7 ms·

Unfortunately you are several years too late. The site and community used to be amazing when Matt and Jessamyn ran the show, but went it started going downhill

Unfortunately you are several years too late. The site and community used to be amazing when Matt and Jessamyn ran the show, but went it started going downhill after Josh Millard took over and is now a shadow of its former self.

ddellacosta 9y ago
How has it gone downhill?
- deepspace 9y ago
  Maybe its just me, but back in the day (early 2000s) we used to have raucous (but still very civil) discussions about controversial topics, with little or no moderator interference. Shortly after cortex joined, submissions and comments which did not conform to a very narrow set of socio-political viewpoints started getting censored, and these days there is pretty much no room for controversial content. Sure, I can see that the site would look highly civil and somewhat interesting to a new user coming from, say, Reddit, but to me the fanatic censorship has turned the place into a boring echo chamber compared to what it used to be.
  - arkitaip 9y ago
    Cortex has been a member since 2001 and a mod since 2007. You mean it's been going downhill for a decade because cortex? C'mon, don't be silly now.
    - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
      > Cortex has been a member since 2001 and a mod since 2007. You mean it's been going downhill for a decade because cortex? C'mon, don't be silly now. That's a lot like trying to dispute the effect of Donald Trump's presidency on the US by noting that he has been an American since he was born.
  - gumboshoes 9y ago
    To put it another way, the mods are modding. They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons. That's what makes it great and better than most of Reddit on any given day. That modding affects everyone. I had a comment deleted just last week: I was too chatty on an Ask Metafilter response and bloop, away it went.
    - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
      > They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons. Eh, I don't think that's really a fair characterization. Yeah, sure, they delete dups, etc., but no one's complaining about that. The mods also delete stuff from an ever-increasing (but ill-defined) list of topics that "Metafilter doesn't do well," which basically means anything that could upset the cool kids or other favored groups. There's a lot of hype about Metafilter's famed moderation, but all it's really done has caused the site to reach a different failure mode. Rather than discussion, you get a bunch of commenting that's bracketed by passive aggressiveness and anxiety, carefully moderated into an illusion of civility.
      - gumboshoes 9y ago
        What you call "topics Metafilter doesn't do well" I call "same-old rehashes." They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug.
        DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        > They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug. That's the standard justification, but it leaves a lot to be desired. For one, IIRC, even brand new topics have been moderated away because the mods judged discussion might not go in the "correct" direct (for lack of a better word). Two, avoiding disagreement to the degree Metafilter does is a recipe for tension and dysfunction.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  What was once an open place is now very, very constrained. The acceptable range of viewpoints has ratcheted into a narrower and narrower consensus, to the point where the discussions are boring and you have to be careful to not make them interesting. The viewpoint racheting alienated a lot of people from the site who used to feel like they were part of the community.
  - kome 9y ago
    So true! Controversial topics and confrontation are avoided at all costs. So from one side metafilter it is very civil and quiet, but from the other side is quite uninspired and dull. Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring.
    - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
      > Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring. And full of anxiety and dysfunction masquerading as something else.
      - kome 9y ago
        ahahah, so so true!
glhaynes 9y ago
I could probably be convinced that a bit of decline has occurred (though, its a different world with some different priorities/urgencies, too), but "shadow of its former self" massively overstates it IMO.
acdha 9y ago
You're the second person I've heard make that claim but I don't think it's anywhere near as accepted as you're presenting it. I personally don't see a quality hit so much as the general decline in all sites which aren't Facebook and when Google chose to cut their ad revenue by ~40% which forced them to lay off moderators: https://matt.haughey.com/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15ec96f0 https://matt.haughey.com/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15e...
- arkitaip 9y ago
  There has been no decline in quality and blaming cortex is utter bullshit. My guess is that the haters never liked mefi in the first place and are abusing the change in management to attack the site.
  - sien 9y ago
    Blaming Cortex is nonsense. But there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it when it became an echo chamber. Perhaps all sites like it decline. Slashdot, Kuro5hin and many others are a sad shadow of what they used to be. Maybe HN in 5-10 years will be pretty sad too.
    - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
      > Kuro5hin It's finally dead! http://kuro5hin.org http://kuro5hin.org
    - jacalata 9y ago
      > there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it I think that people's memories are flawed enough that the "it used to be so great" arguments are all pretty suspect. I tend to think that it's more like "I used to not be familiar enough to realize x" combined with "I feel like I've seen these arguments before". I have the same feelings about HN plenty of the time.
  - acdha 9y ago
