Metafilter contains the seeds for everything from Twitter to Reddit to comments sections on blogs, and it’s older than podcasts, the blog boom, Facebook, and well, basically everything online. Owner Jessamyn West sat down for a deep conversation with Mike about how MetaFilter’s reliance on community-focusd governance and person-scale moderation has helped it achieve its status as the elder states-site of the Good Web.

We previously had Jessamyn West on the show for two episodes in 2022, where she talked about taking over as owner at MetaFilter and libraries as a public good.

Transcript

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Hello everybody, I am Mike Sugarman, welcome back to reimagining the internet. I am in Randolph, Vermont. You may be asking how I got here, I drove. I drove from Burlington where I just interviewed Michael Wood-Lewis at Front porch Forum and now I’m here with Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, owner of MetaFilter, librarian, technologist in Randolph, Vermont. And I’ve just learned community manager at the Flickr Foundation. And Jessamyn, thanks for coming back on the show. We had you on the show like two years ago.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah, right, right when I was sort of taking over things at MetaFilter. And just like we recorded before and I believe we went live after. So yeah, about two years.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, cool, it’s really good to have you back on the show for the Good Web series. I’ve been interviewing with the Good Web series is in all of these episodes, assuming that everybody has the goldfish memory that I have. But the Good Web series, yeah, we’re doing a few episodes of people who are doing cool important work on the social internet that has a track record. And we’re trying to get their story of how it works, how it has worked. And give something to folks who may be listening to this, who want to take a stab at their own social network or just participating in something new. What that experience is like. So yeah, Jessamyn, thanks for agreeing to do this. It’s cool to meet you in person.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Right, we’ve been emailing for years. Literally years.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I know, yeah, that’s so much of, I don’t know. This podcast was originally a pandemic project. We started summer 2020, so it’s nice to finally get out of the computer.

JESSAMYN WEST:

I like both, but yes, I think both are pretty important if they’re attainable.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Definitely, and honestly, if anybody wants to visit a nice old town in Vermont, Randolph, Vermont is a really good one. Yeah, it’s green, it’s cute.

JESSAMYN WEST:

It’s hoppin’, population what? 4500. It’s the largest city, the largest town in Orange County, Vermont. Which is the second or third smallest county in the state. Second smallest state.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Okay, so, right, we had you on a couple years ago, and I noticed something about those episodes. Ethan knows you so well, and Ethan knows MetaFilter so well that he somehow neglected to ask you to tell the listeners exactly what is MetaFilter for people who don’t use MetaFilter, like what’s the experience like? Who’s on it? Just give me the summary.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Sure, yeah. MetaFilter started in 1999, so a really long time ago. Originally, that was when a lot of the people who, if you were blogging at all, like doing a little sort of post on the internet, sort of new stuff on top, talking about what was going on with you, you had to roll your own, right? You had to sort of do your own. I don’t even remember if there was any sort of tools at that time yet. And most blogs were just like a person. Hey, it’s me, this is my thing, blah, blah, blah.

And then Matt, Matt Haughey, sort of long time internet person to people who know him specifically for this, but also for other things. Basically wanted to build a thing where he could blog about stuff, but also he could share that blog with his friends. And so it was a group blog with Matt and Matt’s friends. So that’s how it started out basically, 1999. But then Matt’s friends became friends of friends, right? If you wanted to be on the blog, you would ask Matt. And the whole idea was neat stuff you find on the internet. Let’s share in a place.

And because it started out so long ago, it was sort of built by hand by Matt on the Cold Fusion platform. I don’t totally understand the tech of it. And people could comment and then other people could post, right? So it was like a blog where not only could you comment on Matt’s post, but you could make a post of your own and Matt and Matt’s friends could post on that. Right? Started out and his slogan was “best of the web,” right? We find cool stuff on the web and we filter it nominally for you. And it was just a little online community.

And then over time, it got bigger. There was signups that anybody could sign up after a time. More subsites got added. Matt put ads on it. And then that brought in money. One of the most popular subsites was called Ask MetaFilter, which became kind of a Q&A part of the site. But it was the same blog format. Post, comments. You can like, fave stuff, but you can’t downvote it, which is why we’re not Reddit. You can make friends with people. We have some like XFN stuff so that if you’re on it and I’m on it, I can be like, hey, I’m that Mike. And then you know that we had a subsite for meetups, talking about television. And most importantly, MetaTalk for talking about the site so that people who use the site could give advice or feedback on the site and talk about the site, which I think made us a little different that you had a line into the people who ran it and you could make comments or maybe make feature requests that would become features.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, so I actually was not aware of its origin in blogging, but like to kind of put in perspective, RSS 2.0 was brought to the public in 2002. So that’s three years after MetaFilter starts. RSS 2.0 is generally what’s attributed with like what enabled blogging to really be a widespread phenomenon because you could subscribe to other people’s blogs. So you needed something before stuff like that.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Right. And people could build tools on it if they had RSS, right? There was a whole bunch of like, what’s new in blogs? Which blogs have new content? Where can you go comment? Who’s popular?

MIKE SUGARMAN:

It’s how you would distribute. It’s how podcasts are still distributed. It’s why we have podcasts because you have this standard for subscribing to other people’s content that’s not commercialize.

JESSAMYN WEST:

I was reading somebody on social media just talking the other day about like, if you have a podcast but it doesn’t have an RSS feed, are you even a podcast?

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure it’s not. I have a strong opinion about that. I think not.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah. I mean, old school web people definitely have opinions about a lot of this stuff.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Very much so when you go on Metafilter, that is what it still is, is you can go on there and see posts, like it’s a little title and then it’s a little blurb and there’s like, I guess an upvote count and you can like see what people are collecting.

JESSAMYN WEST:

We call them favorites, not upvotes, but yes. And there’s no algo. That’s actually probably the biggest thing that just moves us.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

When you mean, I mean, there’s an algorithm in every piece of software, right? What do you mean?

