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Comment by slackstation | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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