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I was actually surprised to hear that they are employing multiple full-time moderators for a site like this. Is there any word on how much they were spending pe

I was actually surprised to hear that they are employing multiple full-time moderators for a site like this. Is there any word on how much they were spending per moderator? When I read things like "current response times to contact form emails of less than a few minutes will increase" I am tempted to say they might have actually had too many until now, but I don't participate enough on that site to judge this. Maybe it would pay off to invest some money in the development of better "crowdsourced moderation" features (like rating/flagging of posts) to save on staff in the long run?

teraflop 12y ago
MeFi already has favorites and flagging. However, flagging is only used to get a moderator's attention, and the final decision on whether to delete something is always made by a human. I think the userbase would be extremely resistant to changing that. More importantly, an integral part of MeFi's culture is that the moderators aren't just behind the scenes, deleting spam and banning problem users; they try to actively steer discussions away from flamewars/trollbait and towards productive discourse, without being too heavy-handed on the "delete" button. It's similar to what I've seen dang trying to do here over the last few months, but it works a lot better without nested comments.
- joshmillard 12y ago
  What teraflop said. cortex here, one of the mefi moderators. I totally understand where arguments along the lines of "automate and eliminate human costs" come from and there is absolutely value in finding ways to simplify/streamline/remove work, and we've developed a lot of custom tools for the site over the years to do just that. It's something that we'll have to do more of now as we transition to the smaller staff, taking a lot from what we've learned over the last several years as guidance. But the fact that Metafilter has attentive, thoughtful human eyes on the site and hands on the till is a defining part of the culture and nature of the site. It's not a question of whether it's a good business expense, it's a question of whether it's what makes for the kind of community we want to maintain.
- barrkel 12y ago
  I've seen a lot of groupthink on MeFi. I mean, there's groupthink on every site small enough to have recognizable usernames and associated reputations. But the groupthink eventually became too much for me and I left. The actively (and silently) wielded delete button only needed be used a couple of times.
brandnewlow 12y ago
Reddit had fewer than 8 people when it was seeing orders of magnitude more activity than MeFi. I understand fully why its great to have humans doing this work, but this downsize could be a good thing in the long run if it forces them to find novel ways to make things scale better.
- grlhgr420 12y ago
  do you really think reddit is a model of what a web community should look like? genuine question, because if that's the case then you're not exactly the intended audience
  - brandnewlow 12y ago
    Reddit is certainly a model of what a web community could look like. MetaFilter has taken a different approach. The market is telling its team that approach is not economical. Perhaps there's some ideas they can borrow from sites like Reddit that baked more crowd-power and automation into their models from the get-go.
    - grlhgr420 12y ago
      generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service and it's kind of sad that i have to point that out in the first place. there's a reason i've read metafilter every day for over a decade and reddit is generally considered a step above 4chan.
      - kemayo 12y ago
        Generating revenue /is/ the same thing as providing a service that can afford to remain in business, though. A service that shuts its doors because it runs out of money isn't being valuable to anyone at all. Hopefully mefi can find a way to operate within their means without compromising their important characteristics.
      - illuminate 12y ago
        "generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service" Well, from the cited stats, it's not enough of a valuable service to generate sustainable revenue.
JackC 12y ago
Metafilter has absurdly good moderation. It sounds like they're going to do the best they can with more automation and fewer staff, but this is a huge loss. What they're doing is just really hard. It's not a paradise, but they have reasonably civil, well-thought-out conversations with people of vastly different viewpoints on everything from transgender issues to Israel-Palestine to which rock band is the best to weird art to police brutality to which dogs are the cutest dogs to anything else you can think of. Imagine scaling up Hacker News so that every member is allowed to post to the top of the front page, and posts are allowed to be on any topic imaginable, and the average comment is going to be at least as knowledgeable and thoughtful as it is here -- in fact, the comments are expected to be good enough that they won't be sorted or threaded, and it will be more or less a faux pas to comment without reading all the comments that came before yours. It'll also be a faux pas to drive away people with contradicting ideas. Running a site like that is so hard that I don't know of anyone else doing it. Not at this scale, not with so many members, not with so much freedom remaining to members. The key is that Metafilter functions like a community. The members have reputations they care about (partly because of the $5 entrance fee, and partly because they value the respect of other members), and the mods pay attention to the mood of the site and the relationships between people, spending more time nudging people than actively deleting things. They also spend a ton of time (at metatalk.metafilter.com) getting feedback from the community about how the site should be moderated. Spend a few weeks reading Metatalk and you realize that, whatever they're being paid, it isn't enough.
- oulipian 12y ago
  MetaFilter can be hard to describe but I think this is one of the best descriptions I've seen of what makes it special.
- dublinben 12y ago
  It's pretty difficult to have a conversation of any kind, let alone a productive one, without threaded comments. I feel like the site is stuck in the 90s along with Fark.
  - joshmillard 12y ago