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. There’s no, there’s no algo that moves the content around. It’s date only. It’s only date. The algo is date.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Okay. So people keep up by just visiting the site.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah, you can fave a thing, but you can’t, it doesn’t affect where it shows up on the page or anything. And people often, like people who are heavy like users, there’s a thing called recent activity, which will just thread all of the threads, your, all the blog posts, all, I don’t know what you call them, that you’re following, right? So you can see who’s recently commented in that. And for people who are really active on the site, you can either like leave a thread open and like stuff auto loads the end through the miracle of JavaScript, or you can look at recent activity and see the last 10 comments in any thread. And it used to be that MetaFilter moved slowly enough that seeing the last 10 comments was fine if you were somebody who was just kind of keeping it open in a tab while you were doing your work or making dinner or whatever. Yeah. Now depends on the thread, but some threads just go, “Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh,” really fast moving. So just people comment slowly or when they find it or even much later, right? Threads stay open for a long time. So you can comment in something that somebody posted like weeks ago, no big deal. And you know people will see it in your recent activity, which is kind of nice. I mean, it’s like bumping, I think, that people do and like bulletin board forum type things.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

So speed is actually something that’s been coming up a lot on this Good Web series. And yeah, the idea that MetaFilter was slower at one point and now it’s faster. I mean, could you just… It’s a little faster. But like how slow was it and how fast is it? And like also in terms of moderating and like, I don’t know, helping maintain community, like how does that speed play into all of that? It plays into it a lot actually.

JESSAMYN WEST:

It used to be slow enough that like I joined MetaFilter. I don’t know if it’s… I don’t remember exactly when I joined, but the thing that made me feel like, “Oh, this is like a website that I go to when something’s happening.” There were like two events. There was a Seattle earthquake when I was living in Seattle and there was a lot of… MetaFilter was a lot of… Because everybody was friends with Matt, a lot of the people that were on the website, were people who Matt knew, Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, maybe people he met at conferences, Austin, Texas, South by Southwest, people, that kind of thing. And you could see comments coming in like, “Oh yeah, I felt that. Oh yeah, I felt that.” And in fact, we had an earthquake here in New England fairly recently. And it was very interesting that… It was very interesting to notice the different pace of people talking about the earthquake 15, 20 years ago where MetaFilter was where you got the information. It was the only place there was news about a thing that was currently happening.

Whereas now, where you get your information from Mastodon or Twitter/X or Instagram or who even knows. But then you might go to MetaFilter still to talk about it with your friends. And so it used to be that’s just kind of where the people were. You might not even know them all, but they’re talking about the thing. And now it’s like, news is distributed, people haven’t quite found the place that they go to for breaking, breaking, breaking stuff. And MetaFilter’s the place where you go to talk about it with the people you like to talk to about stuff.

And then 9/11 also, really big deal. And that was one of the first, I think, fast moving threads, I can remember, just back to the subject of speed because people didn’t know what was going on, were accumulating links and information, which had a lot of utility when you were very concerned that you didn’t know what was going on and you wanted to get as much information as possible. And there wasn’t a place to get it in a traditional news outlet online. You can’t just wait for the newspaper if you believe your country is under attack, kind of. And it was an interesting way of sort of thinking about that. And nowadays, I think people just assume they’re going to get the alerts on their device or their buttons or their notifications or their whatever.

And MetaFilter now, compared to that, is very sleepy for the most part. But we still have the unfolding situation in Gaza. We have the run up to the United States election. And those threads are still what I would perceive to be hopping, like multiple comments in every minute. And stuff can kind of, from a moderation perspective, get away from you.

Because we still also have completely human moderation. We have some alerts that come to the moderation team, like, “Something’s getting a lot of flags.” But we just either, the moderators see either what they read or what the flag queue tells them or what email tells them. And that’s it, very slow motion. And it can be a little hard to keep up, especially when people’s expectations are very, very different.

But when Matt started the site, the site was Matt. And when Matt went to sleep, there was no moderation. And when Matt woke up, there was moderation again. And I was the first person who wasn’t Matt, who worked at that website, just doing moderator stuff. And again, because Matt built the whole thing himself, all the tools were bespoke. So the flagging, homegrown, moderation, homegrown.

When I was, I don’t know what Boing Boing’s back end looks like now. I don’t know what it looked like in the beginning. But when I was working there for the one week, being like, “Hey, featured person,” they had a Movable Type install. And that limited or bounded what they were able to do in a different type of way than sort of what limits and what bounds the sort of MetaFilter back end has.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

So the MetaFilter backend, frontend even has never really fundamentally been updated. It’s not like it was replaced with a React front end at some point.

JESSAMYN WEST:

No, parts of it still run on Cold Fusion. And realistically, I think our dream is to have it rewritten to be in something people recognize like PHP, but still PHP, right? That’s not modern per se.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

It doesn’t really go down. It seems like a pretty resilient site.

JESSAMYN WEST:

It used to go down all the time.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Well, then someone fixed it apparently.

JESSAMYN WEST:

It was like the big joke that like, “Oh, hey nerds, you’re going to have to find something to do or talk to your family because the website’s down until Matt wakes up.” But yeah, we had a developer, PB, you may know him as the inventor of the permalink, Paul Bausch—I don’t know how his last name is pronounced because I know it from reading. And he really firmed everything up. And one of the people that we do have who works there and gets paid is frimble. That’s frimble’s username. And they are the person who really sort of keeps the whole weird creaky thing running. And we don’t have as much downtime. We do have a little bit more attention on it. We’ve got a more robust, I don’t know, back end. That is not my part.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

If you’re describing the evolution of social media, you’re describing the point—I don’t really understand how it works. But at some point, like our eyeball was a separate organism. And then somehow it like, conglomerated into like a fish. And then the fish like slowly evolved into us. So you’re going to have describing like the fish. It’s like the stuff was coming together into the organism. And then there was a lot of like evolving from there, right?

