Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, that description belies the close camaraderie that emerges in an online group of just a few thousand people. West herself is an example of this: she met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter group as “a community of old internet nerds.”
This month, the venerable site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing that it’s survived this long; it’s come this far largely because West helped it stabilize after its near-death spiral. You could say it’s a site that time forgot—I certainly had, until I decided to celebrate its massive birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like traveling back in time. For those who’ve been around for a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of the internet’s past. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still text-only. Some members may influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers and don’t sell private-label makeup or clothing. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, “It’s a weird retrospective thing — like the cockroach that survived.”
When Haughey founded Metafilter in 1999, he envisioned a quick way for people to share frigid stuff they saw on the dozens of key blogs at the time. “I never even thought about casual conversations, but it quickly became that,” he says.
For about a year the community was compact, with maybe 100 visitors a day, but in 2000 it was featured on a popular blog called Cool side of the day, and 5,000 people checked it out. That helped Metafilter grow from a niche link-sharing site into a community where sharp people also discussed what was frigid on the internet. In the early 2000s, Haughey thought too many people were joining, so he removed recent memberships. (People could still see the conversation as something outside.) For years, the only way to get in was to email him and beg. Later, when he decided to charge a $5 fee, 4,000 people signed up on the first day. The fee also helped weed out potential trolls. That, and fairly paid moderators, kept the site civil. More importantly, the community itself didn’t tolerate awful behavior.
One popular feature early on was “Ask Metafilter,” where members seek advice and guidance from the collective Metafilter mind. “When you throw a question out to 10,000 really smart nerds, chances are someone has some experience with the topic you’re asking about,” Haughey says. It became an invaluable repository of knowledge, not only for the community but also for those who stumbled upon answers via Google. Quora later launched with a similar idea, but with mega-footprint ambitions. That wasn’t Metafilter’s style.
“I didn’t want to be Walmart,” Haughey says. “We’re just a neighborhood store.” At one point, he consulted with a kid named Aaron Swartzwho had an idea for a site that was sort of a social media wiki for everything. Swartz then joined the first batch of Y Combinator and connected with a few founders who started a company called Reddit, which was essentially Metafilter with unlimited ambitions.
Haughey was OK with that. In the early 2010s, things were pretty comfortable. Metafilter’s community was tight, and millions of visitors dropped in, lured by Google search results. Haughey earned money from them through Google ads, and was able to quit his day job as a web designer, buy a house, and start a family. But since 2012, Google has made a series of changes to its ranking algorithms to combat spam, and Metafilter, for reasons that are mysterious, suffered collateral damageOver the next few years, revenues declined sharply, and Metafilter was forced to lay off some employees.