What was once a useful and community based site is now a commercially-driven, over-moderated cesspoo – I have fond memories of OzBargain and the many deals it brought me years ago. This was back when it was a much smaller site but the users posted deals to benefit each other and not themselves (referrals).

Although there were less deals back then, they were quality deals and they would always be accompanied by a number of insightful comments about the product and whether there were better deals to be had. Nowadays, all you see are 'free ebooks' this and 'free apps/udemy courses' that, things that can be found on other, less cumbersome sites and things that barely anyone will actually benefit from. Comments are now low effort and mainly involve trash talking against the minority groups. The site had evolved to this stage ever since 'badges' were introduced which basically encouraged these low effort deals and comments to be posted. There's even a badge for posting a comment every day of the month. Nowadays, you have to sift through the junk to get to the good stuff.

I would say that the site first started dying when Neil and Scotty decided to allow certain users become 'powerusers' aka moderators. This basically let them go around censoring posts and comments as they saw fit with no justification required whatsoever. Obviously, long time contributors were not impressed with this change and as they had no say in the matter, decided to leave, with some even starting their own bargain site.

All in all, I would not recommend contributing to this site unless you want to be treated like dirt for trying to help people. Lurk if you are incredibly bored but don't bother engaging in discussion with those who continue to use this site unless you have extra brain cells to lose.