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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten far more value out of my Metafilter subscription than the $5 I originally paid for my account. It really is an excellent (and very well-moderated) community.

If you're interested, you can donate to help cover Metafilter's ongoing costs using this link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b...

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I don't mean to question what it almost certainly a well-meaning comment, but could someone from metafilter (I already saw cortex in the thread) endorse this or suggest an alternative? I'd love to send a few bucks that way to keep the wolves from the door but just want to make sure they're going to the correct bucket.

That donation link appears on this page: https://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi

"Supporting MetaFilter The site and server can always use upgrades of hardware, software, and bandwidth. If you'd like to chip in, you can donate via this PayPal link."

Which does in fact link to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b...

The site's getting hammered right now, but if you can't get through directly you can also check through the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NMFYgwZ...

Thanks, I was looking in the wrong place for potential donation links.

That is our existing paypal account, yes.

We aren't formally doing any fundraising at this point -- that's an account we've had set up for ever mostly for the once-a-month "hey, here's five bucks, buy yourself a beer" tip from a random happy/guilty user -- but if you toss money in that, it ends up with us, and I won't tell you no.

If you want to be extra sure about the paypal link, visit the one at the bottom of Metafilter's about page, here:

http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi

Thanks. Sorry to hear about the trouble at Mefi. I'm blackleotardfront there. It might be superfluous to say but we are all 100% behind the staff and site and whatever you guys decide is the best course of action we will support to the best of our ability.

Doesn't sound like you may necessarily want to expand this funding source, but if you do, I also run a content-heavy site that currently runs on donations. I've been doing it without paying a dime myself over the past 8 years or so.

Some things I've learned:

- Ask for specific dollar amounts. It'll give users an idea of what they should type in. - Make that donation link more prominent on the page. The "this PayPal link" <a> tag is pretty hidden at the bottom. - Offer incentives. I give my donors a trophy for their site account when they give something, and there are certain tiers (e.g. gold trophy for $50, silver for $25, etc.) Requires a bit of management on your side of things, but it could pay off.

Ask for specific dollar amounts. It'll give users an idea of what they should type in.

Yep. I was at a museum and they had "please donate €5" donation box, which was full of fivers. Otherwise it'd be full of coins.

Cortex: as a single datapoint, I'd pay a totally voluntary subscription for metafilter. Make it an option, and I'll do it.

You know, if you offered me a way to subscribe, I would :)

Heck, I just saw donations can be recurring, so let's do that instead. If you made this a bit more prominent, I'm sure quite a few people would love to chip in.

To be fair this was addressed in the linked post:

> On the subscription payment idea, even if 10% of the userbase started paying a few bucks a month for extra Pro-level features, we’d still be coming up thousands of dollars short each month.

People also say this about the SA forums. I paid for it (and some extras), enjoyed what I read in the archive -- there are some real pearls! -- but I have no idea how I could fit in there.

So I'm just a lurker, but I'm still happy I found the site.

What are the "SA" forums?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful

It's a peer of 4chan.

> It's a peer of 4chan.

That is highly inaccurate

Not really. I am a member too and I must add that even the moderators do (almost all the time) that what is frowned upon when he 4chan do it. But hey, to each his own.

SA is a place with a lot of interesting contradictions; it's been around since the early days of the Web ('99) and somehow survived through several waves of dot com implosions (eFront, etc) to the present day. It is highly moderated and hosts some of the best topic-specific communities this side of Reddit, but also spawns edgy and dark humor and internet memes. The $10 fee was started in 2001 before such things like that done on the Web and that allowed the site to finally be self-sustaining and free from having to join ad-sharing groups or another content network.

I've been reading since 2000 and while I don't participate as much as I used to, I still enjoy keeping up with some of the communities there.

It's al right. After reading the current SA I decided not to go for the archives package. I just didn't like it. The way people were banned, unbanned was meant to look like funny but I didn't. Sometimes it looked like bullying, sometimes just assholery, sometimes just like absurd moderator actions. But then again I thought I was not going to fit in anyway and there's sth that I am missing to fit it. So, I just visit and login like once or twice a quarter. I never posted anything.

Good choice, archives have been down for a month anyway.

Are MetaFilter's traffic stats publicly available? I feel like there might be ways to make more money from it to keep it self-sustaining.

Edit: Matt Haughey just told me on Twitter that the quantcast numbers are accurate enough - https://www.quantcast.com/metafilter.com

So that's 6M uniques and 16.5M pageviews per month.

Some napkin math:

Let's say 8 staff + servers cost $100,000/month.

So, they need 10,000 people paying $10/month. That's 0.2% of their monthly uniques.

Assuming 10% of the uniques are registered users and 2% of registered users pay, that seems achievable.

Plus, they can keep the ads for non-paying users and also have higher paid plans for those willing to pay. For example - https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/468474737790693376

To add to that, for comparison, they'd need $6 CPM worth of ads on all their pageviews to make the same amount just from ads.

This is rough back of the envelope calculations, but we only have 62k paid users, only about 12k come back every day, so subscriptions would need something like 25%-50% of the daily userbase paying, not just 2%.

