The parent is dead right. MeFi was interesting was then was civil disagreement.
Everyone piling on and 'favouriting' how bad Conservatives | Trump | Business | Capitalism | Libertarians | Rupert Murdoch are is very dull.
It's still good for some funny cat pictures and stuff though.
Oh, and just for HN readers, MeFi these days seems to think Silicon Valley is full of Libertarian Brogrammers. There are comments saying how terrible HN is. Perhaps because there is more diversity of opinion here.
It's still mostly witty, funny, gen-x zeitgeist. There's great wordplay.
The last couple of years, however, it has had an undercurrent of seething anger. There's such deep faith in really liberal social, economic, and political policies, and an increasingly narrow orthodoxy. I don't think Bill Clinton-era democrats would make it very on long on the blue these days. Hit the wrong note, and it quickly turns to Elyse toting up her unpaid emotional labor, and Steven going from NPR to Chapo Trap House, and Mallory joining the Middlebury Antifa to beat up Charles Murray.
Similar bad things have happened on the right, of course. Kids become Milo, not Alex. But it makes me sad to see the two sides drifting. It's hard to shake the bad feeling about the future.
It's not as if there isn't anything good to be gleaned from the site, so I'm not likely to flame out (though I do find every moderated comment provides a nice motivation to take a self-imposed break from the site and find other places to speak my mind). And it's not as if the past was a golden age of nothing but enlightened philosophers arguing betwixt hilarious quonsar shenanigans. Nor is it the case that I always feel like I'm fighting a battle and most of my comments disappear. There's plenty of my comments that are also decorated with many favorites, so I guess you win some you lose some.
But sometime in the last 3-4 years (out of the 15-ish that I've been frequenting it), the comment deletion started happening more often with rationales that looked thin to skewed to me. Along with that I think I've sensed a change in the gestalt of the site. And when stuff like the Google Memo and subsequent firing comes up, I know that even if I think the Metafilter gestalt is wrong about a handful of things among other opinions that I agree with, and I think can articulate a good thoughtful case that might be worth considering.... I know it's not a good idea to put in the time there. And my guess from the Metatalk discussions I've monitored and other interactions on with the site, Josh and the current mods largely consider that a win, believing that Metafilter is a better place without pushback on some opinions/politics/ideals, even if it's expressed politely and thoughtfully.
That's within the rights of any online publication or community, of course. Not every space has to be purely open-speech or even polite speech with a committed culture of critical review, editorial slant is and probably will inescapably be a thing no matter who you are. But I also think it's reasonable to say that it's changed notably in that regard.
That thread [1] was particularly hostile, so much so that I'm shocked to see so many people here defending Metafilter's culture. Even though I largely agree with their politics, I don't visit Metafilter very much because the echo chamber is simply too bad. One user in that thread was particularly bullying - they had 98 comments in the thread (nearly 1 in 10), and over 2300 favorites from other users. Politically I'm well to the left of the median commenter on Hacker News, but I've found Metafilter to be unbearably toxic whenever sensitive issues come up.
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/168651/Misogyny-based-on-flawed-er...
Diversity of opinion is important. Having people present their arguments well is important. But that goes down when it's just a festival of agreement.
Oddly, it's better at HN. Perhaps because there is less politics and more stuff where people actually have useful expertise.
I personally don't see a quality hit so much as the general decline in all sites which aren't Facebook and when Google chose to cut their ad revenue by ~40% which forced them to lay off moderators:
https://matt.haughey.com/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15e...
But there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it when it became an echo chamber.
Perhaps all sites like it decline. Slashdot, Kuro5hin and many others are a sad shadow of what they used to be.
Maybe HN in 5-10 years will be pretty sad too.
It's finally dead!
I think that people's memories are flawed enough that the "it used to be so great" arguments are all pretty suspect. I tend to think that it's more like "I used to not be familiar enough to realize x" combined with "I feel like I've seen these arguments before". I have the same feelings about HN plenty of the time.
The other big thing which is hard to under-estimate is how much the web has homogenized over the years. MetaFilter was where you went to find someone's personal blog, collection of cat scans, etc. and people just don't do that the way they used to: instead of blogs that largely happens on Facebook or Instagram (and it's private), individuals are competing with for-profit content mills and SEO spammers, etc.
HN has followed a similar arc – you used to see more personal tech blogs and open source but now that's competing for attention with major companies paying staff to blog as a recruiting effort. Nothing wrong with that but it feels rather different and it changes the values of aggregator sites.
It's amazing what competent moderators (and a $5 signup fee) do to keep the noise down.
I've had an account since late 2000 (yes, 17 years). I still read Metafilter pretty much every day, but I have gotten to where I will not comment, because I recognize that I do not think the "right" way. I've made perhaps two comments in the last 6 years. I frequently will type up a comment but then erase it without clicking save, because I know my thoughts would not be welcome.
For example, when the thread[1] about the Democratic National Convention was underway last summer, I noticed the thread was up for 48 hours, had over 3000 comments, and barely any mention of the resignation of the DNC chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), which had occurred just a few days prior. Go ahead and look through that that thread now (it's long since closed). There are a grand total of four mentions of Schultz's name. That's it, out of more than 3000 total comments. That's really strange, isn't it? The chair of one of the two major US party resigning a few days before their presidential convention is highly unusual and really should garner a bit more conversation, one would think. I'm sure if the chair of the RNC had resigned a few days before the Republican convention, there would have been more than just four comments about it. I was about to point this out, but then I realized that if they wanted to talk about it, they already would have. No one wanted to hear it. The groupthink is just that strong. Shut up and toe the party line (in every sense).
I also see other folks commenting here saying Metafilter's moderation is good and that poor comments are removed, but then I frequently see things like this comment, which is the first response to a post[2] about the recently-leaked climate change report:
> thank god i'll be dead by then. enjoy your eternal life on a cinder, peter thiel
That was allowed to remain (and has multiple "favorites"), because it's apparently okay if the Earth is ruined and everyone dies, as long as some techbro Metafilter doesn't like gets what's coming to him. That's what passes for "quality" on Metafilter these days, along with near-daily posts about how horrible white people are.[3]
And yet I can't look away. I'm still there reading it every day. Don't ask me why.
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away
[2] http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence
[3] http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probabl...
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?q=schultz+r...
Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring.
And full of anxiety and dysfunction masquerading as something else.
Shortly after cortex joined, submissions and comments which did not conform to a very narrow set of socio-political viewpoints started getting censored, and these days there is pretty much no room for controversial content.
Sure, I can see that the site would look highly civil and somewhat interesting to a new user coming from, say, Reddit, but to me the fanatic censorship has turned the place into a boring echo chamber compared to what it used to be.
Eh, I don't think that's really a fair characterization. Yeah, sure, they delete dups, etc., but no one's complaining about that. The mods also delete stuff from an ever-increasing (but ill-defined) list of topics that "Metafilter doesn't do well," which basically means anything that could upset the cool kids or other favored groups.
There's a lot of hype about Metafilter's famed moderation, but all it's really done has caused the site to reach a different failure mode. Rather than discussion, you get a bunch of commenting that's bracketed by passive aggressiveness and anxiety, carefully moderated into an illusion of civility.
That's the standard justification, but it leaves a lot to be desired. For one, IIRC, even brand new topics have been moderated away because the mods judged discussion might not go in the "correct" direct (for lack of a better word). Two, avoiding disagreement to the degree Metafilter does is a recipe for tension and dysfunction.
That's a lot like trying to dispute the effect of Donald Trump's presidency on the US by noting that he has been an American since he was born.