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I'm a regular on Something Awful. One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disinc
by enraged_camel 9y ago
I'm a regular on Something Awful.
One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc.
I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.
- mulmen 9y agoI believe you are correct. If I pay for something that suggests I am the customer and not the product.
- newen 9y agoHaha if you pay for SA it only suggests that you are a sucker who paid 10 bucks to post on SA for a couple of days before getting banned. They are very ban happy there.
- mulmen 9y agoI have had an SA account for years and never been banned. I don't appreciate being called a sucker and I think the price is fair for what I get. When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.
- newen 9y agoGood for you but it's hard to take you remotely seriously when you try to relate SA and high quality conversation.
- Retra 9y agoAre you trying to be ironic on purpose?
- newen 9y agoSA is basically 4chan except you have to pay 10 bucks to join. I don't really see the joke here.
- enraged_camel 9y agoThe "joke" is that you complain about the lack of high quality conversation on SA, and yet your posting style here is extremely shitty. No wonder you got banned so quickly there...
- newen 9y agoWhat, am I supposed to list my reasons with citations (of course) to justify my opinion about some historical relic of a site? And I didn't get banned from SA; I just know a lot of people who did.
- enraged_camel 9y agoIf you got banned after a couple of days that means you broke the rules in a big way.
- ionforce 9y agoThe other factor is not being shy about banning people. Heavy moderation.
- mywittyname 9y agoAlso, SA's userbase consists largely of older, tech-savvy people. It's been around for nearly 20 years now and I bet their registration peak was ~2004 (:files:). So it's pretty likely that the median age of a poster there is ~35-40. I'd totally pay $10 for a less shitty reddit clone.
- taupefrancis 9y agoThe Something Awful forums provided my first real exposure to 'internet culture'. I find myself reading their forums more and more often lately because discussions there seem less likely to devolve into an echo chamber. An account there is well worth the registration cost imo.
- cirgue 9y agoI think part of it is the lack of voting and the presence of easily-identifiable avatars: participants have an incentive to post things that generate maximum engagement and discussion with other specific users as opposed to maximum instantaneous agreement. In this regard it mirrors real-world social interaction much more closely than reddit/fb/twitter.