Sixteen Years
metatalk.metafilter.com
metatalk.metafilter.com
I've been in that same boat most of my professional career, and in fact I'm about 16 years into my journey working with the same project (Webmin; which started out with me having a company that used it in products and then ended up with me pivoting and starting a new company based around it); I'm lucky enough to not be the primary developer, and I'm lucky enough to have always had just enough money to keep an extra support person on staff and occasionally pay to make some problems go away (translations now and then, accessibility testing, UI and design assets, etc.), but having some huge number of people expecting things to always Just Work, and never have security problems, and never be confusing, and always get better but also never change in any way that might effect the way they use it, is a definite source of stress that I don't think people working in large companies will ever experience (though they experience their own sorts of stress and I don't think I would trade, even for much better pay).
I've had to step back a few times over the years, in more subtle ways than this. And, I've spent time on other projects and other jobs (either to make money or just to have something else to think about and to play with new languages and tools). But, it's strange to look back on so many years of doing roughly the same thing.
It's also odd to think of things that have been so clearly defined by their founder no longer being operated by their founder. This is, I guess, kinda like Rob stepping down from Slashdot a few years back. Turned out not to really effect Slashdot all that much (though I don't know how relevant Slashdot remains today, since I so rarely visit); I wonder if Metafilter has the team to keep it spinning...it's also a site I haven't spent much time at in recent years.
This sums up all I can really muster as a response. I used to visit Metafilter long ago, but I've completely abandoned it for at least a few years. The submissions just lost their way at some point, and the archaic comment system was completely surpassed by reddit/HN.
The only places online where I feel a strong sense of community exclusively have linear discussion.
I hope people don't do too much deciding about what does and does not work at this early date, we've only had about 20 years of large scale internet participation, and much less of (in the English sphere) near total participation (total participation matters because people faced with the novelty of spraying their thoughts at strangers tend to behave somewhat differently than people who are used to it).
However, from my own personal experience, I have to say that discussions become a lot more interesting when they happen in real-time between small numbers of people. Comments tend to be brief. Topics shift around. People respond to each other. Interjections happen frequently. Opinions can freely mix and mingle in this environment, and the end result is a conversation that can actually go somewhere new.
In threaded discussions, it feels more like people posting their pet walls-of-text at each other. In some ways, the "discussion" is already set in stone from the very start. Furthermore, there's a significant penalty to the upvote/downvote model. It incentivizes groupthink; promotes giant screeds and quippy jokes; keeps topics firmly segregated; prevents the discussion from branching out past an initial point.
I don't explicitly talk about it above, but part of what I am getting at there is that you can't force a high context situation; it either exists, or it does not.
Maybe the solution is simply to facilitate small groups that discuss things, I don't know. I think I would be disappointed if that is the case, because it would make it more difficult for me to access a wide range of viewpoints. The seemingly overly serious moderation here can probably be described as an attempt at getting people to acknowledge a little bit of extra shared context.
> The Trigger Warning crowd clearly rules the site these days, has for some time, and act as though it has always been thus.
What's the "Trigger Warning crowd"?
There's social justice warriors (SJW) who do fight the good fight and try to point out (and/or stomp out) racism, bigotry and homophobia when they see it, but then there are also those who take it to far. The extremists. They adopt the SJW ideology and wrap themselves up in it like a warm blanket. I think that 'slur' would refer to those extreme individuals. An example of someone taking it to the extreme would be someone frothing at the mouth because you said the word "spider". They're angry, upset and offended because they're scared of spiders and you didn't put a trigger warning in front of it (Yes, those people really exist). They're hypersensitive and find everything and anything offensive for the sake of being offended because their outrage nets them a form of attention.
On every side of every issue, you're going to have extremists. I think it's best to stomp out extremism when you come across it because they inevitably do more harm to their cause then good.
This is actually a great write-up on the trigger-warning phenomena:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-j-rosendall/trigger-wa...
Quote from the article: "I believe the current P.C. agenda, by demanding purity from its allies, is showcasing its inherent weakness." She is right. We do not advance the cause of justice by censorship or by claiming to be traumatized by other people's opinions."
It's mostly a straw man argument used as an excuse to consider threatening women with rape a matter of free speech.
And actually, I've noticed the same thing happening in female-majority subreddits as well. (/r/askwomen)
[1]: http://www.metafilter.com/85667/Hi-Whatcha-reading#2777344
There are all kinds of peaceful forums that have this problem and Metafilter is just a prominent example. The thread you linked is interesting but not outstanding for a web forum, and the cost of it is probably several threads that a healthier community would have made.
This is hard for you to see because you probably read about new people entering these communities and praising them for closely fitting their preferences. What you don't see is how many people leave, don't join or reduce participation.
But again, these are common forum issues. The owner of Metafilter has managed the situation pretty well and especially over sixteen years. I'm sure the personal attention to the community by Metafilter staff is a big reason why it's as similar to its old self as it is.