Like what you’re describing, Cold Fusion, bespoke tools, a place where all the bloggers would hang out. The guy who invented the permalink like helped build stuff like that.

JESSAMYN WEST:

He worked there for a long time. Yes.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

It’s primordial right? And it’s like, how has it lasted this long? Is it just some people never figured out how to use the internet outside of MetaFilter? I assume it’s not that.

JESSAMYN WEST:

I beg your pardon. No, I mean, I think the thing is it’s like more people would still be active on Usenet if Usenet didn’t get so difficult to use, right? And MetaFilter is still, or as fewer places supported and NNTP, you couldn’t interact with Gopher—Gopher is still a very viable technology, but you can’t get to it in the same way. You have to build things on top of it to get to it. You need something that works through HTTP, HTTPS now, I guess, for discoverability. But websites still work. And I think that’s really the big thing. And I think that’s the thing people are kind of arguing about.

And for people like me who are like bloggers of a certain age, I like going to a place where I can see the people I’ve known. I mean, this town, same thing, right? I’ve lived in this town or the next town for the last 20 years. And it’s nice just getting to walk around and like see the people you know. I mean, maybe not for everybody. I think there are people for whom novelty is significantly more important or other factors, right? But I think for many people, if you’re the kind of person who would go to a corner bar, you’re the kind of person who would still hang out on MetaFilter.

And MetaFilter really paid for itself through ads and like tiny amounts of sort of contributions from the people because it doesn’t cost that much to run. I mean, the only expensive part is paying people to work there. And you used to be able to make money kind of hand over fist just having Google ads. That universe has changed. But for a long time, Matt was making a very nice living. And I was making a very nice living working there. And now, you know, things are a lot more scant in some ways, but like advertising revenues, OK.

But we keep going more because of user contributions, including a couple sort of big donation contributors who help us do our thing. We’ve got a really lean team and we watch pretty much every penny. People will listen to this and be like, “Wow, what about that time?” Yes, OK. But yeah, in general, we’re pretty tight about it and it’s enabled us to keep paying the bills basically. There’s not much “there” there. We don’t have an office. I mean, there used to be, I guess, an office briefly in Portland, Oregon, but like we never needed it.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. I guess what you’re describing is like it’s lasted this long because it is kind of akin to a small town. It’s like and some people want to leave the small town. Some people never want to leave. Some people have their conflicts in the small town, but also you figure out how to balance the budget of the small town in a way to keep it, OK, this thing can run. We don’t have to dissolve or incorporate into something else. That hasn’t burned down.

JESSAMYN WEST:

And I think MetaFilter is the same way. There’s a lot of people who are there because they in general like it. There’s some people who spend time there because it’s their sworn enemy and they need to just wake up every day and vanquish their foes. And you know, everybody finds their own reason.

I like to think about sort of extremely online people generally speaking. Not everybody on MetaFilter is extremely online, but we definitely have a core group of extremely online users. And in many cases, they’re extremely online for a reason. Yeah. A lot of different kinds of reasons why that might be true. But understanding those reasons and understanding what brings people to community like that is an important part of understanding how to solve problems for them, keep the community running, keep people from tanking it, which is something my probably biggest concern.

One person with like a cranky lawsuit could really be a problem. And you want to be a place where people don’t want to be the cranky lawsuit type of people, but, challenging.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. So there’s like two questions that come out of that. Let me say the first question and then I will say this is the second question that came out of that previous answer. The first question is like, yeah, so how, how like kind of influential are the people who use MetaFilter in setting that kind of like community vibe and that sense of community and like how things actually run. Like I know there is a bit of a push and pull, but clearly the small town wouldn’t work if people didn’t feel like they did have a stake in how the thing operated.

JESSAMYN WEST:

So I can think of at least a handful, probably a dozen users who over time have some little project that they work on.

Like oh, we’ve got a monthly card exchange and you can like send cards through the mail and that’s like a tangible thing. Right. It’s again, no shade on intangible things, but it is a tangible thing and it’s a way to build community and it happens around MetaFilter, but like we don’t do anything. We the, you know, owners, staff, like moderators, whatever. And there’s like a ton of those little things.

And then there’s like, I said before the feedback area where people can be like, I think this is the feature I’d like or this is an accessibility thing you may not have thought about because you don’t have my profile, but I have a problem with this and you should probably know about it. You know, you try to be proactive, but you can’t always be.

And I think also people feel like they have the ability to get things done there that sometimes people have requests that get built into a thing, but almost always they at least get some feedback like, oh, we’re not going to do that because.

But so, you know, people do get to sort of discuss that and it is a little tricky because there is ultimately like a bottleneck, right? If one of the mods says no, or I say no, that thing isn’t going to happen, no matter how good an idea it might be or what kind of community grounds well they have. And I think that’s hard, obviously, for people who really feel like it’s a community. And it is tricky.

I think a lot about the difference between IRL communities and online communities. And in online communities at the end of the day, someone’s got root, right? Yeah. Whereas here in Randolph, Vermont, we can all meet at the park and that park doesn’t belong to anybody. And nobody can keep you out. It’s a public space and there are fewer rules, right? There’s just the public space rules that are like the laws of town. But you tend not to come up against those. Whereas online, you start making threats against somebody. We’ll shut your account down and you don’t have a legal recourse. You just have a sort of emotional recourse and also our terms of service and our code of conduct and everything else. But that’s very different than a codified set of laws and you’re right to a trial by jury, that kind of thing.

And those really are differences. And I think if we pretend they’re not there, it’s basically pretending that the power laws kind of don’t exist, right? Like you really have to understand who has the power in a situation. And I say that not to flex and be like, “it’s me.” But just to be like, it’s real. And that is a difference in the way we mean community when we talk about online community where it’s really difficult to own things in common. You can do it. You can go co-op. It is very, it’s challenging.

