Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter As a social network for non-friends, a description that is somewhat contradicted by the close camaraderie that emerges in an online group of just a few thousand people. West herself is a case in point: she met her partner on the site. She also describes Metafilter’s cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”
This month, the revered site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing that it’s lasted this long; it got this far in large part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot; I certainly had forgotten about it until I decided to celebrate its big birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. For people who have been here a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what the Internet used to be. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still just text. Some members may be interested influential on Metafilter, but they don’t consider themselves influencers and don’t sell cosmetics or clothing under their personal branding. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, “It’s kind of a weird throwback, like a cockroach that survived.”
When Haughey created Metafilter in 1999, he envisioned a quick way for people to share interesting things they saw on what were then a few dozen major blogs. “I never thought about free-flowing conversations, but it quickly became that,” he says.
For about a year the community was small, maybe 100 visitors a day, but in 2000 it appeared on a popular blog called Great site of the day, and 5,000 people viewed it. That helped grow Metafilter from a niche link-sharing site into a community where smart people also discussed what was cool on the Internet. In the early 2000s, Haughey felt that too many people were joining, so he cut off the possibility of new members. (People could still see the conversation as alien to them.) For years, the only way 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 the well-paid moderators, kept the site civil. More importantly, the community itself didn’t tolerate horrible behavior.
A popular feature early on was “Ask Metafilter,” where members seek advice and tips from Metafilter’s collective mind. “When you’re throwing a question out to 10,000 really smart nerds, chances are someone has expertise in what you’re asking,” Haughey says. It became a repository of invaluable knowledge, not just for the community but also for those who stumbled upon answers via Google. Quora later launched with a similar idea, but with ambitions to have a big presence. That wasn’t what Metafilter was going for.
“I didn’t want to be Walmart,” Haughey says. “We’re just the corner store in the neighborhood.” At one point, he consulted with A boy named Aaron Swartzwho had the idea to create a site that was like a sort of social media wiki for everything. Swartz then joined the first cohort of Y Combinator and teamed up with some founders to create a company called Reddit, which was basically Metafilter with limitless ambition.
Haughey agreed with that. In the early 2010s, things were pretty comfortable. Metafilter’s core community was tight, and millions of tourists came, drawn by Google’s search results. Haughey monetized them through Google ads and was able to quit his day job as a web designer, buy a house, and start a family. But starting in 2012, Google made a series of spam-fighting changes to its ranking algorithms, and Metafilter, for mysterious reasons, suffered collateral damageOver the next few years, revenue plummeted and Metafilter had to lay off some employees.
