5 ms·

What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that

What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users that still post in the technical sections is incredibly high as a rule when most other communities tend to need a lot more attention to curate the content. So in an ironic sense, Something Awful is an irony to me in that it’s actually now some of the better community created content on the Internet. I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... ---- As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...). I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
  - ycombobreaker 5y ago
    > Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0" I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then. Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
    - jl6 5y ago
      I too consider the label “Web 2.0” to have arisen alongside AJAX, but the greater insight is that periodization of history in general is post-hoc, imprecise, and subjective.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      > I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then. AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s. > Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning. In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious. Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that). ------ Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
- lotophage 5y ago
  The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (well.com) is paid to post I believe, and has been around since about 1985.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    The Well is an Internet pioneer. It long predates the Web. I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.
JohnBooty 5y ago
I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale. It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it. By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route. There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people. One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well. The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue. I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. I feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.
- banannaise 5y ago
  Remember that SA was a one-time payment of a fairly nominal amount. The primary purpose was not revenue. It was a combination of giving the users a stake in the community, and making it expensive to post maliciously (since you would burn through accounts).
- jychang 5y ago
  I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into, although not quite the same obviously.
  - 5y ago
Consultant32452 5y ago
I like them both. The best part about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something there is a random yokel there to call them out on their shit immediately. And aside from a check mark I barely notice, the posts are indistinguishable. I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.
- mejutoco 5y ago
  I agree. Unfortunately, in my experience that person‘s criticism is buried in a sea of admirers trying to add to the point to grow their audience. I would love if twitter would embrace argument, instead of unconditional agreement. I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
- mavhc 5y ago
  Also the worst thing about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something correct, there is a random yokel there to say they're an idiot immediately
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Twitter is a soup of opinions all mixed together.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
SA was free and had advertisers, but they disappeared and because the site was such a shitstain on the internet, no advertiser wanted to touch him with a ten foot pole. > terrible, low effort, low quality content You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.
bluedino 5y ago
Internet brands bought up a bunch of v bulletin boards a few years ago. You could pay to be a "premium member" but you still had to deal with the free members and didn't get many benefits other than skipping ands and perhaps access to PM's
- genewitch 5y ago
  They also bought vbulletin itself, and then developed future versions in house.
anm89 5y ago
I don't totally disagree with the concept but have you actually been to SA in the last year or two? It makes reddit look like an academic journal. Some of ugliest forums out there.
- devonkim 5y ago
  Depends upon the context and subforums, I've been a fairly active member for like... 20 years now (I am cringing as I typed that out, yikes). It's not that different from Reddit in that respect but it's much more readable for longer posts in a BB format compared to Reddit without a doubt (Reddit always struck me as a more accessible form of old Usenet posting than forums software of the 2000s). The programming and hardware conversation culture is somewhere between the dry conversation on HN and the rapid fire drive-by snark-for-pay that is the common denominator for modern Internet commentary.
eluusive 5y ago
I agree with this sentiment. People are currently attempting to do it at scale in a de-centralized way. Stamp is pay-to-post, and the proceeds go back to the entire community. https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum
- maskaler 5y ago
  It's possible your comment brought the site down?

Apocryphon 5y ago

Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. MetaFilter is still up and around.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Wonder what other pay to post sites from Web 1.0 remain and how they are now. Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0". See this article from 2005 which tries to define Web 2.0: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.ht... ---- As for your question: ClassMates.com is still around (lel...), but most sites around that time actively tried to avoid requiring payment to join or do anything because payment-barriers (even "only to verify your age!"-type walls) presented a massive narrowing of your conversion-funnel (like you could go from 90% visitors completing a free signup to less than 1% as soon as you put a period-correct (and aesthetically ugly) Authorize.NET credit-card screen (ah the days before Stripe.com...). I think the horrid results of adding a paywall for low-value activities from 20+ years ago is permanently ingrained into web publishing people today and why they're so averse to it, even when there's clear demand for a premium-tier (especially ad-free) experience from YouTube Premium, Twitter Blue, Hulu, et cetera.
- ycombobreaker 5y ago
  > Given that SomethingAwful's non-forum content is predominantly user-generated and user-submitted (although not algorithmically) I don't consider it Web 1.0, it's more "proto-Web 2.0" I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then. Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning.
  - jl6 5y ago
    I too consider the label “Web 2.0” to have arisen alongside AJAX, but the greater insight is that periodization of history in general is post-hoc, imprecise, and subjective.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > I thought "web 2.0" came hand in hand with the adoption of AJAX for requests and dynamic updates within a single page? The WWW was full of user-generated content long before then. AJAX dates back to 1998 (1997?) though it was an IE-only proprietary feature for years until Firefox added it (Netscape might have had it too) in the early 2000s. > Reading through the article that you linked, as well as following some others from there, it looks like a little bit of retconning. In my experience, "Web 2.0" was a non-technical definition: it was always about "user-generated content" that had minimal human curation (think: Digg.com). Arguably this should also include vBulletin/phpBB-style web-forums, Coppermine-style online photo galleries, PHPNuke-style content-management and portal systems, and so on... - however those kinds of web-applications all date-back to the 1990s so they were hardly new. Instead, for Web 2.0 people moved from self-hosted forums to central-hosted link-aggregation ("social bookmarking") sites like Reddit and Delicious. Now that I try to re-remember, I recall how "Web 2.0" was not just "user-generated content" but also all about "the social web". MySpace was Web 2.0, as was Facebook (this was the early days when Facebook was criticized for not allowing their users the same latitude in restyling their profile page as they could on MySpace... funny that). ------ Anyway, despite AJAX's use since the late-1990s in Microsoft OWA, it was definitely being used in the early-2000s in the wider web (2001-2005) prior to "Web 2.0" being a thing. We were using Mootools instead of jQuery back then. I remember it took Microsoft until late 2005 to natively support low-code AJAX requests in ASP.NET WebForms ("ASP.NET AJAX"), prior to that doing AJAX requests needed a lot of hand-written JS code, which back then was super unreliable (this was before browsers even had Developer Tools windows and built-in script debuggers: we all were using the Microsoft Script Debugger and Visual InterDev to attach to IE/MSHTML's JS engine's debugging functionality.
lotophage 5y ago
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (well.com) is paid to post I believe, and has been around since about 1985.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  The Well is an Internet pioneer. It long predates the Web. I think that Jaron Lanier was involved in the early Well. I remember him discussing it, in an old Wired interview.

