See, I don't know. I wasn't around sites like something awful very often, maybe it was different there but the sites I was around, new grounds, and such tended to just be different.
There's one such I revisited recently, the sites whole purpose is to discuss and play weird, niche, obscure, or outright pornographic games that you'd never have any chance of finding otherwise. 90% of the traffic though, was to pirate it. Most of the stuff wasn't for sale anymore, or was a pain in the ass to get, and so 10 years ago every single post would immediately have a link unless it was fucking impossible to find. The result is that if something truly fucking weird pops up, a whole community plays through it at the same time basically.
Today you are still allowed to link, but mentioning that you are linking, requesting a link, or implying the existence of a link gets you banned by the Jannies. 99% of people don't know linking is allowed if you just post a link. Jannies leave condenscending notes on people who respond to some necro-ing faggot going "meta upload not working" with "Here's the Link, still had it on my hard drive, have fun". In the past if they tried to do that they would have been eaten alive. The janny went from the public servant to the dictator.
You were never able to acquire some kind of emotional social gratification from being a nanny before, at least not where I was at. Sure you had mods people liked, who would drop in and fuck around, but 90% of that was when they would undo some other mods faggotry with a "sorry, we overstepped" message.
I blame the welfare state.
