K5 as it was usually shortened to, had a few very interesting people on it back in its heyday such as Micheal Crawford who wrote about Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and localroger who wrote The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It was reddit with all the weird kids.
Michael Crawford is here on HN, in case you were wondering. When I first saw his name, I definitely did a double-take and had flashbacks to his OggFrog posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford
I nearly forgot to mention mindpixel AKA Chris McKinstry, I remember his suicide was a such shock. I can't think of anyone else who could write about mind and thought, and hypersurfaces and Hopf maps in a suicide note.
> It presumably encouraged much higher quality content.
Haha, oh boy. You're talking about k5, man. We practically prided ourselves on terrible and meta content. But yes, some of the longer-form stuff was truly interesting. You had to submit to some pretty grueling dissection of your work by a broad group of people, though, and I only front paged a couple articles because I didn't truly understand what was going on.
I actually landed on k5 a couple months ago and read stuff I wrote in 2001, long before I realized the permanency of the Web. It was an interesting time travel experience to a long, long time ago. I'm half glad it's dead so that portion of my life slowly fades into history/archive, because I honestly have no idea what I was talking about half the time.
After 2005 to 2006 the site became ridiculous. That's because Rusty had the guts ripped out of him when some arsehole photoshopped his wife's image on a pornographic image.
The trolls laughed at it, but it destroyed the site and I really feel that Rusty never had the same attitude toward K5 ever again.
This is why trolling needs to be banned. It's OK to have some fun, but when you start pissing in your own backyard, or let terrible people to take over, then they bully even the founders and everything goes to shit.
