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MF is a pay-to-post site, so it is skewed towards people who will pay. It's the same as those small elite colleges where people will study something impractical for an exhorbitant fee. You would only pay if you agreed with whatever the orthodoxy is. And it becomes self-selecting, and self-perpetuating. The people on MF are the sort of people who would say "OMG I can't believe anyone voted for Trump, because nobody I know did"

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MF has a one-time sign-up fee of $5.[0] It's a method of making it less likely that people create fake accounts and for members to value their accounts more. There are some people for whom this fee is beyond what they can pay. For many people, it's a cup of coffee or two, or a beer at a local bar. Yes, it has a gating effect. It'd be interesting to do a more formal study to compare the discussions there with other sites, such as HN, lobste.rs (invite-only), or Reddit.

[0]: http://www.metafilter.com/faq.mefi#1

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