Thanks Matt. As someone not very familiar with your site, I have some observations about the user experience of the site:

I just tried signing up for the site. My first hurdle was finding the sign up button. It's nearly impossible.

After finding the "New user" link and clicking on it, I'm presented with your community guidelines, which I understand make MeFi what it is. But, that page could still do with a sign up button, instead of the link buried at the bottom.

Anyway, I clicked on the "Go ahead and sign up for an account here" link, filled in my details and then I was presented with the "pay $5 to complete your signup" message. I didn't know it was going to cost me $5! I went back to the guidelines page, and I noticed you did mention the $5 there, but I didn't read it.

I expect this is the most common user experience of new visitors to your site interested in joining.

I don't know if improving these things will move the needle at all for you, but there seem to be a few simple things you could try to increase signups.

Some would say that the difficulty in signing up is a feature—Metafilter wants dedicated people who've really thought about it to sign up.

This is a feature.

Lurking on Metafilter doesn't require an account; you need one only if you want to post or comment. The $5 threshold (and the wall of text "guidelines" page where it's mentioned a couple of times) serves as an incredible gatekeeper. That is probably the single most effective thing that is responsible for the high quality of Metafilter's posts and comments. The exceptionally well-done moderation is a very close second.

Most mefites actually did read the guidelines page, because by the time they've decided to become a member, they know that text on that page is probably important, and (much like the rest of Metafilter) is probably worth reading in full.

Because what usually happens is a user will read Metafilter for days or weeks, slowly realizing how special it is, and then finally hit a topic that they're passionate about -- the kind of thing where they just have to post, because they know they can contribute to the community... so they spend the $5 and sign up.

The catch is, they've been a member of the community for a bit already, albeit a mute one, and they've probably picked up on some of those guidelines already. That's the point. Optimizing the site so a first-time-visitor is more likely to become a (paid) user would inherently be deprioritizing community quality.

It's that community that makes MetaFilter what it is.

I agree with "Most mefites actually did read the guidelines page, because by the time they've decided to become a member, they know that text on that page is probably important".

But just wanted to say that I love MeFi but the interface leaves a lot to be desired. Really :(

I suspect that a major reason for the demise of Metafilter is it's just so rude that people have started leaving and not returning. I used to love it and spent a lot of time hanging out there, until it started to get so incredibly snarky that I felt uncomfortable commenting. The last straw was when some veteran accused me of trivialising the holocaust just because of an innocent quote. Nobody needs that stuff.

That's the reason I stopped visiting. I once asked a tech-support type question and was told to "man up and grow a pair", and tell my users they would just have to live with the problem (no attempt to answer the actual question). Unfortunately, answers like that tend to get lots of favorites since they sound so emphatic, and people on MeFi seem to like emphatic answers, in the same way reddit likes funny answers.

Man, I am sympathetic if you got an obnoxious answer like that, but for what it's worth as one of the folks who moderates it that as stated is a comment I'd delete from an Ask Metafilter thread in a heartbeat and would expect other users to have flagged a bunch as well. The system isn't perfect but "man up and grow a pair" is really precisely deletable as a crap non-answer in our moderation rubric.

Thanks for that :) It's a great community but some of its flaws grew a bit tiring. I genuinely hope it can come through its current crisis and keep right on going.

Your caricature of what MF is like is so grotesquely at odds with my experience that I would suspect that you are exaggerating or making it up. Metafilter, by and large, has an informed, intelligent and very helpful community. There are always jerks or people having a bad day but the mods deal with that promptly. That said, people who are just asinine, like perhaps those making unfair generalizations, are often dealt with by gentle ridicule. I have never seen anyone unfairly snarked, ever.

> Assuming 10% of the uniques are registered users

MeFi has way fewer than 600k active registered users. There are a little over 200k user IDs, but those are allocated at the beginning of the signup process and a lot of people bail out before paying the $5.

I took a quick random sample of 100 userids, and only 30 of them had completed the signup process. Of those, 7 were visibly active (posting, commenting or marking something as "favorite") in the last 12 months.

So the number of registered unique visitors is at most about 60,000, and probably closer to 10,000.

EDIT: This comment is superfluous since matthaughey chimed in while I was posting, but I'm a bit pleased that my estimate was so close.

Showing ads to only non-paying users makes those remaining ad impressions considerably less valuable. Google won't care, but it basically rules out more lucrative direct sales of ads. No one is going to pay top dollar to reach only the cheapest and least engaged segment of your audience.

> It really is an excellent (and very well-moderated) community.

Except for that part where they won't ever ban dios.

Why should they ban dios? Honestly, what makes Metafilter a great site— I've been a member there for a decade— is that, unlike a lot of fora, it still allows dissenting and unpopular views. I may frequently disagree with what dios says, but it's usually worth reading anyway.

I think a lot of people equate "moderation" with "deleting and banning". If that's a moderator's main tool, though, that moderator has already failed, IMO.

(Admittedly, Mefi culture has become more eager in recent years to simply quash posters or viewpoints that make them uncomfortable, which is a pity. I go there because I want find people intelligently and courteously expressing ideas I might not already be thinking. Lately Mefi has seemed less fruitful.)

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