Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”
This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot—certainly I’d forgotten about it until I decided to mark its big birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. To people who have been around a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what online used to be like. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still text-only. Some members may be influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers, and they don’t sell personally branded cosmetics or garments. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, "It's a weird throwback thing—like a cockroach that survived.”
When Haughey started Metafilter in 1999, he envisioned a quick way for people to share cool stuff they saw in what was then a few dozen key blogs. “I never even thought about free-flowing conversations, but it quickly went there,” he says.
For about a year the community was tiny, maybe 100 visitors a day, but in 2000 it was featured in a popular blog called Cool Site of the Day, and 5,000 people checked it out. That helped Metafilter morph from a niche link-sharing site into a community where smart people also discussed what was cool on the internet. In the early aughts, Haughey felt too many people were joining, so he cut off new membership. (People could still view the conversation as an outsider.) For years, the only way you could 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 to weed out potential trolls. That, and fairly paid moderators, maintained civility on the site. More importantly, the community itself didn’t tolerate awful behavior.
One popular feature from early on was “Ask Metafilter,” where members seek advice and tips from the Metafilter hive mind. “When you're pitching a question to 10,000 really smart nerds, chances are somebody has to be experienced in the thing you're asking,” says Haughey. It became an invaluable repository of knowledge, not just to the community but those who stumbled on the answers through Google. Quora later launched with a similar idea, but with ambitions for a mega-footprint. That wasn’t Metafilter’s thing.
“I didn’t want to be Walmart,” says Haughey. “We’re just the neighborhood corner store.” At one point he consulted with a kid named Aaron Swartz, who had an idea for a site that would be like a social-media wiki for everything. Then Swartz joined the first Y Combinator batch and hooked up with some founders starting a company called Reddit, which was basically Metafilter with limitless ambition.
Haughey was OK with that. In the early 2010s, things were pretty cush. Metafilter’s core community was tight, and millions of tourists dropped in, drawn by Google search results. Haughey monetized them via Google ads and was able to drop his day job as a web designer, buy a house, and raise a family. But beginning in 2012, Google made a number of spam-fighting changes to its ranking algorithms, and Metafilter, for mysterious reasons, suffered collateral damage. Over the next couple of years, revenue plunged and Metafilter had to lay off some employees.
By then Haughey had been getting burned out anyway, and he eventually took a job at a new startup called Slack—this worked out pretty well for him! In 2017 he turned Metafilter over to a staffer who struggled to keep it going for the next several years. In 2022, West became the owner. She’d been Metafilter’s first employee in 2008 but had left six years later. She has a day job as a Vermont librarian as well as a charming connection to computer history: Her dad was Tom West, the enigmatic protagonist of the classic computer narrative, The Soul of a New Machine.
With the help of an active steering committee, West straightened out the finances and put Metafilter on a path to becoming a nonprofit. While Metafilter’s numbers are nowhere near its heyday, new members do trickle in; one influx came from refugees abandoning what used to be called Twitter. Currently, the biggest project at Metafilter is a long-overdue rewrite of its ancient infrastructure. West promises that when it’s done, Metafilter will still look and function as it does now. No pivot to video!
Steady money still comes in from member fees and ads, but one income stream that West will not pursue is licensing its archives to an AI company. “It’s not the direction we want to go,” she says. Metafilter has implemented some anti-scraping methods, though West admits that it’s no match for the data-hungry efforts of Big Tech. “We’d be kidding ourselves to think our content that is freely available on the internet is probably not already ingested into some sort of AI models,” she says.
Among several charming Metafilter tropes is the way it marks a death, whether a celebrity like Shelley Duvall or one of its own members. Mourners post a message consisting of a single period. The lone dot speaks eloquently of loss, as well as respect for a life lived well, or at least loudly. “When I die, MetaFilter members will notice that I have stopped posting,” says one longtime member. “They will miss me. That's not why I continue to be an active member, but it does comfort me in some odd way to know that there will be an obituary thread in MetaTalk with a row of posted dots meant to honor my passing.”
As it begins its next quarter-century, there’s no urgency to pre-write an obituary for Metafiter. It’s a rare survivor of the early internet that has maintained its heartbeat and kept its dignity. Metafilter is what it is, while also being what it was. “It's never been built to get big,” says West. “The goal has always been for it to pay for itself, and it does now, which is a nice minor miracle.” Check it out for yourself. Just not too many of you.
Time Travel
I last gave thought to Metafilter in 2013. In WIRED’s 20th anniversary issue (we’re a cockroach, too!) I did a short interview with Matt Haughey, who was still running the site. Google Adsense hadn’t completely eviscerated Metafilter’s ranking yet, so he sounded pretty happy about things.
WIRED: You founded Metafilter, a communal weblog, in 1999. It remains one of the liveliest and least-trolled outposts on the net. In part, that’s due to your choice to cap the number of users and charge a small fee for membership. Is there a Dunbar number—the social sweet spot where things work best—for communities?
Matt Haughey: Mine is about 10,000 to 12,000 active people. It works great because there are people who have experienced all kinds of weird ailments and situations. For anything someone tosses out, there’s a really high chance that one in 10,000 people have done that exact same thing. But it’s not so many people that you’re just yelling into the abyss.
WIRED: You’ve said that it’s important to have a social network of nonfriends. Why?
Haughey: Your friends are usually afraid to tell you the truth. But someone who doesn’t have any emotional investment in your relationships can be objective and say, “According to what you’ve told me, you’re an idiot because of X, Y, and Z.” It’s like having a shrink.
Ask Me One Thing
Phil asks, “Are words sufficiently granular to describe reality?”
Thanks, Phil. My first response to this is a question of my own: Are you stoned? Forgive me, but your ask sounds a bit like a query once posed by a college classmate of mine whose LSD dose was perhaps more potent than anticipated. He grabbed me by the collar and said, his face an inch from mine, “Why are you … you?”
As with my friend’s question—I’m still working on that one—yours can’t be dismissed by its trippiness. It’s actually profound. What is reality, really? Each of us constructs our own version of coherence from the input received from our senses. This approach seems roughly effective. The words we use to communicate with each other reflect what seemed to be tacit agreement of a shared reality.
Probably you ask this question because of the rise of large language models, which must construct reality from words alone. Using billions of words, models like ChatGPT and Claude can provide a convincing, though not flawless or genuine, sense of reality. Certainly, the prose that they Hoovered up from “publicly available” sources has allowed those models to communicate with humans as if they knew what they were talking about.
Before LLMs, one might have been tempted to answer your question in the negative. If some entity never experienced reality, words might not have been sufficient. But now we see that by imbibing language alone, an algorithmic system can at least fake it when discussing the world with us humans, So it seems the answer is yes. Which should not be so surprising. Words are powerful. Just look at what you unlocked with a seven-word question. Philosophers have written theses on far less.
You can submit questions to [email protected]. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Killer Hurricane Beryl went from a tropical depression to a major hurricane in 42 hours.
Last but Not Least
In the wake of the Gaza mess, Meta struggles to moderate fairly. Maybe it needs … a metafilter?
An economist forecasts the market by peering into people’s refrigerators. Cold.
Using a clever hack, this woman raked in money from ride-sharing and delivery services. And then the jig was up.
It’s not Prime Day yet. But early birds can peck at some deals right now.TKTK STORIES
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