State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions | Hacker News Reader

State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions

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51 pointscolinprince20 comments

Metafilter might be the internet community with the single highest quality of discourse on the internet. Yes, easily outdoing even HN. I really hope it comes through this intact.

It will. They want to keep paid 24/7/365 moderation coverage and that's not cheap. But MetaFilter hasn't had that for most of its history, so if they can't afford it, they won't need to shut down the site.

As someone who generally shares their politico-ideological bent (and is a paying member), I agree. I could see how someone who didn't might disagree. But if you're generally intellectually curious and don't necessarily see things from that left-of-NPR perspective, I think it's a good place to steelman[0] some of your arguments.

I do like how they moderate the community, with active moderators and a modest feewall to participation. Anybody else doing it like that?

[0] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

I disagree with this, but not because MeFi users are wont to flame or bait or argue in bad faith by default.

I paid for a membership almost a decade ago and haven't been on Metafilter in probably 6 years now. Even back around 2012 it was getting to the point where there was a clear ideological bent - namely a postmodernist, anti-capitalist, anarcho-socialist-lite, ideology. That would be all well and good except arguing from any other pov, if only for argument sake, would get piled on and not discussed in a way conducive to productive conversation.

Seems to be happening everywhere on the web now - including HN. Just this week someone argued that this statement I posted was "almost racist":

I also don't think this is desirable as a framework for AGI - as humans, despite our intelligent status, are quite unstable and sub-optimal in groups.

How someone gets "racist" from that statement is really mind boggling. Not exactly a great environment for discussion.

It looks like they just mis-read you as saying that there are particular sub-groups of humans that are sub-optimally intelligent, when what you charitably appear to be saying is that evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals.

evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals.

Indeed. I strive for clarity above all things in my writing, but it seems increasingly impossible to navigate the minefield of offense-taking. I try to largely ignore it, but prevailing ideologies don't really care about arguments that are controversial, and immediately jump to labeling.

I don't know. In basically no other place in my adult life other than Hacker News am I ever seriously confronted, by people I'm actually talking to, with the idea that non-white people are inferior to white people (intellectually or otherwise). It basically only happens to me here. And the (bogus) argument that science conclusively shows certain racially-defined subgroups to be inferior is the most common form that sentiment takes. So I wouldn't be surprised if people here were hypervigilant about that.

I'm not looking for people to be racist (I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when someone whose comments I've read before on HN says something that betrays a belief in racial superiority; it's not pleasant). But I am pretty regularly on the lookout for subtle or coded appeals to that logic.

And as we can see, simply stating your opinion here - which is effectively anti-racist and anti-fascist gets you grayed out.

However I do encounter racists in my daily life and it's pretty unnerving - if only because I or my father have been on the receiving end of their racism (we're not white by the way). So I'm acutely aware of it, yet I'm hesitant to bring up any argument that is counter-narrative - irrespective of whether the argument is about race or not - for fear of being singled out.

I think - based on what dang has commented to me personally and I've read elsewhere - HN has taken the approach that political/social controversy in and of itself is counterproductive to reasonable online dialog, so anything that has even a whiff of polarization needs to be very closely monitored. Obviously that's a matter of judgement and while I disagree, it's apparently the direction they want to go, so be it.

I think the relevant guideline puts it well:

> Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

The inadequacy of this guideline and couching most moderation along its lines is why the problem and 'dynamics' as tptacek puts it, exist in the first place.

The site selects for and breeds civil, substantive racists and misogynists (along with the hyper-sensitized responses) like a hospital breeds antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

I can see selects for, but breeds seems a stretch. Unless you mean breeds civility within racists and misogynists, which seems beneficial?

Yes, mostly the second thing. It's the opposite of beneficial - because the guidelines say 'don't be a meanie/obvious blowhard' and most people who get called out for anything are called out for something along those lines, bigots who adapt to these can and sometimes do last on the site for years.

HN's mods put in a great deal of effort in and are surprisingly successful at containing the far more basic and common human impulse to be a jerk to strangers online. They have rules, they enforce them, they publicly shame rulebreakers, etc. You are explicitly not allowed to be an asshat on HN and everyone knows it. The place would be better if 'don't be a bigot' got the same treatment. All caps users and transgressors against HN's fundamentalist quotation marks cult† are exposed to more public opprobrium than your typical "human biodiversity" sea lion.

†This bit is a dumb[1] joke[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

This all makes sense. All I'm saying is that there are dynamics on this site that might make people hypervigilant about racist arguments --- where "hypervigilant" implies "more than is objectively justified".

Thanks for saying that. Usually I don't post to say the following, but I'm making an exception: My experience and feelings about it are the same. It's a failure of HN, though I believe that the mods are trying to figure it out and that it's gotten better.

I stopped posting at that time as everything I said was either removed or insulted.

That may have been true 10 years ago, when Matt and later Jessamyn were the only moderators, but I would argue that the quality of the discourse on the site started a long, slow decline after Josh joined the moderation team, imposing a no-dissenting-opinion-allowed moderating style.

Currently the number of paid moderators is insanely high for a site with the number of active users that Metafilter has, so the financial problems come as no surprise.

Not everyone would agree with this statement.

I'm honestly failing to see that. Maybe at some point, but sampling the front page ...

All the articles on the front page have 20 or less comments. Of those, at least two thirds of those comments are single sentences. "High quality discourse"?

I see things like this:

https://www.metafilter.com/174818/We-have-to-articulate-ours...

"Hahaha. YES. Time to revolutionize my voicemail."

"But why?"

"We truly live in the future.

Edit: I hate you all."

"Don't we all want a big red drama knob, really?"

https://www.metafilter.com/174819/Dont-accessorize-with-horn...

"Ah, yes that definitely makes sense, thank you!"

"This will really change the aesthetic of heavy metal album art."

"Decorating, that's where I'm a Viking!"

"Disappointing lack of drinking mugs made out of your enemy's skull."

I haven't heard of Metafilter in forever, it always seemed like a pretty obscure community. How come it takes $38000 a month to run this site? It can't be getting that much traffic.

EDIT: ok, upon reading the TFA most of it goes to pay the wages of employees, but what do they all do is unclear.

Last I checked: There are multiple moderators and one Tech guy. Historically, they prided themselves on providing "real jobs" with adequate pay and benefits.

The numbers I'm seeing suggest the full time staff probably make better than $50k/year and the part-time staff likely make some pro-rated equivalent, so to speak.

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