Squidoo was more like HubPages. As a matter of fact, if memory serves me, Squidoo was acquired by HubPages a few years back.

Squidoo was a good platform. A place to stretch your writing muscles, develop a following, tweak your style — the quintessential fun multi-topic platform to get your message out.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous affiliate marketers and spammers started flooding the site and gaming the system. The user experience began to suffer as a result. Soon it became polluted with useless posts — you know, rehashes of rehashes, plagiarized articles, promotional posts offering no value to the reader, etc.

HubPages, of course, is still around but, while a decent site, it lacks that fervent bite and boldness of the early Squidoo days. It still relies on user-created content, but it is blander — more sanitized and controlled by rules and restrictions imposed by HubPages itself.

I understand HubPages' approach, they had to steer their ship toward a more conformist path in order to avoid Google penalties. Otherwise, their monetization model, which relies heavily on AdSense, would be compromised.