Whereas in person, all you need to do is kind of all hang out at the same place at the same time in a public space and your community, right? Like look at the Rainbow Gathering.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Like, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I think this might be a generational difference between like your age person and my age person that it’s like, I think there is an era of looking at the internet of like, maybe it is like the Rainbow Gathering where it’s like people getting together and there’s nor was that developed, but it’s kind of like, let your freak flag fly. Do whatever you want. We’re all here.

JESSAMYN WEST:

At the end of the day though, who owns your platform, right?

MIKE SUGARMAN:

And I think that I look at it and I’m like, that probably was the case for a while. And that doesn’t like, it was always the case. That sounds like a metaphor was about like somewhere along the line, like they actually started building gazebos at this like Rainbow Gathering. There had to be something to kind of rule in the gazebo. And it’s like, then there’s sort of your real structures.

The other side of it. And I think this doesn’t get said enough is there is this myth of the internet as like a level playing field where, or specifically social media platforms where anybody can like have a voice. The reality is any platforms that are set up that way without clear rules are just places where either the loudest people dominate or the people with the most time on their hands or the people with the most resources. Twitter is such a good example.

JESSAMYN WEST:

You can buy followers on Twitter.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. And there have been activist movements that have started protests, but in general, the people that like are most heard on Twitter are the people that are really good at Twitter. And we, something we focus on a lot at the lab is all the people who don’t get the chance to participate in those spaces because there isn’t scaffolding to keep them safe, right?

We have a researcher in our lab who is a dissident who’s studying silencing on Twitter, like when governments send masses of people or bots out to silence people who are like criticizing those governments. It happens with Indian government. It happens with a lot of different governments. I mean, that is really the promise of a totally level playing field that like the person with the—where is this metaphor go? The biggest bat? I don’t know. But yeah.

And I think that I admire a kind of like older idealism about, oh, maybe this community will just work if we like all get together. I don’t know if anyone listening to this podcast has ever tried to run a consensus process with more than like 10 people.

JESSAMYN WEST:

My sister went to a college with a consensus process and all it is, I mean, at the end of the day, you wind up with status quo more often than not because if the consensus cannot be achieved, the fallback is status quo.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. Or it’s just like an endless philosophical conversation, which has its place, but like at the end of the day, there can be…

JESSAMYN WEST:

No, an endless philosophical conversation, not if you’re trying to get something done. Exactly. It’s great to talk philosophy.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. It doesn’t help if you’re trying to like come to consensus about like, these are where we should place fire exits. It’s like there’s rules about where you put fire exits for a reason you don’t have to debate it necessarily and it’s okay that those safety structures exist.

JESSAMYN WEST:

And you should have people that you trust make those decisions. I should be really clear too that like I have had scrutiny because I’m transparent, but I haven’t had like people showing up at my house and doing a thing. But I have had people show up in my other social media accounts and be like, I want to talk about this thing. And I’ll be like, this is not where we talk about that thing. I mean, people want our books to be more transparent because they’re funding us. So why shouldn’t they be? And we felt weird about that because our books looked weird for a long time because we had a transition from the previous owner to me, which was uglier than it needed to be. Not between me and the previous owner, but just in how long it took and how not good the records were that we had that we needed to work with. And I didn’t want to show people a bunch of books that looked crappy, but a lot of people, I think rightly, took issue with that. That’s fine. We can have a reasonable conversation about that, you know, talking in text on the internet.

But people, some people, for whatever reason, took it into unreasonable conversation territory, right? Started talking shit about stuff, like just took it in a, and here’s a whole bunch of other things that I think are true about you because of this. Or as I said before, you know, veiled legal threats. And that’s scary because I have a lot of, as the sole owner, I have a lot of, what’s the word, exposure?

Like, yeah, theoretically, something that happens to the website could affect me and my own personal bank account just because somebody doesn’t like the way a thing happened. And we do our best. But like every time you talk to a lawyer, it’s real money. And that’s either my personal money or the site’s money spent on that. We try to do that as little as possible. We do have some great legal advice.

But sometimes when stuff gets legal, you have to, you know, laws are real. You can’t just kind of be like, oh, we’re just the internet. Laws don’t count. Like laws are real. And we have to figure out how to deal with that. And on an international website, just getting GDPR compliant, big deal, right? Of course. A lot of work. And you’re not ever sure you’re doing it right. People asking questions on Ask MetaFilter about where to find torrent for blah, blah, blah. You know, I don’t give a shit about torrents, but I have to think about the future of MetaFilter at the same time that I’m thinking about the present of MetaFilter.

And it’s super tricky to do because as soon as you start talking about that, you know, as soon as you say, I don’t care about torrenting, that becomes a public statement that you made that people have read and heard about. And so trying to kind of walk that line with people who are, you know, really angry for legit reasons. But sometimes you can’t talk about why you can’t talk about them.

The other instance that comes up a lot, and everybody thinks they’ve got some great solution to this, but like, you’re having a user who’s having a mental health crisis, right? And they wind up acting out on the site because they’re having a mental health crisis. You deal with that on the back end, but dealing with that on the back end might mean banning that user. That user might take to a completely other platform and start saying they want it to be handled this other way. And you wind up being in this really awkward situation where like, I’m not going to talk about that other user’s personal information, even if they’re saying, talk about all my personal information just because of, you know, rules we have or whatever. I can understand why that’s deeply unsatisfying. But it’s also the reality of trying to iterate in public and solve these problems in public.

And also things happen quickly, right? Somebody can have a freak out, leave a whole bunch of comments. You know, saying doing damage or causing harm seems like a big way to put it to me, not that it’s not true, but that it’s, I don’t mean that exactly, but like, you know, you can leave a whole bunch of comments all over the website about something you’re really upset about. Yeah. And if that needs to be moderated, that can become very visible. And different people can have different opinions about it and you may not be able to give them complete information.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, certainly. And is MetaFilter the type of place where when people have had a mental health crisis, there is a community response to it? Is it something that you’ve just tried to handle purely from a moderator standpoint?

