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.
Thanks for those Crumbs of your Cleavage. That's your name, and that makes me laugh, smile, blush, because that's more creative than my nickname, Oatmeal. I think I never did Hub Pages. I did try to do AdSense but never got that to work as YouTube terminated 2 of my channels. Here is an upvote. That is interesting.