[HN Gopher] Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?
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Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?
Author : muglug
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-09-17 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicinfrastructure.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicinfrastructure.org)
| barrysteve wrote:
| Wow Jessamyn's back and now owns it? Never thought I'd see the
| day. She was always fair and understandable.
|
| I got an account on Metafilter back in '08 and closed it in '15
| because it became devastatingly political. It was like a cliff
| face, it went from a generous and unrestrained community to total
| one-sided 'my way or no way' politics. I asked the mods to close
| my account in 2015 because of it and they did.. without the
| awkward twang of displeasure or faint remorse I was expecting.
|
| To this day, if I see that black and white attitude to politics,
| I ditch the site. It's not worth it. HN's tech focus really is a
| saving grace.
|
| When she says " _A lot of people left because the site changed
| and they didn't_ ", it was definitely my outcome.
|
| BTW this was the best non-professional song I found on Mefi back
| in '08 (a million years ago?)
| https://music.metafilter.com/902/Miss-Me-in-the-Morning
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I got an account on Metafilter back in '08 and closed it in
| '15 because it became devastatingly political. It was like a
| cliff face, it went from a generous and unrestrained community
| to total one-sided 'my way or no way' politics.
|
| Yes. People who haven't heard of Metafilter don't get how, at
| one time, it was the best of Reddit and Hacker News in one
| place.
|
| It really destroyed itself because users ( _and, more
| importantly_ , the mods behind the scenes) developed a hivemind
| that exceeds anything out there other than the likes of
| /r/politics (no, kids, HN's "hivemind" is nothing of the sort
| in comparison) in its intensity to erase anyone who commits
| wrongthink. I hope Ms. West understands how catastrophic the
| consequences were.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Yeah for sure. Reddit's hivemind is mostly based on automod
| bots and two or three mods manually scanning & banning
| everything. MeFi was open and a pleasing place to hang out
| and tease out new ideas. Then the politics hit and the open-
| and-friendly feedback loop turned into a recursive folding
| inwards into one political view, for owner, mods (except
| jessamyn who didn't get into it) and commenters.
|
| It wasn't just an automod bot banning keywords or your
| comments getting shadowbanned. You could say what you wanted
| and the people (entire user base and owners) would figure out
| the best way to reinforce their recursive implosion and
| completely destroy you and whatever point you were trying to
| say. Kind of impressive in a mechanical sense, and you know,
| horrible to participate in.
|
| Looks way better than that now.
| boastful_inaba wrote:
| Metafilter is the only community that I've seen that had
| "agree with the hivemind" as an explicit rule! I don't know
| whether it still operates this way, but for a very long time
| it ran with a "read the room" rule, which meant that
| disagreeing with the others in a thread was a mute/banworthy
| offense. So of course a site monoculture would develop under
| those circumstances...
| jefurii wrote:
| I know what you mean - for awhile after 2016 you couldn't say
| anything remotely progressive without having your comments
| flagged by overzealous Clinton-or-nobody Dems. I almost left
| but I stuck around and it's gotten better. The no-U.S.-politics
| option made things easier.
| dnissley wrote:
| Metafilter was the place I learned to be civil online, and that
| just makes the current state of things all the more
| devastating.
| nth_degree wrote:
| I only left (err, closed my always-open browser tab) a few
| months ago, after reading through the discussion about the user
| survey. The number of comments saying, basically, "anyone who
| thinks the site changed for the worse is just a [insert right
| wing caricature here]" horrified me yet, by that point, was
| completely unsurprising. But after reading a few comments from
| people who had left the site, I finally realized that I could
| do the same, and I'd probably be happier for it.
| genericacct wrote:
| If I recall correctly it was a google algo change that punished
| the site a few years ago
| lph wrote:
| Yes. The Ask MetaFilter section of the site has a deep bank of
| questions with high-quality answers. Google used to weight
| these heavily in its search results, so Google directed a lot
| of potential new users to the site and accounted for a lot of
| ad revenue.
|
| At some point in the mid-teens, a Google algorithm change de-
| prioritized MetaFilter, with catastrophic effect on the site's
| income.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Jessamyn is great. She doesn't know it, but she was one of the
| inspirations for me going to library school, many years ago.