JESSAMYN WEST:

Sometimes, I mean, if people are having, I mean, like, there’s some terrible stories, right? There’s some stories of like members who committed suicide and, or who died by suicide, and we found out kind of almost at the time. And it’s just, it’s a terrible feeling and you’ll get a lot of people who feel very strongly about it. Like suicide is a very difficult issue and trying to figure out both what like a site response to talking about that is. Like maybe you have information about a user that shouldn’t be public, but you have users who are clamoring to want to know what happened and trying to figure out how that works. Sometimes there’s just users like on a more basic level, like maybe they’ve got a substance use disorder issue and you happen to know about it because they’ve talked about it and you notice they’re posting while inebriated and you just give them the night off, but they can come back tomorrow. But then somebody’s like, why is that person’s account disabled? And you don’t want to talk about that user’s personal business.

You think you’ve worked it out with the users and on another sort of similar tricky issue, you know, sometimes we have users who are in trouble and maybe they’re having trouble making rent, maybe they’re living in their car, maybe they’re whatever. We do have some hard and fast rules about sort of fundraising stuff on the website just because we can’t vet them. Yeah. Right. And we have had some sort of scammy. We did have a user who pretended that they had died and showed back up as another user.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Oh my God. Whoa. Oh, wow. Yeah.

JESSAMYN WEST:

And it was a real thing because people were like, oh, I miss that guy because you get to know them on the site and then you find out they’re still there. And very dramatic. This was a long time ago, but a lot of the old time users we all remember when that kind of thing happened. And so we allow people to put fundraising links on their profile pages. Okay. We just don’t allow them to have them in a community discussion space because we’re not going to talk about it.

There have been times in the past when there have been users who needed help, made appeals for help, people funded them, and it didn’t work out right for various reasons. And it’s very difficult to talk about publicly because you don’t want to out people’s personal business. People may have different interpretations about what happened frequently. Right? I mean, yeah, it becomes the philosophical question again, but it’s hard to talk about in public because, I mean, you know, internet people, right? And then it would have turned out differently, but you can’t know that. We do our best. We are open to like scrutiny and feedback. But and we, you know, we have an internal like a Slack where we all on the moderator team, the dev team, the moderator team, the person who kind of runs the day to day and me and some former mods can all kind of communicate. And that’s good for moral support because sometimes it’s hard to deal with people who are being awful to you for a thing that you know more about than you can talk about.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Okay. So here’s the question two, we get finally get back. So question one: how does like community help play into kind of culture and community standards and that sort of thing. The other is, I know there have been issues on MetaFilter. I know there was a period of time when you weren’t participating in MetaFilter. Here it is today. Here you are part of it. Like what are the storms that it’s like weathered and it’s like almost 25 year 25 year history, not almost exactly 25 years. It’s 2024.

JESSAMYN WEST:

25 in July.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

And it’s 25 year history that has like gotten to the point where like it exists. It’s pretty similar to what it has been. There are still people using it who were using it. I mean, yeah.

JESSAMYN WEST:

I mean, we do get a lot of new users same as same as Randolph, right? We get new people coming in. Yeah. People stop using it sometimes or new people come in and stop using it like whatever. We have enough churn, I think that it stays at least a little fresh. I hope. I mean, different people have different opinions. This is mine. Well, I don’t, you know, I don’t like to speak and be like MetaFilter’s like this because my MetaFilter is a very particular way. It looks different to other people and that’s definitely true.

But like big deals were a lot of people coming in who weren’t just Matt’s friend, right? So all of a sudden your in-jokes, you’ve got to be a little bit more careful about it. When I started working there, there was definitely what we called like a “boyzone culture.” And there was a lot of like, oh, famous woman does blah, blah, blah. And you get all these like, I’d hit it comments. And you just be like, oh my God, stop it. Like, so, but it’s hard to change that kind of culture, right? You have to have a lot of people, but you also have to have the people in charge again, who’s got root, who’s making the moderation decisions decide that that’s an actionable thing. We worked on that. We’ve worked on the site then got big. Everybody was making a lot of money. And then the bottom fell out of the Google ads engine. Kind of it felt like overnight, but it kind of wasn’t.

And you know, the reason I left originally was, and I don’t think this is, I think we’ve talked about this publicly before, but like, you know, Matt was sort of like, all right, everybody needs to tighten their belts were given like big pay cuts and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, why don’t you just ask the community for help? Because before the community wasn’t really people would chip in if they felt like it or wanted to, but there was no concerted fundraising. It was just all like Google ads and we all had a lot of money. And Matt was just kind of not going to go that direction. And I was working a lot in a job that was stressful and I didn’t feel supported. And it’s hard to tell why that’s happening. But I felt a little bit like I’m the woman that runs the site, but the guy who’s in charge of the site isn’t doing the stuff that I need. Here’s a decision he’s making. I absolutely don’t agree with. Instead of taking a pay cut, I’m going to walk away for a while.

And then I left and then the site went through sort of a contraction. A couple other people just sort of moved on. Thank God, I don’t 100% remember the sequence of events. And then a year later, Matt had sort of decided he was going to take a job at Slack and give the site to the person who came in after me, basically Josh-slash-Cortex. And then Josh kind of ran it, you know, bless him all through like the Trump years, the run up to the Trump election, the beginning of the pandemic, which really changed the way MetaFilter looked. Because there were a lot of people who were coming there to like talk about COVID or talk about Trump. And a lot of threads were not only fast, but they were fast and angry. Like because people were upset, of course they were.

But if you have sort of a certain amount of sort of righteous indignation about topics, it can also affect your feeling towards moderation about those topics and became very hard to moderate a lot of sort of negative energy directed towards the mods. There was definitely not the sort of we’re all in this together vibe that I had in my town and I did not feel and this was like I was not, I was, I would occasionally like fill in as a mod. Like I went away for a couple of years and really didn’t work there much at all. But then I would come back and like pull shifts kind of occasionally. During early COVID. I didn’t see my partner because he was in Massachusetts. And so I just pulled shifts on the weekends and I could help and I felt good helping.

