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Why Does a Librarian Own a Social Media Site That's Been Around for
Longer Than Facebook?

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Reimagining the InternetReimagining the Internet
Reimagining the Internet
Why Does a Librarian Own a Social Media Site That's Been Around for
Longer Than Facebook?
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Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 1672 | Recorded on
September 7, 2022

Jessamyn West is not just one of the web's favorite librarians, but
the new owner of Metafilter, an incredibly long-running social
network that dates back to a very different Internet. In the first
part of our interview with Jessamyn, she tells us just how Metafilter
has kept going and stayed healthy since 1999.

Transcript

Ethan Zuckerman:

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Reimagining The Internet. I'm Ethan
Zuckerman. I am here today with one of the Internet's very coolest
librarians and one of the internet coolest people in general,
Jessamyn West. Jessamyn is a librarian in Randolph, Vermont, where
she leads the Randolph Technical Career Center. She's a frequent
speaker and writer. She wrote the 2011 book Without a Net: Librarians
Bridging the Digital Divide. She blogs at librarian.net. One of the
things we're going to be talking to her about today is the MetaFilter
community where she used to be the community manager and director of
operations, is now the co-host of the MetaFilter Podcast and as of
very recently, the owner of MetaFilter. Jessamyn welcome. Good to
have you here.

Jessamyn West:

Hey, good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Ethan Zuckerman:

You have been highly, highly online and really visible in sort of
technology circles, particularly connecting the librarian world to
the larger digital world. You're also very much a rural New England
person. And of course you are now CEO, owner, director of one of the
Internet's longest lived and most beloved online communities. What is
MetaFilter and how did you end up owning it Jessamyn?

Jessamyn West:

Well, MetaFilter is I think Matt Haughey, who's the guy who created
it, had the best description of MetaFilter, which is a social network
for non friends. It's essentially an online community blog. So back
in the early days of blogs, a blog was just a thing that one person
did before kind of everybody had one and before you stopped calling
it a blog, because it was just what the web was. It was started in
late 1999 and it was basically anybody could make a post to the front
page about a neat thing you found on the internet that you wanted to
talk to other people about. Other people had accounts also, and
people could talk in a very text based environment. There were images
for a while, but then there stopped being images and it's grown over
time. There's now the most popular part of the site is Ask
MetaFilter, which is like Q&A about, you got a relationship question,
you got a cat question, you got a vacation question, ask the
community.

And so it's a longstanding community where it ebbs and flows of who's
there and what they're doing. But there's some people who have been a
part of this particular online community for over 20 years. Right.
And so you get to know people. You have people who have been married
and they have kids and then their kids get accounts on MetaFilter
like it's boggling, honestly. And I started out there just as a
friend of Matt's and then over time being kind of a super fan, Matt
ran it by himself for a long time. I became kind of the first
employee after just Matt and the dev guy, PB, Paul Bausch, and slowly
that turned into a little bit of a job.

And then as kind of the great glory days of blogs happened, it was
advertiser supported. The ad money was good back in the day. And the
site had a team of full time round the clock, 24/7 moderators. We did
stuff, spent money on it. And I worked there from 2005 to 2014. When
I stepped down to really spend a little bit more time doing
libraries, Josh Millard, who was kind of the guy who was hired after
me, once Matt stepped away. I mean, it's all God soap opera-y. Right.
Matt stepped away to get a job at Slack. Josh stepped in as kind of
the owner and also the guy who ran day to day, did that for four or
five years during Trump, during COVID like, oh my God. So hard. It
was so hard then. And really it was a lot, it was too much. Right.

And so he had to really pull back and the site has been kind of
reconceptualized so that I'm the one who does kind of in the UK, they
call it just admin, right, paperwork, legal, vision stuff. But we
also have one of the longstanding moderators there who's really in
charge of day to day. Right. So as much as I'm, I guess the CEO, I'm
also not the person whose day to day, like we should delete that
comment. This is how we should handle this community issue. I'm there
as kind of a long time person who understands the community, who has
vision, but we're really hoping to shift to more of a steering
committee model where the people who use the site are the ones who
really get to help run the site. And it's hard because it's been a
long time where it's been not that.

So it's been like that guy. He's in charge. This is his fault. I'm
mad. Moving on to, okay, well MetaFilter is us. How do we want to
handle this difficult conversation? How do we want to handle this
weird topic? And that's kind of where we are now. This all just
started as far as my kind of weird return, and we're still trying to
figure out how it's going to happen. Right now we have a transition
team helping ease Josh out, ease this new model in, and then we're
going to move to a steering committee, which is going to hopefully be
the legislative body that helps determine what MetaFilter is going to
be.

