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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

A $5 registration fee is one of the things that killed kuro5hin.org. God, I miss k5.

As a long-time member of K5 with a pretty low uid, I seem to recall there being some open question about how earlier fundraising efforts were apportioned.

There were also problems in that the initial setup of k5 was completely user-driven and user-generated with votes on the mod queue determining what was good. Early attempts to 'control' the crapflooding issue was to create the "diary" section, which functioned as license to post anything you wanted. The $5 fee was a reversal of that approach AND didn't add anything for users (Scribd?), so people mostly left.

I wish there was a mass-migration of some sort. K5 was the most well-rounded community I've ever been a part of. I wish this could be recreated. :-/

K5 needed more user generated content. Metafilter posts are links strung together. They are easier to do.

Another thing that probably drove the decline of K5 was the rise of blogs for everyone. Why post at K5 when some bunch of goons could remove what you regard as worth publishing while on your own blog it went live always?

How so? People weren't willing to pay it?

Well, a major aspect of the community was dupe accounts, temporary accounts, and novelty accounts. The fee killed that.

That wasn't the entire community, dont get me wrong, but it was enough to slow activity to the point where it wasn't very interesting anymore.

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