Why does a librarian own MetaFilter? | Hacker News Reader

Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?

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108 pointsmuglug42 comments

Hi! Yes I'm the owner which is mostly paperwork and legal and sort of "the vision thing." Loup is running day-to-day stuff and we have a 12-member Steering Committee who will hopefully be setting the priorities and keeping everyone on target. I can not stress enough that I am not making the daily decisions but I do know that yes being able to accept help (and money, but help especially) is really going to be a priority as we try to make the site more community run and much less of a "single point of failure" situation. The last few years have been hard for the world which also means hard for MeFi; MeFi had some MeFi-specific issues and problems which needed addressing and are getting looked at. For anyone who hangs out there, or who just has fond memories of the place but it's not your spot anymore, consider stopping by to say hi again, giving feedback (or money, but feedback especially) and helping MeFi stay MeFi. <3

For those who aren't sure what MeFi is: it's basically this site, but with a broader range of topics and a deeper sense of community, like certain newsgroups or mailing lists.

Thank you! This is the first time I've heard of Meta Filter.

It's a shame - MetaFilter and sites like SlashDot used to be more prominent. I think that has changed with the way Google likes to lead to paywall and ad sites now over quality content and discussions. Just to make a point, if I search "how to screw in a lightbulb" I wouldn't be surprised if the top result takes me to a blog post that explains the history of the bulb, the average life of each type of lightbulb, some Amazon affiliated links, before it gets to what I need. I often have to tag on "reddit" just to cut down on the noise and get to the answer.

Not to detract from the overall point, I got a pretty decent wikihow as the first result when I searched. It was amp-hosted and wouldn't be suitable on a low-bandwidth connection, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I've been conditioned to expect.

Wow Jessamyn's back and now owns it? Never thought I'd see the day. She was always fair and understandable.

I got an account on Metafilter back in '08 and closed it in '15 because it became devastatingly political. It was like a cliff face, it went from a generous and unrestrained community to total one-sided 'my way or no way' politics. I asked the mods to close my account in 2015 because of it and they did.. without the awkward twang of displeasure or faint remorse I was expecting.

To this day, if I see that black and white attitude to politics, I ditch the site. It's not worth it. HN's tech focus really is a saving grace.

When she says "A lot of people left because the site changed and they didn’t", it was definitely my outcome.

BTW this was the best non-professional song I found on Mefi back in '08 (a million years ago?) https://music.metafilter.com/902/Miss-Me-in-the-Morning

>I got an account on Metafilter back in '08 and closed it in '15 because it became devastatingly political. It was like a cliff face, it went from a generous and unrestrained community to total one-sided 'my way or no way' politics.

Yes. People who haven't heard of Metafilter don't get how, at one time, it was the best of Reddit and Hacker News in one place.

It really destroyed itself because users (and, more importantly, the mods behind the scenes) developed a hivemind that exceeds anything out there other than the likes of /r/politics (no, kids, HN's "hivemind" is nothing of the sort in comparison) in its intensity to erase anyone who commits wrongthink. I hope Ms. West understands how catastrophic the consequences were.

Metafilter is the only community that I've seen that had "agree with the hivemind" as an explicit rule! I don't know whether it still operates this way, but for a very long time it ran with a "read the room" rule, which meant that disagreeing with the others in a thread was a mute/banworthy offense. So of course a site monoculture would develop under those circumstances...

There's an expectation on MeFi that people's lived experience trumps people's hot takes.

Whereas in a lot of communities, HN included, a majority viewpoint, even if it reflects a very shallow understanding, can be immensely popular.

To some extent that's just bike-shedding, and maybe that's okay on HN, but Metafilter covers a wider range of topics, and handles a lot of them well.

You should check out the subreddit rules for r/conservative.

Yeah for sure. Reddit's hivemind is mostly based on automod bots and two or three mods manually scanning & banning everything. MeFi was open and a pleasing place to hang out and tease out new ideas. Then the politics hit and the open-and-friendly feedback loop turned into a recursive folding inwards into one political view, for owner, mods (except jessamyn who didn't get into it) and commenters.

It wasn't just an automod bot banning keywords or your comments getting shadowbanned. You could say what you wanted and the people (entire user base and owners) would figure out the best way to reinforce their recursive implosion and completely destroy you and whatever point you were trying to say. Kind of impressive in a mechanical sense, and you know, horrible to participate in.

