Rusty no longer wanted to have to deal with dupe hordes gaming the system, crapflooding, griefing, harassing, and so on. The $5 killed user growth, but it also

Rusty no longer wanted to have to deal with dupe hordes gaming the system, crapflooding, griefing, harassing, and so on. The $5 killed user growth, but it also killed 99% of the admin workload. The tradeoff worked for rusty, even though it didn't work for the 'community.' Rusty's favorite site is MeFi anyway...