    I think it's more likely that we're seeing the average drift upwards and a non-trivial percentage of the community is less involved than they were in the earlier days of the web, so the active community isn't as varied as it used to be. The other big thing which is hard to under-estimate is how much the web has homogenized over the years. MetaFilter was where you went to find someone's personal blog, collection of cat scans, etc. and people just don't do that the way they used to: instead of blogs that largely happens on Facebook or Instagram (and it's private), individuals are competing with for-profit content mills and SEO spammers, etc. HN has followed a similar arc – you used to see more personal tech blogs and open source but now that's competing for attention with major companies paying staff to blog as a recruiting effort. Nothing wrong with that but it feels rather different and it changes the values of aggregator sites.
rhizome 9y ago
Wow. As a member for 10+ years and a reader for slightly longer, this is a surprising criticism.
dws 9y ago
Huh? I've been hanging around Metafilter for many years. There have been changes since it ran on a box under Matt's desk, but "used to be amazing" to "going downhill"? Not seeing it. It's still one of the most civil places around.
- sien 9y ago
  It is very civil. But that's because it's an echo chamber where everyone must have the same views. The parent is dead right. MeFi was interesting was then was civil disagreement. Everyone piling on and 'favouriting' how bad Conservatives | Trump | Business | Capitalism | Libertarians | Rupert Murdoch are is very dull. It's still good for some funny cat pictures and stuff though. Oh, and just for HN readers, MeFi these days seems to think Silicon Valley is full of Libertarian Brogrammers. There are comments saying how terrible HN is. Perhaps because there is more diversity of opinion here.
  - arkitaip 9y ago
    Mefi has always been to the left, everyone knows it. Just because it doesn't align your your politics doesn't make it bad. Probably does you good to get out of your own bubble.
    - nyolfen 9y ago
      metafilter used to have left slant but a degree of diversity. i specifically recall ironhands(? or similar) as a respected conservative commenter. those days are long, long gone. having the wrong opinion gets you run out.
      - jessamyn 9y ago
        IronMouth I think? I don't mod there anymore and haven't in a while but I still see some of the respected conservative commenters there but fewer than in the past.
        9y ago
joezydeco 9y ago
I'm a relatively new MeFi user and I think it's still lightyears more civilized than Reddit ever was on it's best day. It's amazing what competent moderators (and a $5 signup fee) do to keep the noise down.
floatingatoll 9y ago
This statement does not necessarily reflect widely-held views of the active MetaFilter community.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  I'm skeptical "the active MetaFilter community" is actually representative of "the MetaFilter community." It seems like is just the fraction who likes or at least tolerates the way it is now.
  - Mz 9y ago
    As a rule of thumb, people who aren't so thrilled tend to stop showing up.
    - iiiggglll 9y ago
      Count me as part of the strange group that is dismayed at the quality but for some reason I can't fully explain, keeps showing up. I've had an account since late 2000 (yes, 17 years). I still read Metafilter pretty much every day, but I have gotten to where I will not comment, because I recognize that I do not think the "right" way. I've made perhaps two comments in the last 6 years. I frequently will type up a comment but then erase it without clicking save, because I know my thoughts would not be welcome. For example, when the thread[1] about the Democratic National Convention was underway last summer, I noticed the thread was up for 48 hours, had over 3000 comments, and barely any mention of the resignation of the DNC chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), which had occurred just a few days prior. Go ahead and look through that that thread now (it's long since closed). There are a grand total of four mentions of Schultz's name. That's it, out of more than 3000 total comments. That's really strange, isn't it? The chair of one of the two major US party resigning a few days before their presidential convention is highly unusual and really should garner a bit more conversation, one would think. I'm sure if the chair of the RNC had resigned a few days before the Republican convention, there would have been more than just four comments about it. I was about to point this out, but then I realized that if they wanted to talk about it, they already would have. No one wanted to hear it. The groupthink is just that strong. Shut up and toe the party line (in every sense). I also see other folks commenting here saying Metafilter's moderation is good and that poor comments are removed, but then I frequently see things like this comment, which is the first response to a post[2] about the recently-leaked climate change report: > thank god i'll be dead by then. enjoy your eternal life on a cinder, peter thiel That was allowed to remain (and has multiple "favorites"), because it's apparently okay if the Earth is ruined and everyone dies, as long as some techbro Metafilter doesn't like gets what's coming to him. That's what passes for "quality" on Metafilter these days, along with near-daily posts about how horrible white people are.[3] And yet I can't look away. I'm still there reading it every day. Don't ask me why. [1] http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away [2] http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence [3] http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probably-the-most-dangerous-people-in-the-world http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probabl...
mrbill 9y ago
I beg to differ, I've seen nothing of the sort.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
NelsonMinar 9y ago
there's been no perceptible change, and certainly not because of the management change.
arkitaip 9y ago
Nonsense. Cortex (Josh) and mods have been working hard and it shows in that quality is what it's always been.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  i have never encountered a more intense progressive echo chamber than what metafilter has become, and i visited it regularly for a decade
- joezydeco 9y ago
  I also didn't realize Cortex now owns Metafilter.
  - jedanbik 9y ago
    It just happened. There's a stickied MetaTalk post about it still I think.
    - joezydeco 9y ago
      Was the banner at the top of the blue only recently added? I don't really read MetaTalk.
      - jessamyn 9y ago
        Banner's been there for at least a week.
gumboshoes 9y ago
What? That's BS. I've been with Metafilter since its first month and its as great as it ever was!

