You know that thing on the home page that says “Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks.”? It is absolutely true.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a better-informed, smarter group of people on any general discussion board anywhere on the net, let alone try to put together such a cast in real life. And the dipsticks add flavor. Or grit, or something. You get the idea.
And the moderation does make a huge difference. Places like alt.folklore.urban and alt.fan.cecil-adams can be great, but the nature of Usenet, and particularly the unmoderated groups, guarantee a fairly high noise level. Here the spammers and obvious trolls are chased out almost immediately, and even long timers get tossed if they flaunt the rules too much.
Also, many other web discussion boards are so cluttered with icons, sig lines, dancing pictures, and other crap you can hardly see the posts. After seeing dozens of posts on a thread saying “Dude, you suck!” followed by 30 lines of signature including animated jpgs of the poster’s cat, skateboard, and lunch, I’m ready to scratch my eyes out.
There’s a lot of silliness here, most, but not all, of the answers are right, and the wrong ones usually get corrected. Lots of chatter about inconsequential things, serious things, esoteric things, simple things, fun, games, sex, drugs, and rock and roll! What more could you possibly ask?
The money was trivial in an absolute sense, and compared to the value I get, positively microscopic. I’d pay two or three times as much and consider it a bargain.
So, given all that, it’s like the other guys said: The time came when we had to pay to play or lose the joint. I paid.