And then gradually and then Josh/Cortex really experiencing some burnout and it really took him a while to come to terms with it, figure out what to do about it. And he and I were having a lot of kind of back channel conversations and it really sort of became clear. He just wasn’t going to be able to keep doing the job he was doing both because he was just under a lot of strain and also he just wasn’t running the site anymore. Right? We all have different ways we deal with stress and I think for him it was a little bit like I cannot deal with this negative energy. I am going to put off a decision about something that’s going to be awkward and I’m not going to win. Right? Regardless of which way I decide to go on this difficult situation, somebody’s going to be furious I can’t deal with that anymore.  And so he had a got together kind of a transition board.

Oh, I should also talk about like other things like MetaFilter got a little bit better, still room for improving, dealing with the fact that all the early friends of Matt’s were mostly white dudes like Matt. And we got a more diverse audience that didn’t just include women but it included people of color, it included a lot of people from international locations still mainly Western but and there was a lot of concern that we weren’t doing well by those members that there was a lot of casual dog whistly stuff that you might not recognize if you didn’t know to look for it.

And more recently, even though this has always been with us but we’re getting better at dealing with it a little bit, the discussion around trans identity has been similar. So there was BIPOC advisory board established, we’re looking at working on a trans advisory board established. Those become tricky because trying to figure out what their charter is and what they’re supposed to be doing and who’s in charge of them and etc.

But at any rate, moving back to the sort of big challenges, Josh had a transition board helping him kind of set up a structure and he sort of reached out to me and was like, “Look, we’re thinking about doing this thing where we’ll have a steering committee of 12 people, they will be the people who kind of help make site decisions, deal with sort of community and culture. The mod team keeps doing what they’re doing but they’re better supported, there’s better turnaround, there’s more transparency. Would you be able to show back up and just do like legal and paperwork? Would you be the person who owns the site on paper if we had this structure to support you?”

And I was like, “It would not be my choice but it would be my choice over MetaFilter not existing anymore.” And so I stepped in and that lasted for about six months and kind of fell apart for, oh, it turns out you can’t have a bunch of people volunteering to support a LLC structure corporation. Like US labor law doesn’t let you.

And it would have been fine if people had just been pitching in a couple hours here and there but there was a lot of structure, there were a lot of people who were working very hard, particularly in a kind of a last ditch fundraiser, like the site was a month away from not being able to make payroll anymore and it was a lot of people really pitched in and worked very hard.

But that was itself tricky and then the steering committee kind of dissolved maybe a year and a half ago and I’ve now been the technically legal and paperwork but realistically me and the team who works there are doing all the jobs and it’s a little too much right now.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

I know there are some ideas about the way that kind of business structure of MetaFilter can change. Is that something you feel like talking about?

JESSAMYN WEST:

Sure. I mean, in so far as I’m not as much a part of it just because I do not have the time or energy but there’s now a new exploratory board called the Interim Board who like one of the things I, after we found out we could not have the structure that we had, I had some conversations with my lawyer who’s lovely and a lot of other lawyers just to be like could like a website, like a community website become like a non-profit model.

We’ve seen some websites turn co-op, we’ve seen some websites I think most recently Mastodon which is also a business has a 501(c)(3) structure in the United States which will help them do fundraising and probably honestly help with volunteer and stuff like that. People always talk about like Reddit but like all the mods are volunteers at Reddit, how does that work? Yes. Reddit’s a platform owned by Conde Nast, moderating has never been a job on Reddit and so as a result it’s okay to have volunteers do it. You’re making faces which I will just read into the record.

Yeah. I’m just going to go through about how this works right because MetaFilter has jobs that we pay people for, we can’t also have volunteers doing those jobs. I see. It’s like when I was in library school. I see how that’s a labor issue. I had been volunteering doing some library stuff at Seattle Public Library and once I ever worked for them I could no longer volunteer doing it because it was professional level work basically. Yeah, sure. And I get it. Of course. I get realistically tons of websites do this all the time but if you have somebody who’s like I maybe might make a thing about this you have to be like all right I have publicly been notified we need to do something different.

So I had some lawyer friends who were like I feel like you could be sort of a non-profit and we went back and forth with community who themselves were as a group kind of the people who were very active. There was a lot of stress and tension among them but they got together a board and they’ve been kind of meeting over the last like six or seven months and they’re hoping to be able to file paperwork, become a company, file 501(C)3 paperwork in the United States obviously. It’s not ideal but there’s not any way to be an international. I mean you’d have to be an NGO and that’s like a ridiculous amount of paperwork. Not really something for a tiny community website.

But that’s kind of where we’re at right now and we’re working on it. In my dream world I would be able to sort of make this hand off right around when MetaFilter turned 25. It’s been too much work for me. Even though I love MetaFilter, I’m happy it’s continued to be able to exist. I’m happy I’ve been able to be a part of it. A good deal of the things that are in my life, it’s almost half my life.

I met my partner there, just had a meet up. A lot of my local friends, I originally met, I lived one town over and the guy who lives next door to me now and we both lived in completely different places, I met because he asked a question on Ask MetaFilter and I’m like I think you lived near me.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, I mean, what that really brings to mind to some extent is there are other structures that exist that don’t apply to websites. You’re kind of describing almost like an ideal legal structure for MetaFilter is like a social club. If you have a social club in a city, you have some amount of tax exemption and you have the ability to get a liquor license and then there’s an income structure for membership fees.

This is one of the constant questions that keeps going in this Good Web series. It’s like, how do you describe stuff on the internet? People will use the park analogy a lot, they’ll use the room analogy a lot. We talk about models for websites, if it’s like an abstract thing or it’s like what JavaScript framework are you using?