ddellacosta 9y ago

How has it gone downhill?

deepspace 9y ago
Maybe its just me, but back in the day (early 2000s) we used to have raucous (but still very civil) discussions about controversial topics, with little or no moderator interference. Shortly after cortex joined, submissions and comments which did not conform to a very narrow set of socio-political viewpoints started getting censored, and these days there is pretty much no room for controversial content. Sure, I can see that the site would look highly civil and somewhat interesting to a new user coming from, say, Reddit, but to me the fanatic censorship has turned the place into a boring echo chamber compared to what it used to be.
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Cortex has been a member since 2001 and a mod since 2007. You mean it's been going downhill for a decade because cortex? C'mon, don't be silly now.
  - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
    > Cortex has been a member since 2001 and a mod since 2007. You mean it's been going downhill for a decade because cortex? C'mon, don't be silly now. That's a lot like trying to dispute the effect of Donald Trump's presidency on the US by noting that he has been an American since he was born.
- gumboshoes 9y ago
  To put it another way, the mods are modding. They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons. That's what makes it great and better than most of Reddit on any given day. That modding affects everyone. I had a comment deleted just last week: I was too chatty on an Ask Metafilter response and bloop, away it went.
  - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
    > They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons. Eh, I don't think that's really a fair characterization. Yeah, sure, they delete dups, etc., but no one's complaining about that. The mods also delete stuff from an ever-increasing (but ill-defined) list of topics that "Metafilter doesn't do well," which basically means anything that could upset the cool kids or other favored groups. There's a lot of hype about Metafilter's famed moderation, but all it's really done has caused the site to reach a different failure mode. Rather than discussion, you get a bunch of commenting that's bracketed by passive aggressiveness and anxiety, carefully moderated into an illusion of civility.
    - gumboshoes 9y ago
      What you call "topics Metafilter doesn't do well" I call "same-old rehashes." They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug.
      - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        > They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug. That's the standard justification, but it leaves a lot to be desired. For one, IIRC, even brand new topics have been moderated away because the mods judged discussion might not go in the "correct" direct (for lack of a better word). Two, avoiding disagreement to the degree Metafilter does is a recipe for tension and dysfunction.
Chaebixi 9y ago
What was once an open place is now very, very constrained. The acceptable range of viewpoints has ratcheted into a narrower and narrower consensus, to the point where the discussions are boring and you have to be careful to not make them interesting. The viewpoint racheting alienated a lot of people from the site who used to feel like they were part of the community.
- kome 9y ago
  So true! Controversial topics and confrontation are avoided at all costs. So from one side metafilter it is very civil and quiet, but from the other side is quite uninspired and dull. Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring.
  - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
    > Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring. And full of anxiety and dysfunction masquerading as something else.
    - kome 9y ago
      ahahah, so so true!

