of the same way an NYT Paywall made me lose interest in it. The decline did take a while, but I would say that when they instituted the paywall it was "Day 2" as Bezos said. The beginning of the end.

The $10 entry fee and heavy use of bans made the topic subforums the best on the web. While FYAD may have given birth to the shitpost, shitposting is only allowed in the designated shitposting zones.

If you want to talk or read about a massively popular topic: cars, guns, motorcycles, games, money, pets, health, houses, coupons... it's nice to go somewhere that weeds out low quality posting. How ever quality happens to be defined in that particular forum.

> Something Awful certainly spawned a lot of things.

That's an understatement. By the time I started seeing tl;dr being used in its original meaning elsewhere on the internet, it had already long been a bannable offense on the SA boards.

With the $10 in place, it died through attrition.

If they haven't added the $10 barrier, it would have died through a flood of low-quality content and not enough moderation resources.

It's your typical "how to grow a community" dilemma.

There are many private forums still out there that are invite-only or have an entry fee, and some of them have communities as large and "healthy" as SA during its hay day

How to find them? Any links or requirements to get links, etc?

They tend to find you, and your quality commenting, on other sites and invite you.

> But it maintained quality via community, and through a simple $10 barrier.

One thing written-out of the official history. 10bux was introduced when SA had a wide variety of infringing bittorrent links in various subforums. Somehow, Lowtax shut this down before he got busted for it, but if anyone ever mentioned it for years afterward, insta-permaban.

The idea that $10 was quality control developed later. The real rules had nothing do with "quality" and were always opaque and deeply political. Pretty much a Lord of the Flies scenario -- which was great if you loved internet drama, and they weren't coming after you. SA's business model was essentially semi-randomly banning people who would re-register. I haven't been back in more than ten years, so things might have changed. But to pretend they were trying to foster some great community ... no. Just no. Goons were acknowledgedly horrible people engaged in online barbarism.

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