I joined Metafilter in 2002, and although I no longer use it as my main source of content discovery, I do love to go back now and again. It's always been a top notch community, and if you haven't ever spent some time on the site, I highly recommend it.

I still read it and scan through maybe five comment threads a week for insightful perspectives, but I no longer participate because the community is toxic and mind-killing these days. To me, at any rate.

Edit: IB4, "Metafilter: Toxic and mind-killing, these days."

Do you mind explaining why you think so? That's a pretty surprising perspective; the community often has intelligent discussions about a range of topics.

There came a point around 2010 where too many posts and threads were being dominated by militant nitpicking feminists, with an occupying force of transgendered cat ladies.

I have no dog in the feminism fight but metafilter quickly devolved from a community garden into a special interest forum concerning matters of the vagina.

I just peeked at the top few articles on main page for nostalgia's sake. Already I see an article concerning toxic masculinity, and another of a game exploring rape trauma. Not much has changed.

Yes it does, as long as the discussion doesn't veer into political questions, which can happen in surprising and dismaying ways at times.

But I find that to be true of every online forum I can think of, HN is no different.

No, explicit personal attacks are generally frowned on, here.

I haven't found that to be generally acceptable on Metafilter, but again, I haven't really frequented since the mathowie days.

That was a long time ago.