glhaynes 9y ago

I could probably be convinced that a bit of decline has occurred (though, its a different world with some different priorities/urgencies, too), but "shadow of its former self" massively overstates it IMO.

acdha 9y ago

You're the second person I've heard make that claim but I don't think it's anywhere near as accepted as you're presenting it. I personally don't see a quality hit so much as the general decline in all sites which aren't Facebook and when Google chose to cut their ad revenue by ~40% which forced them to lay off moderators: https://matt.haughey.com/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15ec96f0 https://matt.haughey.com/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15e...

arkitaip 9y ago
There has been no decline in quality and blaming cortex is utter bullshit. My guess is that the haters never liked mefi in the first place and are abusing the change in management to attack the site.
- sien 9y ago
  Blaming Cortex is nonsense. But there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it when it became an echo chamber. Perhaps all sites like it decline. Slashdot, Kuro5hin and many others are a sad shadow of what they used to be. Maybe HN in 5-10 years will be pretty sad too.
  - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
    > Kuro5hin It's finally dead! http://kuro5hin.org http://kuro5hin.org
  - jacalata 9y ago
    > there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it I think that people's memories are flawed enough that the "it used to be so great" arguments are all pretty suspect. I tend to think that it's more like "I used to not be familiar enough to realize x" combined with "I feel like I've seen these arguments before". I have the same feelings about HN plenty of the time.
- acdha 9y ago
  I think it's more likely that we're seeing the average drift upwards and a non-trivial percentage of the community is less involved than they were in the earlier days of the web, so the active community isn't as varied as it used to be. The other big thing which is hard to under-estimate is how much the web has homogenized over the years. MetaFilter was where you went to find someone's personal blog, collection of cat scans, etc. and people just don't do that the way they used to: instead of blogs that largely happens on Facebook or Instagram (and it's private), individuals are competing with for-profit content mills and SEO spammers, etc. HN has followed a similar arc – you used to see more personal tech blogs and open source but now that's competing for attention with major companies paying staff to blog as a recruiting effort. Nothing wrong with that but it feels rather different and it changes the values of aggregator sites.

rhizome 9y ago

Wow. As a member for 10+ years and a reader for slightly longer, this is a surprising criticism.

dws 9y ago

Huh? I've been hanging around Metafilter for many years. There have been changes since it ran on a box under Matt's desk, but "used to be amazing" to "going downhill"? Not seeing it. It's still one of the most civil places around.

