The plan all along was to have Plastic run alongside FEED and Suck, with extensive overlap. Plastic hosted all the discussion forums for FEED and Suck articles; FEED and Suck editors helped curate stories for Plastic. There was some vague plan to use the Plastic threads as a farm league where talented writers could make a name for themselves before graduating up to "the show" of FEED and Suck. As a business, we thought -- accurately -- that Plastic could be much bigger in terms of page views and unique visitors, and so would complement the smaller audience size, but more polished content at FEED and Suck. (We'd be able to show advertisers both reach and quality, in other words.) I still think it's a model that might work for someone, but we didn't really get to try it out, because the dot.com bubble burst right as we were closing our initial financing, and our institutional and strategic investors—Lycos Ventures, Advance Internet—chose to let the company run out of cash, rather than to support us through the dark ages of 2001-2003. (I say that, by the way, with no malice—it really was a dark time, and if I had been in their shoes I might have made the same call.)
via www.stevenberlinjohnson.com
From a post by Steven Johnson about an n+1 article about webism and the history of Feed, Suck, and Plastic.
I'm very ambivalent about SBJ on a personal level (you just don't play golf with someone the day before you fire them if have any expectation of them continuing to think of you as any kind of gentleman for example) but I will grant that he is a very smart man, and on this a few years ahead.