Looks way better than that now.

> Then the politics hit and the open-and-friendly feedback loop turned into a recursive folding inwards into one political view, for owner, mods (except jessamyn who didn't get into it) and commenters.

The funny thing is that I vaguely thought Ms. West was the owner, or at least ran things, so to hear that she's only now taken over is surprising. Certainly she was for years the closest thing Metafilter had to a public face.

>It wasn't just an automod bot banning keywords or your comments getting shadowbanned. You could say what you wanted and the people (entire user base and owners) would figure out the best way to reinforce their recursive implosion and completely destroy you and whatever point you were trying to say. Kind of impressive in a mechanical sense, and you know, horrible to participate in.

Yes; the shunning was entirely people-driven.

At least with Reddit, it's possible to find another subreddit if you don't like /r/politics. With MeFi, the only alternatives are off the site entirely. I never used my MeFi account much despite its age because I could see early on the trends that only accelerated as the years passed, so it's no surprise (but still sad, given the site's venerable history) to see that many, many others with much more participation decided to go off the site.

As unhappy as I was as a user of MetaFilter, this is a bad characterization. "Read the room," as practiced on MF, means that you can't storm into a thread with your guns blazing and make it all about you and your viewpoint by responding to everyone else in the thread and dominate by sheer volume of comments. Make your viewpoint known, but don't keep insisting that it deserves a response from others. Basically, don't be the asshole party guest who barges in and demands to be the center of attention. Compared to the rest of the internet, that is the mildest imaginable social norm.

I thought that for a long time, until I actually posted a fairly normal (for Europe) opinion from outside the spectrum of US centre-left thought and had it instantly deleted. Then I realised what appeared to be an unusually well behaved internet community is (was?) probably just a very strictly policed echo chamber.

Let's be honest - you're describing how it was in the before times. Once the most aggrieved people in the universe began holding sway, it devolved into a place where every thoughtful disagreement became a flashpoint.

I only left (err, closed my always-open browser tab) a few months ago, after reading through the discussion about the user survey. The number of comments saying, basically, “anyone who thinks the site changed for the worse is just a [insert right wing caricature here]” horrified me yet, by that point, was completely unsurprising. But after reading a few comments from people who had left the site, I finally realized that I could do the same, and I’d probably be happier for it.

I know what you mean - for awhile after 2016 you couldn't say anything remotely progressive without having your comments flagged by overzealous Clinton-or-nobody Dems. I almost left but I stuck around and it's gotten better. The no-U.S.-politics option made things easier.

Metafilter was the place I learned to be civil online, and that just makes the current state of things all the more devastating.

Yeah my interest in MeFi withered at that time as well. But not because I disagreed with those particular politics (because I don't) but because it suddenly started feeling like an annoyingly US-first type of community.

As Americans argue between each other, they also have a way of making it all sound like it is all about themselves and their world.

I'm a longtime MeFi participant and I'm thrilled Jessamyn is involved again.

Another bit of trivia: her father was Tom West, one of the engineers chronicled in Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/business/28west.html

> her father was Tom West

cool.

Jessamyn is great. She doesn't know it, but she was one of the inspirations for me going to library school, many years ago. Metafilter, too, was my high water mark for discussions on the open internet — nothing has really come close to it since.

This interview transcript is unfortunately hard to read, and I think a little editing and cleanup would do it justice.

I wonder if it was auto-transcripted. It reads like it was done by someone unfamiliar with the rhythms and idioms of "English as she is spoke".

As I recall, when I made a metafilter account many years ago (2007!?!?) it costs 5 dollars to join. Which is a low enough amount that people can do it casually, but it's enough to deter people making random sockpuppets for the purposes of baiting and trolling and spamming. Introducing a barrier like that is an interesting and I think very valid method to maintaining the quality of an online discussion forum.

It's still $5 but they say on the signup page they'll waive it if you ask because you can't afford it/can't send the money somehow. So it's still very accessible but very, very few spammers bother to do either (a few have in the past decade and a half, of course).

Jessamyn is amazing and I'm thrilled she's back running things at Mefi.

