I joined GAF during the dreamcast days, around 2000 or so. Got permed last year because I called out a french dude who was trying to pull a pity party to get people to buy him a copy of Dark Soul. My total ban count was almost 20 if I remember well. And it looks like GAF Gold might become real, since ads don't work with the ssl setup they implemented. Interesting times ahead!
As for people blaming Devo for the death of neogaf, I think her style of posting was more of a reflection of a new breed of progressive internet users at the time, which also led to this more, dare I say, understanding era of the internet.
The strict moderating got rid of the idiotic poster. Dragona's modding was problematic,many good posters got removed over trivial things. We cannot also ignore how bans became a public spectacle for users..
I'm not exactly sure what launched the exodus of gaming industry people with public accounts. Maybe it's the mix of people geting exposed (like that one Sony guy), people fucking up and leaking shit by accident, people getting their teeth kicked-in in badly handled threads (that silicon knight ceo thread), or simply the birth of Twitter.. Insiders on neogaf are just gone nowadays.
The strict moderating policy also removed tons of very knowledgeable people, or people with legit passion about gaming. Now the gaming forum is filled with average joes. It's also plagued with wikipedia experts.
