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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. Wh
by 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 agoMetaFilter 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 agoIt'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 agoIt's definitely a matter of taste, and it's fine that different folks prefer different stuff. The flat model works well enough for Metafilter -- we're constantly seeing thoughtful, responsive conversations on all kinds of topics in the site's discussion threads -- but it's a virtue of the web that there's a variety of models out there so different folks can have their preferences met.
- dfan 12y agoFunny, I was just having a real-life conversation in which I was saying that I prefer the Metafilter style and find it difficult to follow HN/Reddit threaded conversations because it's non-trivial to find updates and all the action ends up in the first thread when there might be some good stuff below. Chowhound has a nice compromise where it's threaded but all the comments you've already seen are folded by default. I'm sure there must be other communities that do the same thing.
- judk 12y agoReddit partually folds comments based on score, but yeah some JavaScript to be more aggressive at first (and auto expand if you want to go deeper into a thread) mightnhelp
- NSAID 12y agoThe benefit is that it's easy to follow everything, like on ongoing conversation. I've been following this post throughout the day and I have no idea where the new comments are. Perhaps I've just never taken well to threaded comments, but I'd much rather have to mentally follow threads if that means I can at least read everything as it's posted.
- archagon 12y agoI disagree completely. When you have threaded comments, what happens is that people post their (often reactionary) opinions in response to OP, and then other people respond in kind to those opinions. On occasion you get a witty quip or a good story, but there's just no meaningful flow of conversation. It's soapbox vs. soapbox. On the other hand, non-threaded discussions, while more difficult to follow, read like actual, real-life conversations. You have a chance of having a pleasant discussion (or even changing someone's mind!) on those sites. I post on HN or Reddit when I feel like adding a point of data to a debate. I post on MeFi when I want to talk to my peers. (Admittedly, even sites like MeFi can't compare to talking with people in real life. There's something to be said for taking control of someone's locus of attention while you're talking, which you simply can't do when you have to talk in discrete, comment-sized chunks.)