Yeah, it is possible. I’m sure more than a few useful idiots were (are? I don’t plan on paying to read comments behind a paywall, LOL) involved in any case. True believers constantly playing stupid games (and with their help, we all get to win stupid prizes) involving Oppression Olympics, Marxist absolutism, lectures on intersectionality, and other completely useless shit.

The original founders had mostly seemed to have left as far as I could tell. Mark Fraunfelder was still around and posting articles; I don’t know how much he commented or paid attention to the BBS forums. He seemed to be a rather typical liberal from his other writings and his interests. Interestingly, I’d see the more delusional types mocking him for being white cishet or whatever (basically, not sufficiently ticking enough boxes in the Oppression Olympics I guess) and those comments seemed to stay up, so make of that what you will.

But the inmates running the asylum in those forums? Holy shit, if it wasn’t a psy-op being perpetrated by our enemies or by the right, the people running the place are just wildly out of touch, that’s all I can say. If it was a psy-op, I’m fairly certain that by moving it to a paywall, it was being effectively shut down, because I don’t know who was even using the main site before - ironically, a site partly owned by Corey Doctorow had become quite enshittified with ads.

When it comes to being all lefty maximalist, the notion of moving to Substack was definitely hilarious. I don’t know how many of the useful idiots were going to make that leap to become paying members of Substack to continue to read and make comments, LOL, since calling Substack a “Nazi bar” is common currency for them…