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.

Also, 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.

The 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.

I 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.

The other factor is not being shy about banning people. Heavy moderation.

I believe you are correct. If I pay for something that suggests I am the customer and not the product.

Haha 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.

I 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.

Good for you but it's hard to take you remotely seriously when you try to relate SA and high quality conversation.

Are you trying to be ironic on purpose?

SA is basically 4chan except you have to pay 10 bucks to join. I don't really see the joke here.

The "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...

What, 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.

If you got banned after a couple of days that means you broke the rules in a big way.

Well, that's because reddit is simply a platform, right? reddit undeniably has tools to allow for strong moderation. see /r/AskHistorians for a perfect example of this.

Strong moderation would mean that moderation is not optional, always present and always consistent.

Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.

"Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.

Reddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways:

1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names.

2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture.

Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.