Hi irishlostboy,

You (and others on this site) definitely have a point: there are a few people on the site taking advantage of the system. Of course, I couldn't tell you exactly who they are--there are some (one or two) clear cases, but there are far more border-line cases, and those I don't know how to deal with.

But I do question your connection between "junk" on the site and the "lack" of community--have you ever spent 10 minutes on YouTube clicking around? YouTube definitely is a community, the millions and millions and millions of crappy uploads nothwithstanding.

And of course, forums are not funded--a community can--and hopefully wil--build up around our forums. It's important to keep in mind how very new this site is (7 months old this month!) and how long true communities take to build.

I think that a community can build up, even (and especially with) our payment system. In fact, I think that people will tend to give us some higher quality stuff than might appear free on other parts of the web, and I think the fact that we have gotten around 2,000 free models, 4,000 free textures, and 300 tutorials, all submitted by users, and most of pretty admirable quality over the last 7 months is pretty astounding.

What needs to happen most is community policing--we need to somehow get more people flagging bad items and rating items in general. Then, perhaps we at ShareCG need to find out ways to make the good rise to the top, and the bad stay... well... at the bottom, so the good people really get rewarded. The way that YouTube et. al. do that is by measuring ratings and views; the way videos get lots of ratings and views is by people, who genuinely like the video, embed it and link to it all over the place. If we could get that to happen here with our genuinely good content, that would be for the better. Then, we might really start to see a community.

-Jake