Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of just a few thousand people. West herself is an example: she met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old web nerds.”
This month, the revered site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing that it lasted this long; he got this far thanks in large part to West, who helped stabilize him after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot – I certainly had forgotten about it until I decided to mark its big anniversary. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. For people who have been around for a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what the Internet was. The flow is strictly chronological. It’s still text only. Some members may be influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers and don’t sell personal brand cosmetics or clothing. As founder Matt Haughey, who resigned in 2017, says: “It’s a strange throwback, like a cockroach that survived. »
When Haughey launched Metafilter in 1999, he envisioned a quick way for people to share interesting content they’d seen in what were then a few dozen key blogs. “I had never even thought about free-flowing conversations, but I quickly got into it,” he says.
For about a year the community was tiny, maybe 100 visitors a day, but in 2000 it was featured in a popular blog called Cool Site of the Day, and 5,000 people viewed it. This helped Metafilter grow from a niche link sharing site to a community where smart people also discussed what was cool on the internet. At first, Haughey felt like too many people were joining the group, so he cut new memberships. (People could still take the conversation as a stranger.) For years, the only way to get in was to email him and beg. Later, when he decided to charge a $5 fee, 4,000 people signed up on the first day. The fee also helped weed out potential trolls. This, along with fairly paid moderators, maintained civility on the site. More importantly, the community itself did not tolerate horrible behavior.
A popular feature from the start was “Ask Metafilter”, where members seek tips and tricks from the Metafilter hive mind. “When you ask 10,000 really smart nerds a question, chances are someone is experienced in what you’re asking,” says Haughey. It has become an invaluable repository of knowledge, not only for the community, but also for those who stumbled upon the answers through Google. Quora then launched with a similar idea, but with the ambition of a mega-footprint. This wasn’t Metafilter’s thing.
“I didn’t want to be Walmart,” Haughey says. “We’re just the neighborhood convenience store.” At one point, he consulted with a kid named Aaron Swartz, who had an idea for a site that would be like a social media wiki for everything. Then Swartz joined the first batch of Y Combinator and teamed up with some founders to create a company called Reddit, which was essentially Metafilter with unlimited ambition.
Haughey agreed with that. At the beginning of the 2010s, the situation was rather calm. Metafilter’s core community was small and millions of tourists came, attracted by Google search results. Haughey monetized them through Google ads and was able to give up his day job as a web designer, buy a house and raise a family. But starting in 2012, Google made a number of changes to its ranking algorithms to combat spam, and Metafilter, for mysterious reasons, suffered collateral damage. Over the next two years, revenue fell and Metafilter had to lay off some employees.