Ethan Zuckerman:

So let's remind people or introduce people who don't know Metafilter
to a couple of things that are peculiar about it. One is that
MetaFilter has been around for 22 years at this point. If you are a
logged in user, as I course am, you can click a button showing you
what MetaFilter looked like 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years
ago. MetaFilter has multiple different sections, but one of them is
generally referred to as the blue and these are moderated, but user
written short blog posts really just long bookmarks. One today, for
instance, is pointing people towards a website that lets you generate
Brian Eno's music for airports or something similar by layering
pieces of choral music and sound sort of put together. So these are
of delightful links across the internet that MetaFilter's community
is finding and putting up there for each other and for the web as a
whole. Who are the MetaFilter people Jessamyn? How many are there?
What's the sort of person who uses MetaFilter and what's up with the
$5?

Jessamyn West:

Good. Let's address those in order. MetaFilter people in general tend
to be people who like myself are extremely online. I mean sometimes
in order to put it in context that other people understand, it's kind
of like Reddit if there were only one of them and there were no
threaded comments. Right. And there were moderators who got to do
that as a job, not as volunteers, et cetera. Right. And maybe a
little less of a commitment to all free speech all the time. Right.
Not that we're against free speech, but we believe that in a
community you have to balance the needs of one person against the
needs of a general community. Right. And so because I mean our user
numbers, you get kind of an incremental user number whenever you sign
up. Matt was user number one, I'm user 292. My boyfriend is 61170. We
don't refer to each other that way.

But a lot of times your kind of aware of it because it does let you
know when somebody signed up. Our user numbers now are in the
300000s. Realistically though we probably have a couple thousand
people that are commenting in a given month maybe. I haven't honestly
looked at the stats recently and maybe 10, 15,000 sort of users that
comment kind of ever in sort of the current environment. Right. A lot
of people just sign up and leave. A lot of people left because the
site changed and they didn't, or they changed and the site didn't,
that kind of thing. Users have a tendency to be extremely online.
They have a tendency to be from Western countries, though certainly
not for all. And we'd like to work on that, but it's challenging.
Right. It's almost exclusively conversation in English, just because
again, mostly sort of Western countries, we do have a lot of
non-English speakers, but they participate in English.

People skew older. Although you do find younger people for whom the
site works for them. Often there's a reason they're extremely online,
which is the thing I always brought to my moderation. Maybe it's just
a kind of reason like, oh, I work on the internet. And so I also hang
out and talk on the internet, or it could be a reason like, oh, I'm
time shifted from everybody I would hang out with in real life. Or
oh, I'm taking care of a family member, which means I don't get to
get out and about. Or maybe I have a disability that keeps me that
gives me communication issues if I was talking or interacting in real
life that I don't have when I'm typing into a box on the internet. Or
maybe all sorts of things, maybe I've got an attitude problem that
makes it difficult for me to interact with people in real life.

I think for me, I stay up late and my community doesn't. So I really
like being able to talk to people. And I like people who get my
jokes. Right. It's almost an outcropping of sort of Usenet
conversation, very text, very nerdy, very interested in things in
that nerdy way. And people who like to share. Right. There's a huge
amount of librarians on MetaFilter.

Ethan Zuckerman:

It definitely feels, so I've been on MetaFilter for a long time. I
certainly don't have a number as low as yours, but mine is in the
15000s. I've been there for a while. And I remember the internet
being a lot more like MetaFilter and there actually being dozens of
different sites out there whose primary occupations seem to be to
document index and celebrate the supreme weirdness of the world that
we are jointly living in. And it is worth reminding people that the
first weblog Jorn Barger Robot Wisdom was basically single line
descriptions of websites with links to them. MetaFilter in some ways
isn't all that different from that, except that it has a rich
commenting culture. And it's now got communities like Ask MetaFilter
that are, I think, warmer and friendlier than just the link exchange
piece of it.

Two things I would say about MetaFilter that seem really worth
calling out, one is that it's remained remarkably friendly and
unspammy, which has something to do with moderation and something to
do with the five bucks. And then the second is that there was a long
period of time during which MetaFilter was almost like the secret
backdoor into Google. So I'm wondering maybe if I can get you to talk
about both of those, the very unusual subscription system and then
the relationship between the mass of comments that is MetaFilter and
the way that search engines have dealt with it over the years.

Jessamyn West:

Sure. Well, the $5 that you've referred to is basically it costs $5
to join. If you don't have $5, drop us a note, you can probably join
anyhow. We don't want it to keep people out who, especially if you
come from somewhere where $5 is an awful lot of money, or maybe
you're in circumstances where $5 is a lot of money, but it costs $5
to sign up. And originally that was literally because, and this is
joint with your other question, right, you posted something to the
front page of MetaFilter, MetaFilter was a popular website before
there were as many popular websites. Think about the early aughts.
You post something to the front page of MetaFilter Google would pick
that up. That would suddenly become more findable because not only it
existed, but it got pointed to because Google used to be all about
inbound links with text being the things that Google used in its were
not quite smart, but we have a smart idea way so that Google would
understand what a page was about. Right.

