4 ms·

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 plac

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.

TMWNN 4y ago
> 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. The funny thing is that I vaguely thought Ms. West was the owner, or at least ran things, so to hear that she's only now taken over is surprising. Certainly she was for years the closest thing Metafilter had to a public face. >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. Yes; the shunning was entirely people-driven. At least with Reddit, it's possible to find another subreddit if you don't like /r/politics. With MeFi, the only alternatives are off the site entirely. I never used my MeFi account much despite its age because I could see early on the trends that only accelerated as the years passed, so it's no surprise (but still sad, given the site's venerable history) to see that many, many others with much more participation decided to go off the site.

TMWNN 4y ago

> 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. The funny thing is that I vaguely thought Ms. West was the owner, or at least ran things, so to hear that she's only now taken over is surprising. Certainly she was for years the closest thing Metafilter had to a public face. >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. Yes; the shunning was entirely people-driven. At least with Reddit, it's possible to find another subreddit if you don't like /r/politics. With MeFi, the only alternatives are off the site entirely. I never used my MeFi account much despite its age because I could see early on the trends that only accelerated as the years passed, so it's no surprise (but still sad, given the site's venerable history) to see that many, many others with much more participation decided to go off the site.