I was a very active user of MetaFilter for a couple of years in the early 2010s. I still have a lot of bookmarked links to shopping and music recs from Ask MeFi, although link rot has by now rendered many of them less useful.

I was putting together a lot of detailed posts on topics that interested me, mostly for my own record-keeping, but also hoping to build connections with similarly minded people. Despite making a lot of effort, including setting up a few MeFi meetups IRL, I never really clicked with anyone else on the site (except for one Brooklyn hipster who was really into the Achewood web comic, but that wasn't really enough for a long-term friendship).

Since I wasn't getting anything out of the site socially, the heavy moderation, the occasional private nastygram, and a handful of particularly strident users eventually got to me and I closed my account.

Any of those links still kicking? It's cool to see what other people like about MeFi and it's the only place where some of that content lives.

Here are some miscellaneious links to Ask Metafilter that I saved. (Sorry about the poor formatting, but the links appear to work.)

Yes, they're all in my deactivated MeFi profile, which I will sadly not share with you.

If I recall correctly it was a google algo change that punished the site a few years ago

Yes. The Ask MetaFilter section of the site has a deep bank of questions with high-quality answers. Google used to weight these heavily in its search results, so Google directed a lot of potential new users to the site and accounted for a lot of ad revenue.

At some point in the mid-teens, a Google algorithm change de-prioritized MetaFilter, with catastrophic effect on the site's income.

I love me Metafilter, but I'm worried that the site itself isn't going to make it, being built on Cold Fusion and the people who want to work on that is approaching 0.

I love Metafilter. ColdFusion ain't great but the bigger problem facing it is the slow decline in readers, posts, and ad revenue. It's an old fashioned site that I find very valuable but is facing attrition. Some stats from 2020 (the trend hasn't changed) https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25642/Talk-less#1375722

It's true that the issue is the number of users and interactions, but the difficulty of making any technical improvements is a part of that. Maybe not a huge one but if they never add features that people want that's going to hurt engagement somewhat.

> It's true that the issue is the number of users and interactions, but the difficulty of making any technical improvements is a part of that. Maybe not a huge one but if they never add features that people want that's going to hurt engagement somewhat.

It's been awhile since I've visited, but people aren't leaving due to lack of features. It was mainly social issues (IIRC, it's a bit of a minefield, and the moderation style has a few notable negative side effects).

> people aren't leaving due to lack of features.

It's not its lack of features that people are leaving, it's that the rest of the Internet 'gained' features, specifically Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, and they consume more of every potential user's attention.

> It's not its lack of features that people are leaving, it's that the rest of the Internet 'gained' features, specifically Facebook, Reddit, and Discord,

Sorry, no. I don't think you get it. People weren't leaving because reddit had threaded comments (or something dumb like that), and that was so great they just had to spend more time there. "Features" have nothing to do with the issues.

> and they consume more of every potential user's attention.

Metafilter's always been so small (and must remain so to work), that concerns like that are totally off base.

I honestly feel like part of it is just that the site sometimes feels like abandonware. That is, it's still running but older cruft is still there (like how you can add AOL Instant Messenger to your profile page) and there are many parts of the site that just don't seem vital and alive. Some of that has to do with a smaller userbase, but some of it also has to do with determining whose job it is to really stay on top of things like that, having the site under active development instead of just reactive "fix what breaks and do backups/updates" sort of things.

The last few years, maybe since 2016 really in some ways, have been really difficult on the site and people got used to more of a siege mentality in terms of managing megathreads, and very limited resources (human and otherwise) and that's a tough set of habits to turn around.

> People weren't leaving because reddit had threaded comments

Please tell me more about why engagement has dropped precipitously. Here I thought it was the superior UI of other sites but I can't wait for you to tell me why I really left.

I agree with you, technical and UX issues are way down the list of reasons why there's less engagement. But I do think it's a contributing factor that they ought to pay attention to.

Paying someone to migrate the site to something modern might be cost prohibitive. But there are plenty of MetaFilter users who have the expertise and would happily pitch in to move the site to a modern open source stack. But for years the MetaFilter policy was "we can't accept volunteer labor because (mumble mumble legal something)." So hopefully they'll eventually decide "the fact that programmatic changes take forever is killing us" and do whatever is necessary to make volunteer labor possible.

I guess they could also let volunteers work on ColdFusion, but they might not get many takers.

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