It doesn't take long to realise that the "business model" here is convincing wannabe hackers to pay BTC to upgrade to "l33t" membership so that they can access all forums.
Otherwise, forums have various "prestige" requirements that take far too long to achieve. For example, you need 5 prestige to post_replies_ in the C forum. You need 25(!) prestige to post replies in the science and philosophy forum. Note that I've used the forum for approximately 1 week, contributing significantly to the few forums I do have access to - and I still have... 0 prestige.
Despite all of these requirements, the quality of posts by most members is shockingly bad. There are people with prestige and tens of thousands of posts under their belt who post complete garbage in every topic. I've never before seen a tech site whose senior members and "experts" know so little about technology.
The staff are the usual arrogant types you'd expect from a site like this.
Basically, the site is a joke. :P