| Metafilter, too, was my high water mark for discussions on the
| open internet -- nothing has really come close to it since.
|
| This interview transcript is unfortunately hard to read, and I
| think a little editing and cleanup would do it justice.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I'm a longtime MeFi participant and I'm thrilled Jessamyn is
| involved again.
|
| Another bit of trivia: her father was Tom West, one of the
| engineers chronicled in Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New
| Machine_.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/business/28west.html
| justinator wrote:
| I love me Metafilter, but I'm worried that the site itself isn't
| going to make it, being built on Cold Fusion and the people who
| want to work on that is approaching 0.
| Tehhund wrote:
| Paying someone to migrate the site to something modern might be
| cost prohibitive. But there are plenty of MetaFilter users who
| have the expertise and would happily pitch in to move the site
| to a modern open source stack. But for years the MetaFilter
| policy was "we can't accept volunteer labor because (mumble
| mumble legal something)." So hopefully they'll eventually
| decide "the fact that programmatic changes take forever is
| killing us" and do whatever is necessary to make volunteer
| labor possible.
|
| I guess they could also let volunteers work on ColdFusion, but
| they might not get many takers.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I love Metafilter. ColdFusion ain't great but the bigger
| problem facing it is the slow decline in readers, posts, and ad
| revenue. It's an old fashioned site that I find very valuable
| but is facing attrition. Some stats from 2020 (the trend hasn't
| changed) https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25642/Talk-
| less#1375722
| Tehhund wrote:
| It's true that the issue is the number of users and
| interactions, but the difficulty of making any technical
| improvements is a part of that. Maybe not a huge one but if
| they never add features that people want that's going to hurt
| engagement somewhat.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Jessamyn is amazing and I'm thrilled she's back running things at
| Mefi.
| jessamyn wrote:
| Hi! Yes I'm the owner which is mostly paperwork and legal and
| sort of "the vision thing." Loup is running day-to-day stuff and
| we have a 12-member Steering Committee who will hopefully be
| setting the priorities and keeping everyone on target. I can not
| stress enough that I am not making the daily decisions but I do
| know that yes being able to accept help (and money, but help
| especially) is really going to be a priority as we try to make
| the site more community run and much less of a "single point of
| failure" situation. The last few years have been hard for the
| world which also means hard for MeFi; MeFi had some MeFi-specific
| issues and problems which needed addressing and are getting
| looked at. For anyone who hangs out there, or who just has fond
| memories of the place but it's not your spot anymore, consider
| stopping by to say hi again, giving feedback (or money, but
| feedback especially) and helping MeFi stay MeFi. <3
| dsr_ wrote:
| For those who aren't sure what MeFi is: it's basically this
| site, but with a broader range of topics and a deeper sense of
| community, like certain newsgroups or mailing lists.
| worldmerge wrote:
| Thank you! This is the first time I've heard of Meta Filter.
| psygn89 wrote:
| It's a shame - MetaFilter and sites like SlashDot used to
| be more prominent. I think that has changed with the way
| Google likes to lead to paywall and ad sites now over
| quality content and discussions. Just to make a point, if I
| search "how to screw in a lightbulb" I wouldn't be
| surprised if the top result takes me to a blog post that
| explains the history of the bulb, the average life of each
| type of lightbulb, some Amazon affiliated links, before it
| gets to what I need. I often have to tag on "reddit" just
| to cut down on the noise and get to the answer.
| walrus01 wrote:
| As I recall, when I made a metafilter account many years ago
| (2007!?!?) it costs 5 dollars to join. Which is a low enough
| amount that people can do it casually, but it's enough to deter
| people making random sockpuppets for the purposes of baiting and
| trolling and spamming. Introducing a barrier like that is an
| interesting and I think very valid method to maintaining the
| quality of an online discussion forum.
| bpeebles wrote:
| It's still $5 but they say on the signup page they'll waive it
| if you ask because you can't afford it/can't send the money
| somehow. So it's still very accessible but very, very few
| spammers bother to do either (a few have in the past decade and
| a half, of course).
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