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Comment by ashika | Hacker News Reader

>no mechanism a small minority can use to be over-represented when administration considers the wishes of the community (i.e. the Metafilter problem.)

I agree that is a decent criterion for health, but is metafilter really so notorious for special interest coddling? I always found the administration there fairly transparent, especially around topics of decision-making. Did I miss something scandalous? I tend to hold them up as the only example I know of for a healthy general-purpose discussion forum.

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Just to explain, I’m saying the dynamic in MetaTalk itself is unhealthy, not the resulting policy changes (separate question.) MetaTalk encourages incessant participation in controversial threads by users who want to influence the site, which then draws users who make valuable contributions to the rest of the site into MetaTalk to defend the viewpoints of themselves or others, which decreases participation across the site. It also creates an unnecessary opportunity for long-time members to get upset and close their accounts. Over time, MetaTalk has fatigued the staff, so they have implemented controls to limit discussion, which in turn upset community members who feel they are denied access to that backchannel, which has driven participation in new side channels that respect fewer of the site’s norms.

Hopefully that makes sense. Keep in mind it’s my opinion. I still consider MetaFilter a generally healthy community, too.

Yes metafilter is a mess. The number of reasonable people who have abandoned that community is very high.

Bad actors everywhere are really all the same. They build up good will with insightful content and active participation, then they use that to strong arm the community to further their personal biases.

As the parent comment said, the mods at metafilter are too close to the community. Being involved can be a good thing but I think the mods have taken for granted how it allows them to be exploited and bullied by a very vocal minority.

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