SA nuked its DPPH and NMP3 forums (porn/music downloads) around 2003 or 2004, so it is doubly odd TCC could be allowed to stay around. Perhaps it was less of an immediate problem than piracy, but leaving around a druggie networking/trade subforum is wild even by web1.0 (or hell, Usenet) standards. I still don't understand how it didn't just result in a chain of drug busts. The only reasons I can think of are the forum's use to the feds as a source of information they could leverage elsewhere, or bureaucratic incompetence.
As for the cliques... It is the most useful to think of SA's early role as a gated Insider Internet. SA membership gave you access to a world of information and fun content at 10BUX a pop, a lot of it exclusive or semi-exclusive at the time. It doesn't seem too impressive these days, but that's because the rest of the net has grown up around it and vastly outscaled it. In the early 2000s, SA was one of the few general purpose forums out there (the Straight Dope Message Boards were another one - it has been recently mentioned it is still chugging along), and that 10BUX was a good value. Its subforums naturally worked as semi-independent messageboards, with their own rules and culture. This started to collapse in the late 2000s as groupthink leaking from a few subforums started to take over and a lot of good posters got driven out over petty shit.
