Life Lessons from a Lifestyle Business: Interview with founder of Metafilter | Hacker News Reader

Life Lessons from a Lifestyle Business: Interview with founder of Metafilter

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159 pointstim_sw54 comments

The stories he describes with the Google algorithm impacting his traffic (and subsequently, bottom line) is pretty scary.

A rephrased quote from Matt Cutts on an algorithm change cutting MetaFilter's traffic:

"Oh yeah, it never reversed. It should have. You were accidentally put in the bad pile."

Pretty much sums up Google customer service.

Yes any business relying solely in SE traffic is super risky.

That's a major source of anxiety for me. A random event completely outside of my control and I'm wiped off the map without a recourse. Every update has unintended consequences for someone...

I used to work for a company that sold furniture online. We were good but the majority of our business came from the beloved serps. It hurt us dramatically when our boilerplate product copy, sent to all online retailers, counted against us as though we were spam. It was beyond my capabilities to develop a method to automatically reword the copy. Surprise, surprise. We started to pay people to write unique descriptions for the products that everyone on the net was carrying. Then affiliates would pick it up and screw us again. That's it. No happy ending. Company was bought by our most underhanded competitor. Now I do my own thing.

I should note we rode the Google gravy train for about 8 years before that happened. After "panda" the company couldnt afford to buy every bit of its traffic. I doubt that's what Google was shooting for with that update but it really changed some lives.

That's really an incredible story, and I doubt that it exists in a vacuum. I'd really like to see a piece about companies like yours and others that were impacted heavily by algorithm changes.

The part that probably bothers me the most is that if the MetaFilter founder didn't have a direct connection to Matt Cutts, it probably would've just been the end of his site at the scale he was at.

Not to be harsh, but this isn't a lifestyle business. It sounds like this guy just wasn't the best choice to run the company.

Too much was spent on salaries and benefits. Only a month or two worth of cash was kept in the company to handle expenses. Free cash flow was pulled out of the company while it was still a viable growth opportunity. All the warning signs were ignored despite a vast majority of their revenue coming from a single source. Most egregiously, even though their traffic cratered after Google's Panda update in November 2012, they didn't reach out to the head of the web spam team at Google because... they didn't want to bother him.

Still, it's hard to admit mistakes. I have enormous respect for anyone willing to share their experience like this.

Matt admits that himself:

> I don’t mean to sound like a goofy politician but I came from meager means. My parents always had shitty small businesses that never made much money. I didn’t have any adults, like country club adults, around me to to tell me, “Oh, you should have a lawyer for that, you should incorporate as this in this state and you could avoid this tax.” I didn’t know anybody like that. I was financially illiterate until my early 20's.

> If you have no idea what an S Corp is, there’s not a lot of hand-holding help for you out there. I was a stupid, bumbling idiot combined with money. My spirit animal was Kenny Powers instead of Warren Buffett.

As et-al says he admits this himself.

But well, MeFi is more of a community than a company and as far as being a community goes it's done about as well as anything on the web.

Matt has been great at keeping a community going.

Kuro5hin, Slashdot and many others have come and gone but MeFi keeps on going.

"Kuro5hin, Slashdot and many others have come and gone but MeFi keeps on going."

Although I no longer use it, it does appear that slashdot is alive and well ...

Alive, anyway.

It seems that some sites disappear into a black hole (such as Kuro5hin) and some become dwarf stars (like Slashdot) - they're still burning, just not giving off much heat or light.

I just went to the page and as an advertiser I'm very confused. Who reads it?

As a long-time member, I'll answer your question directly and honestly: people looking for a well-moderated discussion community that don't tolerate right-wing attitudes very well. Metafilter is, in a very real way, one of the last bastions of the old web.

Thank you.

Two main takeaways here:

1. Community doesn't scale well.

Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit. As I grow older, the best communities and sources online are small. I love watching youtube videos with less than a thousand views. My favorite sites and communities online I share selectively. They are so easily ruined. The magic is lost so easily (and by people who genuinely enthusiastic about things but, aren't in the same mindset as the people already there).

2. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die but, he didn't and paid the price

Maybe it's just the internet changing but, he arguably should have just let it die (or rather change into what Reddit eventually became). Metafilter, SomethingAweful, 4Chan and Reddit all suffer from the reality of very few people creating and the vast majority consuming.

> 2. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die but, he didn't and paid the price

So, I'm a skosh biased, as the person currently running MetaFilter, with a moderation staff that's managed to grow back to close to the pre-crisis status quo, but I don't think that's really the best take on it.

With the benefit of hindsight, mostly what should have happened differently and for the better was to take the downslide more seriously more quickly in terms of changing our spending and saving and model for what the next year or three years looked like, and to have gotten the community involved in that discussion sooner. We'd likely be in more or less the same place we are today, which is smaller but pretty steady and the community doing well, but with fewer lurches and less pain and fumbling along the way.

