Hacker News Reader

In the last 5 years we've seen both Quora, StackOverflow launch and gain serious traction and Yelp has consolidated its position as a top destination for local search.

AskMeFi likely is seeing the results of going up against massively VC-backed competitors. It's hard to imagine Google's search updates were aimed at prioritizing "worthless sites".

Edit: And Reddit & Imgur have exploded. Those have probably had even bigger impacts.

View on HN

I've visited MetaFilter on an off for many years, and I've never heard of AskMeFi before today. I didn't even know they had a section that was similar to Quora or SO. I've only ever seen it as a link aggregation community.

That's strange because I feel that AskMeFi is what keeps me going back and visiting.

That's very true. I'm thinking more of the about.com type of results (which would also qualify for your description of a well funded competitor). Perhaps I was too disparaging of Google's changes, overall they're increased search quality. I just find it unfortunate when sites like Metafilter get downranked as collateral damage.

There's certainly a lot of crappy sites out there! I think they probably got hit just as hard.

VCs wouldn't be pumping money into the Rap Genius' of the world if they weren't seeing big wins there. Eventually a site like MeFi gets crowded out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com