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.