I appreciate Matt's public frankness in this piece about some of the winging-it nature of the site's business history and the missteps along the way, because I know he's always tended to want to be more private or cautious about that sort of thing. And I think the nature of MetaFilter as a tiny business and a relatively close-knit community informs some of that dynamic; it's hard enough for a business to break bad news to customers, but to folks who are genuinely members of a community there's a whole other emotional commitment involved.

Do you run your own advertisements or do use only use Deck (or other third-parties)?

It's a mix of things; Deck, AdSense (for all the trouble they're still a major and these days fairly steady source of revenue), mostly-passive Amazon affiliate, and direct support from the MetaFilter community.

We've looked at other ad rubrics and been disappointed with the specific performance we've seen in a couple test cases, but the volatility of the ad economy means that it's certainly something we'll be reexamining continuously as time goes by.

> Maybe it's just the internet changing but, he arguably should have just let it die

I am so very happy he didn't because it remains one of the few worthwhile communities on the web. I have a monthly recurring donation for that very reason.

In the late 1990's when they started, around the same time as Metafilter, maybe Google was honestly trying to rank websites based on href's, as some perceived indicator of website popularity.

But over time how much has Google itself influenced the product of its own "Pagerank" algorithm?

If Google places a website as a first search result for some frequently searched term(s), even if by accident, then that website is going to become very popular, very quickly.

Opinion: Google determines the popularity of a website.

In the early days we believed they were presenting results based on the relative popularity of websites. At some stage Google itself became the determinant for the popularity of websites.

Stories like this one support this idea.

One could argue Google is running what amounts to an online version of the Yellow Pages where the ads can be changed or rearranged hourly, daily, weekly, etc. Instead of calling a telephone number to place an ad in the Yellow Pages, one has to enter an opaque Adwords auction for words instead of ads.

But for the small business, especially those who do not bid on words, it gets worse. A business listing in the search results will likely never been seen if it is not in the top 10, i.e., on page 1.

Imagine if this were true for the Yellow Pages, which is organized alphabetically. Businesses with names beginning with numbers or the letter "A" would receive a grossly disproportionate share of calls, because no one would ever get past the first page of listings.

As crazy as it sounds, I think there's an argument Google and not the user is effectively doing the choosing. Whether it's intentional or not is irrelevant. The way the system is implemented and used, this is the effect. And this only benefits Google.

But don't Google also analyze how long you spent at a site when you click results. So you click into a site, it's not what you wanted so you back out and click another result. Google records that and sees that site wasn't useful to you at that time for that search word. So it drops in popularity.

I've always wondered if/how that works on power users that opens multiple results on multiple tabs right after searching.

Google runs a beauty contest on the internet.

Contestants vie for first, second, third, so on. Over the past few years by the inherent nature of competition tips and tricks get shared and things normalize. Meaning, everyone starts to look the same.

Oh, you can also just cheat the contest to be ahead of first place by paying more than the next person.

Yes they are (under the well-intended banner of "quality"), and I'm no fanboy for google, but the real theme is monocultures:

It seems so great to have one-size-fits-all solutions - penicillin, Hollywood, iTunes, U.S. Government, "just google it," Microsoft Word, single strain of bananas. But, flexibility and divserity are needed to endure and survive the long-term.

I love the single strain of bananas inclusion. It is a giant problem. They are one of the worst strains according to friends who work in produce sourcing. We need to find a way to popularize consumption of saline/sea vegetables. And I agree with what you say, also.

> Businesses with names beginning with numbers or the letter "A" would receive a grossly disproportionate share of calls,

Look in your yellow pages for plumbers, taxis, etc. You'll notice a disproportionate number of them named things like A, A1, AAA, etc.

I'll bet they do it because they do (or believe they will) get more calls.

A little over a decade ago I founded a community driven website, after some growth I started work on the site full time but discovered I wasn't the right person to lead a business, induced by stress I sold the website on condition I would remain in position. True to their word I remain in position to this day, yet in the years since I've found that business interests and community interests diverge and the community I am passionate about has suffered for profit. I'm burned out, the community is my life, everything is connected, skills, contacts, how do I move on? Matt found his future in writing, where do I find my future?

Quit and mess around aimlessly for a while. You rightfully called it finding your future.

Quit and do things you like instead. You can always build new contacts, skills, and connections. Once you burn out you are just dragging along, it's painful and it's pointless.

I've been in three completely different fields for 3, 6, and 10 years respectively. Once you find something you like, it's very easy to dig in and build a new network and learn. Don't be afraid, be excited. The worst is when you are doing something you feel dread for or don't want to get out of bed in the morning for. Happy to talk/answer any questions.

