Still, I can't get my head around whether it would make sense to do a paid discussion forum.
Metafilter: $5, primarily about posting interesting links and having hopefully civil discussions.
Something Awful: $10, very free-form and anarchic, used to be a center of organizing trolls, now it's not so much for that but it still has a kind of "friendly assholes" aura.
But I think twitter, facebook (and maybe aol) really did a number on the Well. I mean, time marches on. And the Well didn't, or wouldn't.
I remember the Well like I remember Geocities and CompuServe - fondly.
It's one of those places where I would love to get permissions to take out some of those discussions and create a book.
Especially in philosophy & physics there where some really mindbending discussions.
They have this saying "You own your words" and a pretty strong discussion ethics which really makes it stand out.
There are no voting or anything else involved though so you kind of have to find the nuggets yourself. It's based on Pine so there is a lot of opportunity to dig around.