But so spammers figure that out and they're like, oh, if I can get my
vacuum cleaners on the front page of MetaFilter, my vacuum cleaners
are going to shoot way up in Google page results. And that was true,
like page ranking. And so people would just constantly be linking
their vacuum cleaners and you can see them coming a mile away, right,
but it wastes moderator time to have to figure this out each time.
And one of the things we know about spammers is, oh my God, they
fight, they fight when you ban them. And you're like, no, and they're
like, I'm just a vacuum cleaner salesman and it's exhausting.

So we just had this sort of $5 thing and that had a tendency to keep
spammers out. Right. Because it's one thing to spam when it doesn't
cost anything. It's another, that it's going to cost you five bucks.
Maybe you're not going to get your five bucks back. One thing I
really do need to mention about MetaFilter specifically is it is
bespoke, which is also another way of saying rickety and built on PHP
and cold fusion. But we built all the tools, which means our tools
are the ones we need to do our job, which I think is really an
important distinction.

Ethan Zuckerman:

I feel compelled to put in a Jedi GIF at this point here and say cold
fusion. Now that's the name that I haven't heard in a very long time.

Jessamyn West:

I know. I know.

Ethan Zuckerman:

It is fascinating. I mean, one thing I will say is as someone who's
been part of the community for some years, it is really carefully,
thoughtfully and politely moderated. I have had you turn me down on
posts that I wanted to put on the blue because they were promoting a
paper that I'd written or something along those lines. There was a
sort of Wikipedi-ish don't use this for self-promotion rule for a
while. But I think one thing to sort of say about MetaFilter is that
it's not only bespoke, but it feels handmade and handcrafted and
deeply personal. My guess is that those spammers that you've told to
buzz off, it was probably the politest and kindest buzz off that
they've gotten in the last year or so of spamming. Any thoughts on
sort of the community aspect of this Jessamyn? Because it feels very
consciously constructed to be welcoming and inclusive in a very
particular sort of way. And one that again, feels a little bit old
fashioned and a little bit unfamiliar these days.

Jessamyn West:

Well, I will say that we try. I will also say for the people
MetaFilter of course has tons of detractors and I'll be the first to
say, we don't always get it right. But what we hope is that we are in
the process of making it better together. And the whole idea about
moderation in a paid moderators who don't have to do things at scale,
who can really do it at a human, what I perceive to be a human scale
can really take a little bit of time. And if somebody's irate about
something that got deleted, or if somebody's just having a really bad
day, you can maybe understand that through sort of a compassionate
lens, even if you don't agree with somebody or even if they broke the
rules. I certainly don't think I'm an assholes on the internet. I
think most people who are assholes on the internet don't think
they're assholes.

I mean, obviously there's like trolls and spammers and a whole bunch
of bad actors, but one of the things I think that the sincerity in at
least more or less kindness from MetaFilter, I mean, there's
definitely some people who are like it's community of assholes, move
on. Right. And I think compared to some other communities where
people don't talk about politics, or they don't talk about racism, or
they don't talk about difficult issues where reasonable people agree
and disagree and fight is that we're able to come to it with, this is
how I would like to be treated. This is how we can work on treating
you.

And for trolls, it's almost not worth it because after a while,
they're like, nah, I'm doing this to provoke a reaction. And it's
like, sounds like you're having a really bad day. That sounds
difficult. And as a community, again, not for everyone and it could
be better, but it's good. We don't rise to the bait like that. And so
you kind of can't get a rise out of the community in the way that
trolls, I think feel rewarded by. And so as a result, it's just a
bunch of kind of dopey, sincere people trying to have legitimate
communications and interactions with each other.

Ethan Zuckerman:

The internet is a place where pseudonymous user participation
communities go off the rails really quickly. My guess is that roughly
10,000 times as many people know about 4Chan as know about
Metafilter. I'm looking at the blue right now, and I'm seeing posts
from Rock Lobster, Zamboni, Abe Hammer Lincoln and Ursula Hitler.
Somehow the fact that people are named Ursula Hitler doesn't seem to
get in the way of having thoughtful and respectful conversations.

Jessamyn West:

Ursula Hitler is a surprisingly nice person actually. I see them in a
lot of Saturday Night Live threads. We've also got fanfare, which is
for talking about TV and movies. Anybody who still misses television
without pity, please come by. It's not the same, but it's a place.
And one of the things we've always talked about at MetaFilter is
there's nothing wrong with pseudonymity. In fact, there's many good
reasons why you might want to be pseudonymous on the internet, but on
the back end, again are bespoke nonsense. We kind of know who people
are. One of the things we are able to do is we can tell if people
have sock puppets, because we can kind of check IPs and that kind of
stuff. We don't use that stuff for anything except ferreting out bad
actors.