2. There are going to be "chilling effects" (read: norms) in any community. It is inevitable that like-minded people will stick with each other. The question is how these effects manifest themselves. The MeFi model is community enforcement and moderation: "uh, that's not really OK to say". The Reddit model is outright mockery, threats, ganging up, and disturbing PMs. Show me a community that a) accepts widely opposing viewpoints, while b) keeping the discussion pleasant and respectful. Personally, I'm done with the Reddit model.
This seems like misuse of the term "chilling effects" to mean, "I don't like it when someone tells me to stop being an asshole."
The common usage of the term "chilling effects" is when legal mechanisms are used, such as cease and desist letters and DMCA takedown notices, where the threat of legal repercussions are used to shut down communication. To apply it to someone calling out the use of a sexist slur, for example, is to diminish the term "chilling effects" or to elevate some people's free speech (usually that of white males) above the free speech of everyone else.
In short, a lot of the time when free speech is used as an argument, it is because others are exercising their free speech to criticize something shitty someone said. It isn't breaking free speech to call out sexist/racist/homophobic language for being sexist/racist/homophobic, it is exercising it in the best way possible.
Now, of course, if moderation is used aggressively even in questionable cases, that's a different thing, and one worth discussing (with the moderators of said site). It isn't really "chilling effects", I don't think, because a privately owned community website choosing to enforce its own customs and norms is almost certainly not oppression, even if we don't like their choices.
But, I do find it interesting that the author of the piece you've linked seems to believe it was women and feminists who made the majority of the "neckbeard" and fedora images...when, in fact, they are the work of predominantly young male redditors and occasionally 4channers. There are several subreddits devoted to this kind of humor, and from what I can tell they are disproportionately (even for reddit) occupied by young males.
So, there are many other sides to it. Nerds get shit from a lot of directions...not just from women. It sucks to be a nerd. And, it sucks to be overweight. It sucks to be a minority. It sucks to be a woman. It sucks to have a disability. It sucks to be poor. Humans are awful to one another in so many ways.
Sometimes, it's worth considering whether we should say what we're thinking...not because we want to be politically correct. But, because sometimes the things we say can contribute to maintaining a culture of oppression, and if we are decent human beings we prefer not to contribute to empowering oppression with the weight of numbers. And, if we are striving to be more than merely decent, we'll spend some time trying to stamp out those internalized oppressions that make it hard to see when we're being assholes to our fellow human beings.
This is why people find the internet SJW community so distasteful. Not only are they completely ineffective at improving the lives of the people they claim to be fighting for, but they also delight in doing active harm to defenseless people for merely using another model of the world in some circumstances.
You might also be interested in some of Scott Aaronson's followup. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2221
I don't believe Scott Aaronson said anything contributing to or maintaining a culture of oppression. Though, as others have pointed out, his language does seem to indicate women are not complete human beings with their own needs, wants, fears, problems, etc. in his mind (or, at least, were not complete human beings during the painful time in his life when women were a source of seemingly overwhelming distress to him). I believe Scott Aaronson is a genuinely nice guy (not in the pejorative sense). He got caught in the cross-fire of a battle being waged on the Internet between people who aren't always as genuinely nice as he is.
But, that doesn't alter the fundamental reality that there is structural oppression, and many young white men on the Internet are willing participants, beneficiaries, and proponents of it, including in communities that I wish with all my heart were above it (such as reddit, and HN, which are communities that I love and that are frequented by many people I respect and admire).
I want to occupy communities that work hard to be inclusive of people that haven't been welcomed into tech communities the past. I'm willing to be more careful about what I say to achieve that (and, I'm a middle class white guy in America, I do not have a history of needing to watch what I say, so it's foreign to me, too). Not for fear of offending someone, but for fear of pushing away voices that aren't like me. I don't want an echo chamber where a bunch of middle class white guys rant at each other all day.
The only thing I said that was about people was "mostly said by angry young white dudes on the Internet". Which was, in fact, intended to be dismissive of some people's words. I believe it is a boringly predictable and reactionary display of privilege that deserves nothing other than to be dismissed. It is not merely coincidence that it is almost universally angry young white men who make these kinds of statements.
"Political correctness" (and the concept of a "trigger warning", and a few other things) is only a coherent concept under the assumptions of linguistic relativism. Since the two sides have different axioms, they can't really engage in a debate.
It is the end of an era, but I think it makes it more likely that MetaFilter will continue to be successful and not become a has-been. It is in good hands with cortex (aka Josh Millard) at the helm now.
Enjoy some relaxation Matt, you deserve it. :)
It's impossible to sum up just how much Mefi means to me but thanks for everything, Matt. Really.
The most impressive sentence comes right at the beginning. This shows what you can do, if you have a goal. All this experience of many years serves only to tame the big companies rampant systems.