Some remarks on Mefi itself:

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24089/You-were-accidentally-p...

> it would have all the problems Reddit has: terrible people controlling the conversation.

I take serious offense to this. I am a moderator on reddit and the communities I help out in are amazing. He paints all of reddit with the same brush but reddit is too large for that -- it's now the 9th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa. Sure, there are some horrible & trash communities. Perhaps there's a lot of them, but there's also a lot of amazing subreddits run by fantastic mods. Reddit is what you make of it - if you subscribe to those shitty subreddits, then your experience will be shitty. If you subscribe to great subreddits, then your experience will be equally great. Reddit is like a snapshot of the internet as a whole; there's the bad, there's some meh, and there's also some amazing content out there. You just have to look for it and tailor your experience for those things.

If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great.

For Reddit users who know the site, they know it's more of a platform to easily create a community without asking users to sign up for yet another site. However, for the outside world, they view Reddit either by the front page posts (which do have a tendency to deteriorate to a bunch of tired memes) or by the controversies that pop up in the media.

And fortunately the loudest people on Reddit end up being the ones that represent it for the general public.

(Clearly that was supposed to read unfortunately.)

By far the worst mistake that reddit makes is the emphasis it gives to r/all, and the way that impacts its public reputation, and shapes its audience. Reddit's algorithms are nowhere near sophisticated enough to compare long form articles to memes, and at this stage it is a failure even to attempt to do so. The site should abandon r/all, and probably also default subreddits, and make itself a repository of independent communities, which each rise or fall organically, according to their utility to their readers, rather than according to their desire to evangelize to the general community. The current system is built for abuse, and it's not a surprise that it produces dystopian, evangelical idiocy like fatpeoplehate and god knows what else.

I am so blunt because I think reddit in its current form risks doing genuine damage.

Except the front page is frequently full of trash and racism and sexism is rarely more than a click away, and is frequently upvoted. Congratulations on your own curated Reddit, but if an online community has to be carefully curated by individual members just to get to a point where participating doesn't feel like wading through 5 feet of shit for the occasional shiny piece of tin foil, it's in failure mode.

ETA: I say this as a person who reads Reddit material frequently, but doesn't interact much on it. I don't hate the platform. But I do hate a lot of the people.

> If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great.

I think Matt's comment was more about the up vote/down vote and how it can be controlled by a group of people.

As for your comment this is the common defense people turn to when defending Reddit. While it's true, Reddit itself doesn't do a good job of showing you how to use it. Logged out users see /r/all which more often than not is filled with advice animals, pics, gifs and (right now) the_donald subs. It comes across really poor. Even if you convert that user there is still not a ton of guidance to finding relevant subs to your interest. There's so many splintered subs (/r/game vs /r/games vs /r/truegaming) that it can be hard to find the one meeting your needs. You can sub to them all, but then you have this massive feed of subs. Some of which you may never see because your front page is being overwhelmed by some of the more popular subs.

Yeah, /r/all needs to die. The problem is finding and showing great stuff while not flooding niche communities with new members. If you send tons of people to /r/gaming, /r/gaming will stop being good, people will migrate to /r/games, and the cycle will repeat. Any replacement for /r/all will have to address this issue somehow.

Or they just need to build the process of changing what subreddits end up on the front page to account for shifts in quality.

My point was that being on the front page causes a shift in quality. The challenge is to drive people to high-quality communities without ruining those communities.

You're also insinuating that any subreddit that hits critical mass becomes low quality.

That seems to be pretty much the case, there might be a handful of strictly moderated exceptions.

Right, but if you just accept that the communities will be ruined and just shift to the next quality subreddit for a given topic once people have started migrating it might be better for everyone. Making communities more ephemeral and giving moderators less power would certainly chap some asses though.

I know the site can't scale without moderators but I think giving them so much ownership has resulted in a lot of problems. I'm not sure how else to incentivize them but the amount of power they're given clearly is good at attracting the type of people that it shouldn't (as well as the type of people it should, to be fair).

The system should be designed such that a flood of users doesn't degrade the community's usefulness. It should be obvious that it's difficult to obtain mass adoption if quality and readership are inversely correlated.

It's not absolute readership that's the issue: it's a sudden growth in readership. It takes time for people to learn community norms.

I get what you're saying, and it's absolutely true. But, at one point I had to step back and look at Reddit as a whole, and decide if I wanted to be a part of the overall community. Do I want to actively ignore my neighbors by wearing blinders, or should I just move to a new neighborhood, where it doesn't hurt to look out my window?

Ultimately, I decided to move. The overwhelming ugliness that has infected Reddit is a hassle that I'd rather not deal with, and that I don't want to be associated with.