Business models online, it’s so nebulous and weird. I think that the story of MetaFilter is this weird accidental pioneering project for each era of the internet in the past 25 years. What are the new roadblocks you can hit? It sounds to me like part of what you’re describing with Josh/Cortex is like he was the person who oversaw maybe like the moment when the internet became a huge conversation hub. I mean, MetaFilter, when I would go on it in high school, I would go there because it’s like, I don’t know how to find stuff on the internet, but there’s like cool links on MetaFilter. To talk about it as a place where now it’s mainly a lot of threads happening about like the Trump years. That’s totally different thing than what I would.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Very much. I mean, Josh started in 2015, but he was working there well before that. And yeah, and also I think it was when like the kind of angry on the internet thing happened, right? Like a lot of people, like we were on the internet because we were just nerdy and not doing sports or like we like to read and we also like to type. Like it’s a lot of verbal folks who are very verbal. I mean, I think different web communities get different types of people, but MetaFilter was a very typey, thinky, nerdy, like web, web-based, but a lot of people who loved the early web.

And the real trick is—you talk about like social club… In my sort of legal research, like there are, there have been like legit case law about social clubs on the internet not being the same as a social club in person. Like if you don’t have a physical place you’re meeting up, there was one about like people who were in like a pilot, you know, we fly and we’re like a pilot club, but we want to get this status so that we can have like this online space and you know, judges are like, nope, that’s not it.

And, and I feel, you know, it pains me a little bit because I feel a little bit like it’s saying that’s not real. You know, which, which, which just, which hurts me because it’s not only real to me, but I think the internet’s real to everybody now, right? They’re just locked in these social network silos where they don’t have agency and they forgot that they ever could. Yeah. Right? We have so much agency on MetaFilter, like even just the individual users have the ability to contact, you know, me, the mods, talk about things, contact one another, make connections with one another that don’t go through me or the website even like there’s been so many spin off websites.

And also like people leave, right? And people definitely feel differently about this. But for me, unless somebody left because they really feel like they were done wrong by us in a way that we felt like also we feel bad about that. Like that was a bad situation. I feel like it should be okay to leave.

One of the things MetaFilter has that’s similar but a little different to other social media is this concept of a brand new day. You know, you’ve got your you’ve got your weird username, although mine is Jessamyn because I have no imagination, but you get your username and maybe something happens. Maybe you’re having a bad time in your life. Yeah. You either get banned or you leave yourself. You know, you can close your account, delete your account, whatever. Always come back. Yeah. You know, but the brand new day is like also don’t do that thing again. They got you kicked out before but like we’ve all grown up. Yeah. Right? Like you were here five years ago. Your life was in a different place. You feel better. And also you remember you used to kind of like MetaFilter maybe. Yeah. Maybe not. Some people leave for good. It’s fine. Sure.

And it is a little weird and difficult sometimes not knowing what happened. Yeah. Sure. I mean, we know some people have died. Yeah. Like either, you know, in bad ways or just in kind of normal ways. But some people just walk away and you never know exactly what happened to them because sometimes maybe you didn’t even know their real name.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

If you were to travel back in time until not, does have to Matthew Haughey specifically but the Matthew Haughey figure who’s starting the MetaFilter type platform? Hey, you might want to know about this. You might want to know this stuff when you go to start this thing, it’s going to make everything a lot easier. But what would you tell them?

JESSAMYN WEST:

For me, it would be like, get help sooner. Like get help running the website, not like get help.

One of the things platforms have taught us, you know, big social media platforms is that moderation work is hard and it takes a toll. And I think, you know, Matt was like a guy who was not expecting to be a boss. And I don’t think it suited him. And I don’t think there’s any shame in that, you know, but being a boss, like I’m a little better is the wrong word. But like I’m good at being a boss because at some level, I can leave some stuff alone or be like, sorry, this is the tough conversation we need to have. And just personality wise, that’s not hard for me. I’m sure I have other lousy boss qualities.

But like I think for Matt, he really felt like for a long time, he should have been able to go it alone longer than I feel like he had to. You know, I feel like he had friends who were giving him advice, who had been people who use MetaFilter, but who had left MetaFilter and were then giving him advice based on other places they were that maybe they enjoyed more. And I think it was hard for Matt sometimes to take the feedback that he was getting from his lovely friends and figure out what to do with that based on the community he had, not the community he dreamed of.

We also have to be realistic that, you know, I chip in for a lot of stuff in my real life community because it contributes to keeping the community going in a necessary way. And it is like, it’s a little inconvenient to go to a meeting compared to not going to a meeting, but we all kind of have to pitch in. And I think there’s a lot of people who feel that way about MetaFilter, but then there’s a lot of people who treat it like it is just like Twitter or like Instagram or like Tumblr. Where you want it to be different, you don’t believe you have a way to make it be different and you can be very frustrated. And I think Matt spent a lot of time kind of having a lot of his own private anxiety or anxiety that would only be shared among the mod team. All of us were having a very difficult time doing our jobs. And I think if he had let the community support him a little bit more, a little bit earlier, he might not have gotten to a place where he felt like he really needed to kind of walk away, right?

So like, yeah, personal web comes around again, let people support you.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah, I think that’s also a good lesson.

JESSAMYN WEST:

But it’s hard, right? Putting money aside, when you’re trying to decide like, well, how much do I pay me for this incredibly stressful job? And our moderators for their incredibly stressful job and what’s the structure of that situation?

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Yeah. I mean, I think that one benefit that people might have now is that they know to ask the question, okay, what am I going to do for revenue at the beginning as opposed to like, oh, wow, we have a lot of users and this has like costs, like we have to find a way to raise money, which is how a lot of places, that’s how we ended up with like a surveillance ad model at the end of the day that it’s like people are like, “Oh God, I have to pay for this thing.”

