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Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

Reddit had fewer than 8 people when it was seeing orders of magnitude more activity than MeFi. I understand fully why its great to have humans doing this work, but this downsize could be a good thing in the long run if it forces them to find novel ways to make things scale better.

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do you really think reddit is a model of what a web community should look like? genuine question, because if that's the case then you're not exactly the intended audience

Reddit is certainly a model of what a web community could look like.

MetaFilter has taken a different approach. The market is telling its team that approach is not economical. Perhaps there's some ideas they can borrow from sites like Reddit that baked more crowd-power and automation into their models from the get-go.

generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service and it's kind of sad that i have to point that out in the first place. there's a reason i've read metafilter every day for over a decade and reddit is generally considered a step above 4chan.

Generating revenue /is/ the same thing as providing a service that can afford to remain in business, though. A service that shuts its doors because it runs out of money isn't being valuable to anyone at all.

Hopefully mefi can find a way to operate within their means without compromising their important characteristics.

"generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service"

Well, from the cited stats, it's not enough of a valuable service to generate sustainable revenue.

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