A key part of the Something Awful forum's success was the $10 registration fee required to create an account. Discussion can't scale beyond a certain number of

A key part of the Something Awful forum's success was the $10 registration fee required to create an account. Discussion can't scale beyond a certain number of active user accounts without a large drop in quality. It's kind of hard to tell what that limit is because every forum has a large number of mostly quiet lurkers who simply want to read and follow the discourse. SA's $10 fee created a barrier to entry, and the culture of bans being regularly handed out to bad posters encouraged people to lurk until they were ready to make good posts. Upvotes and downvotes as popularized by reddit and reddit-like forums served as a kind of substitute for that effect but they don't work well with as many users as those websites have.