JESSAMYN WEST:

Right. And we use Google ads on MetaFilter like theoretically, I don’t even remember how it works because I use so many ad blockers, but like theoretically logged in users see significantly fewer ads, but I think they still see some. I’m not 100% sure. And like that actually, you know, probably pays for a moderator. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then user contributions pay for a lot more.

But when you do fundraising, it’s so funny because I think of like the public radio model that everybody’s like, you know, what about how NPR does it? You’re like, well, sure. But also I feel like a lot of that sort of fundraising model is a little deeply disingenuous with public radio because there isn’t a way to be a part of public radio. The only way you could be a part of public radio is by contributing and listening.

Whereas with MetaFilter, there are ways of sort of participating, you know, using the flag queue, letting us know, emailing stuff, doing pro social stuff, being a pro social person, mentoring people, being a friend, going to a meetup, like having a friendly conversation about a thing, taking the temperature in the room down a little bit. Like there’s all sorts of ways you can participate. But when we do fundraising, it’s definitely a little bit of that kind of like, hey, I pay your salary. So and I don’t take a salary. I should also really mention. Yeah. I just volunteer. Because I’m the only one who can.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Right. As the owner, you can work for free.

JESSAMYN WEST:

And I was lucky, right? MetaFilter overpaid me for a certain period of time. I’ve got a certain amount of privilege in my life and a job that I like that pays recently. But it is worth sort of knowing when everybody has the sort of conflicts that come around fundraising time. We worry about it. Because like last year, we did a certain kind of fundraiser and there were a lot of people that were deeply unhappy about the way we chose to do it.

It’s always hard, right? Trying to figure out what’s the right way. Are these people right? Yeah.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

The thing that I can’t stop thinking about here is your site is called MetaFilter and so much of the activity that I know exists on MetaFilter and that you’ve described is meta conversation about MetaFilter. And it’s like, yeah, it’s funny because like I just, I came here literally from another part of Vermont where I was talking to someone who runs a website where you’re only allowed to talk about what happens in your town in Vermont, right?

Maybe there’s one thing that’s really special about MetaFilter that everything is up for conversation and it always will be. And that’s all part of the process.

JESSAMYN WEST:

With a couple very specific exceptions.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Sure. I wish are probably good ones to have good exceptions to have. But yeah, it’s like, it seems like part of the fun part of the activity of MetaFilter is when there’s something happening, everybody can have a kind of, which is like, it’s very proto-Twitter in that way. Like Twitter, like now I find Twitter totally insufferable as someone who doesn’t use it all that much, because every time I log on, it’s like, okay, so I have to figure out like what’s the meta conversation happening on Twitter and what’s the event that caused it, and then what’s like the chain of conversations…

But MetaFilter is like a real innovator in that. And it’s so much simpler there because it’s just like, it’s kind of the group of people who’s been doing it forever. And you don’t make money based on engagement. You just, the engagement is just like, it’s just going, you know,

JESSAMYN WEST:

Not really. People think we might, but we really don’t.

I mean, there’s a lot of other stuff on MetaFilter, but I don’t think it gets me talking about it as much. You know, because the Q&A site, as a library person, having a place where you can get your question answered by people you kind of know, different to the library reference experience, or like finding a neat thing you found on the internet that you want to share with people. I do it a lot.

Having that knowledge that you can know how all of it works, right? There’s a wiki. We’ve got a MetaFilter wiki where everybody, a lot more in the good old days, kind of less so now when I don’t think people think about contributing to wikis maybe the same way they did 10 or 15 years ago. But a lot of people would like, here’s a list of in-jokes. If you want to familiarize yourself with the in-jokes, you can access that information.

We have a web page that I’m very proud of on the wiki. And again, the wiki is built by everybody, not us. One is just called “There is Help.” So if somebody is going through a crisis, it’s like a big page about ways you can get help, right? Maybe, you know, food assistance, housing assistance, mental health assistance, medical assistance in your region, right? All over the world. It’s cool, right? Yeah. That doesn’t really exist in the same way in other places that are this size. Little communities, sure. Tiny subreddits, a lot actually. It’s kind of neat watching subreddits make that work, but none of those people get paid. You know? And that’s a different, it gives you a different position relative to what’s happening on the website.

Oh, I’m sorry, none of those people get paid. Conde Nast, well, they don’t own it anymore, right? They spin it off into its own thing. It’s public. Yeah. Stockholders get paid. Shareholders get paid. Yeah. Exactly. That’s right. Hey, I got an email about the IPO, and I’m like, I didn’t get an email about the IPO.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

Basically, it caused Reddit to catch fire last year.

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah. And he decided not to get stock, and then we were just like, eh, whatever. What was I going to do with that anyhow? Yeah. But yeah, for a while, Conde Nast was making money off your engagement.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

It’s so interesting, because in theory, stock is a way that it’s pseudo-democratic. It’s a way that you can be a shareholder and have a say in how the thing works, but it’s like no one who has stock in Reddit has anywhere near the involvement that someone who just posts a lot of MetaFilter has in how MetaFilter has a culture and how it operates and all that stuff. Good or bad, you know?

JESSAMYN WEST:

Yeah. I have some investments, and I get emails that’s like, oh, you can do your shareholder proxy voting, and I’m always like, no to all these board members, yes, to every shareholder initiative. Yeah. Like, oh, there should be a diversity audit? Fuck yeah, there totally should be a diversity audit. But they’re not going to go for it, and a lot of people don’t even bother voting in the majority shareholders. I mean, understanding how power and capital work, especially in America and in American business structures, is important to understand, I think, a lot of what we’ve seen happen in the social media landscape in the last five years especially, but 20 years realistically.

MIKE SUGARMAN:

A lot of their business also. Well, that’s a good place to end it. A very meta place to end it. Jessamyn West, MetaFilter. Maybe not owner for much longer when this nonprofit thing comes through, but thank you so much for joining us.

JESSAMYN WEST:

It was great talking to you.