teraflop 12y ago

MeFi already has favorites and flagging. However, flagging is only used to get a moderator's attention, and the final decision on whether to delete something is always made by a human. I think the userbase would be extremely resistant to changing that. More importantly, an integral part of MeFi's culture is that the moderators aren't just behind the scenes, deleting spam and banning problem users; they try to actively steer discussions away from flamewars/trollbait and towards productive discourse, without being too heavy-handed on the "delete" button. It's similar to what I've seen dang trying to do here over the last few months, but it works a lot better without nested comments.

joshmillard 12y ago
What teraflop said. cortex here, one of the mefi moderators. I totally understand where arguments along the lines of "automate and eliminate human costs" come from and there is absolutely value in finding ways to simplify/streamline/remove work, and we've developed a lot of custom tools for the site over the years to do just that. It's something that we'll have to do more of now as we transition to the smaller staff, taking a lot from what we've learned over the last several years as guidance. But the fact that Metafilter has attentive, thoughtful human eyes on the site and hands on the till is a defining part of the culture and nature of the site. It's not a question of whether it's a good business expense, it's a question of whether it's what makes for the kind of community we want to maintain.
barrkel 12y ago
I've seen a lot of groupthink on MeFi. I mean, there's groupthink on every site small enough to have recognizable usernames and associated reputations. But the groupthink eventually became too much for me and I left. The actively (and silently) wielded delete button only needed be used a couple of times.

brandnewlow 12y ago

Reddit had fewer than 8 people when it was seeing orders of magnitude more activity than MeFi. I understand fully why its great to have humans doing this work, but this downsize could be a good thing in the long run if it forces them to find novel ways to make things scale better.

grlhgr420 12y ago
do you really think reddit is a model of what a web community should look like? genuine question, because if that's the case then you're not exactly the intended audience
- brandnewlow 12y ago
  Reddit is certainly a model of what a web community could look like. MetaFilter has taken a different approach. The market is telling its team that approach is not economical. Perhaps there's some ideas they can borrow from sites like Reddit that baked more crowd-power and automation into their models from the get-go.
  - grlhgr420 12y ago
    generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service and it's kind of sad that i have to point that out in the first place. there's a reason i've read metafilter every day for over a decade and reddit is generally considered a step above 4chan.
    - kemayo 12y ago
      Generating revenue /is/ the same thing as providing a service that can afford to remain in business, though. A service that shuts its doors because it runs out of money isn't being valuable to anyone at all. Hopefully mefi can find a way to operate within their means without compromising their important characteristics.
    - illuminate 12y ago
      "generating revenue isn't the same thing as providing a valuable service" Well, from the cited stats, it's not enough of a valuable service to generate sustainable revenue.

JackC 12y ago

Metafilter has absurdly good moderation. It sounds like they're going to do the best they can with more automation and fewer staff, but this is a huge loss. What they're doing is just really hard. It's not a paradise, but they have reasonably civil, well-thought-out conversations with people of vastly different viewpoints on everything from transgender issues to Israel-Palestine to which rock band is the best to weird art to police brutality to which dogs are the cutest dogs to anything else you can think of. Imagine scaling up Hacker News so that every member is allowed to post to the top of the front page, and posts are allowed to be on any topic imaginable, and the average comment is going to be at least as knowledgeable and thoughtful as it is here -- in fact, the comments are expected to be good enough that they won't be sorted or threaded, and it will be more or less a faux pas to comment without reading all the comments that came before yours. It'll also be a faux pas to drive away people with contradicting ideas. Running a site like that is so hard that I don't know of anyone else doing it. Not at this scale, not with so many members, not with so much freedom remaining to members. The key is that Metafilter functions like a community. The members have reputations they care about (partly because of the $5 entrance fee, and partly because they value the respect of other members), and the mods pay attention to the mood of the site and the relationships between people, spending more time nudging people than actively deleting things. They also spend a ton of time (at metatalk.metafilter.com) getting feedback from the community about how the site should be moderated. Spend a few weeks reading Metatalk and you realize that, whatever they're being paid, it isn't enough.

oulipian 12y ago
MetaFilter can be hard to describe but I think this is one of the best descriptions I've seen of what makes it special.
dublinben 12y ago
It's pretty difficult to have a conversation of any kind, let alone a productive one, without threaded comments. I feel like the site is stuck in the 90s along with Fark.
- joshmillard 12y ago