Because I make it a habit to try to better explain myself to people who I feel don't understand my actions, I wrote a long reply back to him and after doing so realized that what I wrote really summarizes the thought process behind the website. So I'm reposting it here for more people to see,
Late to the punch?
More like way ahead of the curve
Let me compare with an analogy.
Let's say that Youtube is a funnel. When you submit a video, you basically dump it into the funnel along with millions of other people dumping into the funnel at the same time. That results in stuff pouring out of the top that is overflowing, because only so much can get out the bottom-- the intended destination. Do you know what I'm describing? Youtube's display algorithms for relevancy. Compared to the total number of submissions, only a small number of videos are actually benefited by these algorithms and it is primarily people who already have large subscriber bases and can make videos go viral in a few hours after uploading. That's why you see the same people on the front pages all the time. Everyone else is lost in the ocean of Youtube.
For smaller people if they want their stuff seen they need to embed their videos OUTSIDE Youtube. And there is only a finite number of places you can do that and hope your videos actually get seen. As an example, this forum. People's own submissions sit here at the very bottom of the forum, which no one has any other reason to go look at. Consequently few things are seen. Spoony's forum isn't alone in this; nearly every website works that way, including Blistered Thumbs, TGWTG, Kotaku and ScrewAttack. All the featured contributors-- the people who work on the site-- they get front page exposure and everyone else is basically pushed into the back alleys of the website.
And that's fine--there is nothing wrong with them focusing on their own people, but that's not what true Web 2.0 design is about.
Now take a look at www.rpgfanatic.net
We have a featured contributor box. That represents roughly 1% of the website. The overwhelming majority of space is devoted to allowing user submissions to be found, and we have several different ways to do that; directly from a game's page, or using the navigation menu at the left hand side of the screen. We have a small leaderboard on the front page below our image slider. And we will eventually have more ways, too, and put a great deal of emphasis on search functions and a few other ideas I've personally came up with that nobody else has done (near as I can tell, anyway).
Also, unlike GameFAQs and GiantBomb, we won't ban people for submitting monetized videos. GameFAQs and Giant Bomb will do that. It's my belief that Whiskey Media was only running sites like Giant Bomb in order to advertise their website development platform and had little actual interest in building communities beyond that; thus why they sold their company at the first chance they got, even going as far as selling Giant Bomb to CNET -- cause the company who let GameFAQs go to hell are going to manage Giant Bomb so much better, right?
The way we handle walkthroughs is also better. GameFAQs is still primarily notepad txt files. We allow easy embedding of images and videos to compliment your walkthroughs, and you can even embed monetized videos if you have a monetized Youtube account. You'll never be able to do that on GameFAQs, it's against their terms of service.
You can also submit Let's Plays / Commentaries. We have a specific feed just for them so they don't get mixed in with news or review submissions. I don't know of any other site that handles different types of user submitted game content the way we do. Everything usually just gets dumped into one big feed (like on ScrewAttack) and consequently much of it is lost in the sea of submissions. We've put a lot of effort into minimizing that from happening. It's way harder for things to be lost on our site.
You should give my site a shot. We will never sell out to anybody. We're in this for the long haul and for the right reasons.
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