It was a joke on multiple levels. The founder was Rusty. Rusty -> rust -> corrosion -> kuro5shin. The second level was that it was a reference to Neal Stephenson's Sno Crash character Da5id character. The pseudo-Japanese and l33t-speak spelling was did give it a a cyberpunk flair.
To be honest, there was something very awesome about the site layout. When the story submission queue was full and the trolling was only very much in the background, then it was a really good and amazing site.
The trolls turned incredibly mean though. They didn't ever come out of the woodwork, and they were completely anonymous. They were the harbinger of what was to come about half a decade later.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ybSFU9aDzsoC&pg=PA154&lpg=...