Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?

https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/jessamyn-west-part-1/

by muglug • 4 years ago

108 42 4 years ago

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.

mtVessel2• 4 years ago

I wonder if it was auto-transcripted. It reads like it was done by someone unfamiliar with the rhythms and idioms of "English as she is spoke".

barrysteve3• 4 years ago

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

dnissley• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

jefurii• 4 years ago

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.

TMWNN2• 4 years ago

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.

barrysteve3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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...

legerdemain3• 4 years ago

As unhappy as I was as a user of MetaFilter, this is a bad characterization. "Read the room," as practiced on MF, means that you can't storm into a thread with your guns blazing and make it all about you and your viewpoint by responding to everyone else in the thread and dominate by sheer volume of comments. Make your viewpoint known, but don't keep insisting that it deserves a response from others. Basically, don't be the asshole party guest who barges in and demands to be the center of attention. Compared to the rest of the internet, that is the mildest imaginable social norm.

scyzoryk_xyz• 4 years ago

Yeah my interest in MeFi withered at that time as well. But not because I disagreed with those particular politics (because I don't) but because it suddenly started feeling like an annoyingly US-first type of community.

As Americans argue between each other, they also have a way of making it all sound like it is all about themselves and their world.

joezydeco• 4 years ago

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

johnthescott• 4 years ago

her father was Tom West

cool.

arkitaip• 4 years ago

Jessamyn is amazing and I'm thrilled she's back running things at Mefi.

justinator• 4 years ago

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.

Tehhund4• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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

Tehhund4• 4 years ago

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.

jessamyn2• 4 years ago

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_• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Thank you! This is the first time I've heard of Meta Filter.

genericacct• 4 years ago

If I recall correctly it was a google algo change that punished the site a few years ago

lph• 4 years ago

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.

walrus01• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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).

legerdemain3• 4 years ago

I was a very active user of MetaFilter for a couple of years in the early 2010s. I still have a lot of bookmarked links to shopping and music recs from Ask MeFi, although link rot has by now rendered many of them less useful.

I was putting together a lot of detailed posts on topics that interested me, mostly for my own record-keeping, but also hoping to build connections with similarly minded people. Despite making a lot of effort, including setting up a few MeFi meetups IRL, I never really clicked with anyone else on the site (except for one Brooklyn hipster who was really into the Achewood web comic, but that wasn't really enough for a long-term friendship).

Since I wasn't getting anything out of the site socially, the heavy moderation, the occasional private nastygram, and a handful of particularly strident users eventually got to me and I closed my account.

barrysteve3• 4 years ago

Any of those links still kicking? It's cool to see what other people like about MeFi and it's the only place where some of that content lives.

legerdemain3• 4 years ago

Yes, they're all in my deactivated MeFi profile, which I will sadly not share with you.

jonjacky• 4 years ago

Here are some miscellaneious links to Ask Metafilter that I saved. (Sorry about the poor formatting, but the links appear to work.)

Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?

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