JohnBooty 5y ago

I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale. It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it. By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "at scale", or to put it another way: you can do things at a scale orders of magnitudes smaller than those going the ad-supported route. There have always been businesses quietly succeeding with this business model. They don't make the news because they're making "only" hundreds of thousands or several million dollars profit. But that's potentially a nice living for a small team of people. One recent successful example is Defector.com; formed by ex-Deadspin writers. They hit their 1-year anniversary and recently disclosed that they're profitable and doing well. The main problem with this model is that, essentially, you kind of have to bootstrap it. I don't know if there are investors actually funding this kind of revenue model, because the revenue ceiling for this sort of model is probably laughably low by SV standards. I don't envision Mark Cuban hankering for a piece of some business that could well be profitable but isn't likely to ever crack $1mil revenue. I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. I feel like it is a logical next step, but I also felt that way ten years ago and there wasn't exactly an explosion of them. My reasoning was: as things consolidated at the top, folks would stop even trying to focus on the top. Even in 2010 the barrier to entry for becoming the next FB/Amazon/whatever was unimaginable.

banannaise 5y ago
Remember that SA was a one-time payment of a fairly nominal amount. The primary purpose was not revenue. It was a combination of giving the users a stake in the community, and making it expensive to post maliciously (since you would burn through accounts).
jychang 5y ago
I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into, although not quite the same obviously.
- 5y ago

Consultant32452 5y ago

I like them both. The best part about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something there is a random yokel there to call them out on their shit immediately. And aside from a check mark I barely notice, the posts are indistinguishable. I belong to a pay-for-play online community also. It's where I go to not have to deal with the riff raff. It's really wonderful.

mejutoco 5y ago
I agree. Unfortunately, in my experience that person‘s criticism is buried in a sea of admirers trying to add to the point to grow their audience. I would love if twitter would embrace argument, instead of unconditional agreement. I find it hard to disagree on twitter (I simply ignore it if I disagree). There is not a lot of space for deep arguments. The algorithm does not like it, you will be blocked by users after one negative comment. IMHO the most common content on twitter are platitudes and feel-good content, followed by overconfident statements without any nuance, all coincidentally including whatever words are trending for the algorithm (html a programming language/cringey js jokes/rehashed productivity or startup tips)
mavhc 5y ago
Also the worst thing about Twitter is that when a person in a position of power posts something correct, there is a random yokel there to say they're an idiot immediately
HPsquared 5y ago
Twitter is a soup of opinions all mixed together.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

SA was free and had advertisers, but they disappeared and because the site was such a shitstain on the internet, no advertiser wanted to touch him with a ten foot pole. > terrible, low effort, low quality content You just described SA pretty well, but you left out doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns of people IRL.

bluedino 5y ago

Internet brands bought up a bunch of v bulletin boards a few years ago. You could pay to be a "premium member" but you still had to deal with the free members and didn't get many benefits other than skipping ands and perhaps access to PM's

genewitch 5y ago
They also bought vbulletin itself, and then developed future versions in house.

anm89 5y ago

I don't totally disagree with the concept but have you actually been to SA in the last year or two? It makes reddit look like an academic journal. Some of ugliest forums out there.

devonkim 5y ago
Depends upon the context and subforums, I've been a fairly active member for like... 20 years now (I am cringing as I typed that out, yikes). It's not that different from Reddit in that respect but it's much more readable for longer posts in a BB format compared to Reddit without a doubt (Reddit always struck me as a more accessible form of old Usenet posting than forums software of the 2000s). The programming and hardware conversation culture is somewhere between the dry conversation on HN and the rapid fire drive-by snark-for-pay that is the common denominator for modern Internet commentary.

eluusive 5y ago

I agree with this sentiment. People are currently attempting to do it at scale in a de-centralized way. Stamp is pay-to-post, and the proceeds go back to the entire community. https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum

maskaler 5y ago
It's possible your comment brought the site down?