you weren't around back in the days that it was just a Ron Paul fanboy forum and a lot of r/atheism echo chambers (I say this as an atheist who got keenly annoyed by the amount of self-fellating going on there) - this was pre-sub-reddits, when kn0thing was still active on the site and a force for some pro-social moderation, and Digg was still their biggest competitor (until it was flooded with the HD-DVD key leak and a lot of people left it out of annoyance)