And to be honest, the $5, which is often payable with PayPal gives us
or Stripe or other processing platforms gives us a little bit more
information about a person in the event that there might be a problem
either with them about them like, oh God, this person's making kind
of suicidal comments. Does anybody know who that person is? It's a
terrible aspect of online community moderation, but one you should be
prepared to deal with. And so that helps us kind of steer identity.
We basically tell people, you don't have to tell us who you really
are, but you have to just be one person or you have to be one person.
And then you could have a sock puppet account for embarrassing
questions, but really you got to keep it on the level. And my
username is Jessamyn. I have no alter ego on the internet, which is
very strange and very true.

Ethan Zuckerman:

So MetaFilter is now 22 years into this project. You've been part of
it essentially all of that time. Let me ask a question that is
perhaps complex and multilayered. Is MetaFilter sustainable?

Jessamyn West:

Oh, that's it?

Ethan Zuckerman:

Yeah. Well sustainable is a question that has layers. It's got fiscal
sustainability, it's got community sustainability, it's got staff
sustainability. I'm curious about the interlocking of all those
different answers.

Jessamyn West:

I mean my answer in short is yes. And my longer answer is, but not
the way it's been. Right. Because it used to be, we were raking in
money, hands over fist. There was a brief period of time I was making
six figures as a community moderator on MetaFilter and that wasn't
recently, you know what I mean? It was a long time ago when Google
brought in more money than we knew what to do with. And Matt made
decisions that we would all get paid really well and have health
insurance. And that was great. Those days are in the past. The
moderators now get paid decently, but they don't get health
insurance. We have some hours that are currently not staffed that we
determine through statistics just have a really low amount of people
there. More of the money that goes to support MetaFilter comes in
from community donations and not Google.

Right. Google is a fraction now and a smallish fraction of where the
money comes from. MetaFilter has some fixed costs in terms of just
what it costs to run a server with this stuff on it. I'd be lying if
I said I was 100% sure we'd be able to continue with paid staff at
this level moving forward. But also one of the things that kind of a
change in ownership offers an option for is there were a lot of
people who were dissatisfied in what they felt to be a single point
of failure person who was in charge. And I don't think Josh would
deny this. I don't think this is me telling tales out of school.
You'd ask for things and they wouldn't happen. And you'd feel
frustrated because you felt like you were participating and helping
strategize ways to work on problems.

And then you felt like you hit a brick wall. Right. I mean,
especially during Trump and early COVID, right, everybody was
exhausted. And that included the staff, which meant the developer who
was dealing with challenges in their home didn't have as much free
time for development. And that meant all the staff were like, don't
ask for development stuff because the developers busy and the guy who
ran the site was having his own challenges that made sort of
executive functioning a little bit challenging. And so a lot of
people were like, I don't know how I feel about giving you money.
You're not a nonprofit. This is going to pay for this. And I don't
know how I feel about that. And what we're hoping is we can be a
little bit more transparent. We can be a lot more responsive. We can
have community members who are helping do some of the work, which
takes the load off of paid staff.

I don't know if we'll ever have community moderators, unpaid kind of
the way Reddit does, but it's on the table. I mean, I think the
important thing is the community stays the community, but also
honestly, one of the reasons I'm here is to kind of assess what's the
plan and to talk to the community. Look, if we want to stay together
the way we are, we need to have a plan for that. I mean, we're now at
the point, which we weren't six months ago or a year ago where the
money coming in is slightly more than the money going out. When I
took over, what I was told is it loses money slowly. That's probably
good for your taxes, but not good for other stuff. And we've fixed
that.

Ethan Zuckerman:

You had this wonderful Quip before we started recording. I was
congratulating you on becoming the owner of MetaFilter. And you were
explaining that it was more analogous to adopting a puppy, which is
to say a lot of work, a lot of late nights, a lot of cost that you're
taking on, not necessarily the best decision for financial success,
for instance.

Jessamyn West:

Yeah. More like an elderly shelter dog that needs medicine. Like a
puppy is like the world's your oyster, who knows what's going to
happen. You can make this the way you want to. Shelter dog's got some
stuff in them already, some stuff you're able to fix and a medicine
habit that you need to pay for. But yeah, I mean, I'm interested in
it and up for it. MetaFilter's where I go on the internet, right?
It's not like I was away and now I came back. I never left. I just
stopped working there for reasons. But it's where I like to be. And I
believe there are other people who also like to be there and maybe
together we can work on a plan. Right. We're all grownups. A lot of
us have jobs now. We didn't before. We can do things. Right.

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