joshmillard

Heartbreaker!

As far as mefi's guildlines go and my job responsibilities go, morality doesn't really come into it. I don't consider it my mandate to ensure or enforce moral correctness or any such thing.

That what he did was against the site's rules and a violation of the Metafilter community's shared expectations of behavior on the site is why it was a problem on Metafilter, and why we contacted him to tell him to cut it out.

Hi, this is cortex.

How it played out, very short version: I got up in the morning and checked the new signups, part of my morning routine. We have to check for spammers and shills on a daily basis to keep mefi free from linkfarming and bullshit self-links and so on, and that tool is step one. The paypal info that comes with the $5 signup fee is hugely helpful for profiling likely spammers.

I noticed what looked like a signup from Adams himself; person I've heard of signing up happens now and then, it's an "oh neat" moment and that's about it, since if you're sticking to the community guidelines and participating in good faith, who you are and what you do and how anonymous you choose to be is entirely your business.

Unfortunately, what I saw when I checked out his comments since signup was weird aggressive pretending-to-be-a-third-party arguing about himself, which is really not an okay thing to pull on mefi. I talked to the rest of the staff, we sent Scott an email saying "you need to either let folks know who you are or stop having this proxy argument about yourself as if you're someone else".

Time passes, no response from Scott. Then he posts that "who thinks I'm Scott Adams?" comment. Gave him some more time, still no reply, left the "check your email" comment. Time passes, and then, still no response to us, he drops the disclosure in the thread.

If he'd chosen to walk away, that'd have been fine too, and we'd have had nothing to say publicly about what he did regardless of how obnoxious and sketchy it was. We took considerable pains NOT to out him and make it his call how to proceed.

Notably, the main function of the signup fee is to throttle growth of the userbase by eliminating most of the lazy driveby traffic, not to generate cash. In that respect, we could be charging $1, or in theory even "charging" some non-fee annoyance, and probably get about the same effect. But $5 is a nice round number -- enough to be a tiny moment of consideration in a web where membership fees for commenting aren't the norm, but not so much that it's going to cause almost anyone with a reasonably sincere interest in the site or the community from making that investment. And so $5 it is.

And while we absolutely don't spite the income from the signups -- it's a nice side effect of the signup-throttling process and helps with costs some -- it's really not nearly enough to cover payroll for three full time mods and a full-time programmer/developer. The bulk of our revenue is from ads running in the archives.

Heya, I'm one of the other two mods at mefi, along with Matt Haughey and Jessamyn West. I go by "cortex" over there.

A saner way to do this will be to trust people to do the right thing, but verify that they are not doing anything malicious.

Absolutely. And Mefi's definitely been of a size for a long while now where trust-but-verify has been an essential part of keeping it working. Our approach these days is pretty much the same as Matt's approach years back when it was just him running the place: welcome people in with the benefit of the doubt but keep an eye out for trouble -- whether of the malicious or the clueless variety.

And we see both: keeping spam in check (even after the $5 speedbump) is a daily project, though thankfully not a high-volume one (we probably ban a couple of spammers/linkfarmers/astroturfers/SEO-marketers a week), and we're daily working with new users who are varyingly conspicuously not getting how the place works or what it's for or what the local tone and community expectations are.

One nice thing is that we've been able to take long experience with dealing with spammy behavior in particular and use that to build a pretty decent local toolset to keep a close eye on problem areas with a minimum of effort, so what spam does actually try to manifest these days tends to get spotted and nixed with quick turnaround. Which by itself is good news but doesn't say anything directly about the community, but the implication is important: because we can get on top of one of the major sorts of bad behavior very responsively, it leaves us free to continue to let everybody else on the site have the sort of general community freedom that Matt talks about in those guidelines re: trust. Because our small administrative team can effectively and promptly corral the problems that do occur, we don't have to clamp down on the basic posting and commenting rights of the vast majority of users acting in good faith.