Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

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For me one big lesson from metafilter, similarly to HN, is that you cannot create a truly amazing community from self policing and algorithms alone. At least not yet. To build a strong community, incentivizing people to submit and curate good content via upvotes and downvotes is not enough. Hands-on moderation is critical to cultivating a truly great community, because you need truly dedicated users and mods to set the tone, and to quickly step in when a post or comment is really inappropriate. Setting that tone from the very beginning was something metafilter did better than almost any other site. You also need to attract and keep the attention of the top-tier users, those who contribute high-quality content on a frequent basis. And once a few windows are broken, and users start to feel like nobody up top is paying attention, the whole thing starts to break down. Of course, the $5 paywall cannot not be ignored. It's a route I haven't seen many other sites take, and I'm not sure how much revenue it actually generated, but it definitely helped to keep the quality of discourse high. Also, I can hope that someday it turns into a great investment for me when I sell my 4 digit user number.

At the same time, none of that prevents Metafilter from being an echo chamber. I suspended my membership a couple of years back because I found the political discussions there increasingly toxic. Stepping even slightly outside the group consensus can lead to aggressive and sbusive pile-ons, and obvious moderation biases are often handwaved away on the grounds of 'community preferences.' I'm pretty liberal but I got tired of getting crucified for even considering/ analyzing opposing points of view rather than condemning them.

Metafilter qua persistent community has quite different dynamics from Ask Metafilter.

I remember your posts, and always appreciated your perspective.

I also canceled my membership a few years ago for the same reasons. Post and comment counts seem to be down significantly from those days, so there may have been an exodus.

Oh thanks, that's a nice thing to hear.

I kept reading without participating for a while but eventually stopped. After a glance at the redesign I don't guess I'll be going back, though I'm sure there's some retro edition for people who prefer the denser version.

Yeah you can just keep the old style if you want to. It's the one I still use.

I was just reading Twitter and watching a bunch of people who are otherwise intelligent and civilized get in a 160-byte pissing match over bullshit, and it occurred to me that civil internet communities are a rare and valuable thing. So much so that I don't want to engage in any community without strong moderation and a civil culture. Psychologically as a human being I think it's the only way to make the internet a net positive for myself rather than a negative.

One thing I think that Metafilter does really well is, moderators are visible but inconspicuous. For example, comments are deleted, but there is a minimized moderator comment reminding people to not flame, telling someone to chill out, etc. I realized I liked this the best. Similar to what dang brought to HN, just a minor comment here or there saying what he's doing behind the scenes. On the other hand, I can't stand how moderation has always been done on BoingBoing, where the moderator is extremely conspicuous, and actively participates in conversations. It is still done in good faith, but it is really uncomfortable and the moderator basically acts like a regular participant who benefits from lighter scrutiny because they hold a banhammer.

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