sien 9y ago
It is very civil. But that's because it's an echo chamber where everyone must have the same views. The parent is dead right. MeFi was interesting was then was civil disagreement. Everyone piling on and 'favouriting' how bad Conservatives | Trump | Business | Capitalism | Libertarians | Rupert Murdoch are is very dull. It's still good for some funny cat pictures and stuff though. Oh, and just for HN readers, MeFi these days seems to think Silicon Valley is full of Libertarian Brogrammers. There are comments saying how terrible HN is. Perhaps because there is more diversity of opinion here.
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Mefi has always been to the left, everyone knows it. Just because it doesn't align your your politics doesn't make it bad. Probably does you good to get out of your own bubble.
  - nyolfen 9y ago
    metafilter used to have left slant but a degree of diversity. i specifically recall ironhands(? or similar) as a respected conservative commenter. those days are long, long gone. having the wrong opinion gets you run out.
    - jessamyn 9y ago
      IronMouth I think? I don't mod there anymore and haven't in a while but I still see some of the respected conservative commenters there but fewer than in the past.
      - 9y ago

joezydeco 9y ago

I'm a relatively new MeFi user and I think it's still lightyears more civilized than Reddit ever was on it's best day. It's amazing what competent moderators (and a $5 signup fee) do to keep the noise down.

floatingatoll 9y ago

This statement does not necessarily reflect widely-held views of the active MetaFilter community.

Chaebixi 9y ago
I'm skeptical "the active MetaFilter community" is actually representative of "the MetaFilter community." It seems like is just the fraction who likes or at least tolerates the way it is now.
- Mz 9y ago
  As a rule of thumb, people who aren't so thrilled tend to stop showing up.
  - iiiggglll 9y ago
    Count me as part of the strange group that is dismayed at the quality but for some reason I can't fully explain, keeps showing up. I've had an account since late 2000 (yes, 17 years). I still read Metafilter pretty much every day, but I have gotten to where I will not comment, because I recognize that I do not think the "right" way. I've made perhaps two comments in the last 6 years. I frequently will type up a comment but then erase it without clicking save, because I know my thoughts would not be welcome. For example, when the thread[1] about the Democratic National Convention was underway last summer, I noticed the thread was up for 48 hours, had over 3000 comments, and barely any mention of the resignation of the DNC chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), which had occurred just a few days prior. Go ahead and look through that that thread now (it's long since closed). There are a grand total of four mentions of Schultz's name. That's it, out of more than 3000 total comments. That's really strange, isn't it? The chair of one of the two major US party resigning a few days before their presidential convention is highly unusual and really should garner a bit more conversation, one would think. I'm sure if the chair of the RNC had resigned a few days before the Republican convention, there would have been more than just four comments about it. I was about to point this out, but then I realized that if they wanted to talk about it, they already would have. No one wanted to hear it. The groupthink is just that strong. Shut up and toe the party line (in every sense). I also see other folks commenting here saying Metafilter's moderation is good and that poor comments are removed, but then I frequently see things like this comment, which is the first response to a post[2] about the recently-leaked climate change report: > thank god i'll be dead by then. enjoy your eternal life on a cinder, peter thiel That was allowed to remain (and has multiple "favorites"), because it's apparently okay if the Earth is ruined and everyone dies, as long as some techbro Metafilter doesn't like gets what's coming to him. That's what passes for "quality" on Metafilter these days, along with near-daily posts about how horrible white people are.[3] And yet I can't look away. I'm still there reading it every day. Don't ask me why. [1] http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away [2] http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence [3] http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probably-the-most-dangerous-people-in-the-world http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probabl...

mrbill 9y ago

I beg to differ, I've seen nothing of the sort.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

NelsonMinar 9y ago

there's been no perceptible change, and certainly not because of the management change.

arkitaip 9y ago

Nonsense. Cortex (Josh) and mods have been working hard and it shows in that quality is what it's always been.

nyolfen 9y ago
i have never encountered a more intense progressive echo chamber than what metafilter has become, and i visited it regularly for a decade
joezydeco 9y ago
I also didn't realize Cortex now owns Metafilter.
- jedanbik 9y ago
  It just happened. There's a stickied MetaTalk post about it still I think.
  - joezydeco 9y ago
    Was the banner at the top of the blue only recently added? I don't really read MetaTalk.
    - jessamyn 9y ago
      Banner's been there for at least a week.

gumboshoes 9y ago

What? That's BS. I've been with Metafilter since its first month and its as great as it ever was!