Bad users aside, there's also the matter of the warranty canary, rampant guerrilla marketing, bots, and admins messing with the algorithms and UI for monetary reasons.

Circa 2010, I absolutely loved Reddit; I went to meet-ups, modded subs, spoke of narwhals baconing, the whole nine yards. That place is gone now though, and the proof is in the fact that you, an assumingly decent user, has to say ignore the defaults (i.e. the backbone of the site), it's still okay... in certain places! Again, you're on point; there's still no substitute for many its educational, enthusiast, and hobbyist subs, anywhere else online. But, the main decks are flooding with sewage, and many of us want to be clear of the ship, and the waters around it, before the whole thing goes down.

Reddit is quite capable of being terrible for people who aren't even using it at all. They made some concession to eliminating the worst of the hate groups, but those that remain still leak into the rest of the site.

You are an unpaid moderator. Metafilter pays its moderators. Reddit wouldn't be good if it had to pay its moderators because it would need so many.

I'd definitely argue that reddit is making the smarter financial choice by not paying its mods and having more of them, but that's not an option that would work for Metafilter.

Or to take it from another angle, Reddit couldn't be as large.

Which is sort of at the heart of what Matt was talking about with scaling community -- it's not that large is bad or that profit is bad, per se, but if your goal is to have a sense community ethos and some degree of coherence to the spirit of what being a site member means, you have to say no to some of the things that make big userbases and ever-upwards biz growth doable.

MetaFilter's major revenue growth up through 2012 was despite a lack of, not because of, any attempt to chase down big userbase growth. It was a ride on the AdSense wagon during a very big period of growth on that end, while the site maintained a reasonable slow increase of users. Likewise the AdSense crash (and the double whammy we got for the punitive misclassification) wasn't the result of shutting down or reversing user-growth measure. The site strategy of maintaining a community that doesn't grow or change too fast was consistent throughout that long stretch of years, and it's something that means we didn't explode by orders of magnitude but also that, even after a rough period, we also haven't collapsed under the weight of too much growth-chasing overleveraging our resources and debts and so on.

Reddit is a big, complicated topic about which I have lots of thoughts but no real interest in digging in on here or now. But there are some very complicated differences in the implications of what community, userbase, and moderation mean as words and ideas for a site like MetaFilter and a site like Reddit that make casual straight-across comparisons using those words essentially useless. The difference between volunteer and paid moderation is a very good, very big example of that.

I'm sure your little neighborhood is great and positive and welcoming, but you have to admit that's the exception and not the rule. As another poster phrases it, "Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit". I wouldn't go that far, but it's closer than the usual framing of Reddit as having "dark corners"; that is, the site is much more bad than good. The unevenness is a shortcoming, blaming it on the users is completely missing the point. On top of that, using the good parts provides support for the bad parts.

I read this article and followed the funding crisis when it happens because I participate on Metafilter. I think the only serious mistake that Matt made (as laid out in this article) that should have been obvious and avoidable was not following up with Matt Cutts a whole lot sooner. In other words, he should have given it like 6 to 12 weeks tops, then said "Hey, um, I am not seeing the improvement you promised. When can I expect that by?" or something along those lines.

Beyond that, all businesses that actually work at all are basically defying long odds. A lot of things have to go right and it can be nigh impossible to figure out what piece of it can be tweaked to improve performance and what piece of it is a case of "Oh, my god, no, do not touch that! The entire thing will crash if you change that one thing!" This is part of why franchises are so popular.

I've been lurking on metafilter here and there for years.

I usually glance over it once daily after reading HN. I keep meaning to pay the token fee and get a real username, etc.

But today, I saw a headline pre-pended with this:

"(WARNING: Contains strong language)"

... and that's the last straw.

I have come to expect the gratuitous (and common) "possibly NSFW links somewhere in this page" or "warning: trigger alert: hurt feelings" on mefi, but this was too much.

I'm sure I'll keep glancing over mefi from time to time, but I am not going to invest in, or take part in, a community that is so infantile it needs markers like "contains strong language".

The warning was quoted from the source, so your beef is with The Guardian.

MetaFilter has no shortage of strong language and it's not against any kind of community guideline if it's not being used in an intentionally shitty way; as a moderation staff we've pretty clearly set those expectations straight on the rare occasions that someone has complained about sensibility-offending surfeit of fucks and shits and damns in this or that conversation. I mostly just expect it to be done with a degree of skill and thought.

The exception there is slurs and the like; there's strong language and then there's racist/misogynist/homophobic/etc epithets, and the latter subclass is a different beast entirely that in specific discussions of language can bear mention rather than use when the distinction is clear. But that sort of thing otherwise can, indeed, fuck right off.

I remember that it was a long time before RWT's forums could be indexed by Google.

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