Plastic.com

Plastic.com (2001–2011) was a general-interest internet forum running under the motto 'Recycling the Web in Real Time'.

The website was community-driven, with readers moderating discussions, submitting stories, and participating in their selection.

Plastic was launched in January 2001 by Automatic Media, a conglomerate that included the pioneering webzines Feed and Suck.com. In keeping with Automatic's model of small, low-cost websites, Plastic launched with a staff of only four, amongst them Suck co-founder Joey Anuff as editor-in-chief. When Automatic Media folded in June of that year, several of the editors stayed on, working for free. On November 2, 2001, the site was sold for $30,000 to Suck co-founder Carl Steadman, who became its sole owner. Steadman took the site offline for two weeks and relaunched it on December 16, 2001, after falling out with Anuff, who no longer contributed to Plastic after the relaunch.

Plastic did not feature any advertising, and was supported entirely by user donations. The site used a modified version of Slash, the content management system developed and distributed by Slashdot, and it was almost entirely member-driven. As of November 11, 2008, there were 50,218 accounts, with several thousand being active members. For a while, Plastic offered email accounts.

Plastic closed permanently in February 2011, about a month after its ten-year anniversary.

The site's topics included "etcetera", "filmtv", "media", "music", "politics", "scitech", and "work". Topics covered on the board were primarily related to current events. Plastic's content was entirely driven by user-submitted stories. A typical Plastic story selected a topic based around a story found on an external link, with the Plastic user providing a larger context for that article with supporting links and some editorial comment. The stories were often written in a way that frames a discussion for the other readers to post comments within. Readers are invited to post their comments in the stories, which can be moderated by other users. New submissions will appear in the Submissions Queue (subQ), which is visible to all users, and can be voted on by users with 50 "karma" or higher. Each voter can give the sub 0, .5, or 1 points, and high-ranking subs will eventually become full-fledged stories that can be commented upon. In addition to voting on the submissions, users are given a 255 character text field to suggest changes to the story, post helpful links to exterior sites or previous Plastic stories, or suggest alternate headlines for the story itself. One of Plastic's volunteer editors will then properly format the story for running on "the front page".

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