>I got an account on Metafilter back in '08 and closed it in '15 because it became devastatingly political. It was like a cliff face, it went from a generous and unrestrained community to total one-sided 'my way or no way' politics.

Yes. People who haven't heard of Metafilter don't get how, at one time, it was the best of Reddit and Hacker News in one place.

It really destroyed itself because users (and, more importantly, the mods behind the scenes) developed a hivemind that exceeds anything out there other than the likes of /r/politics (no, kids, HN's "hivemind" is nothing of the sort in comparison) in its intensity to erase anyone who commits wrongthink. I hope Ms. West understands how catastrophic the consequences were.

Metafilter is the only community that I've seen that had "agree with the hivemind" as an explicit rule! I don't know whether it still operates this way, but for a very long time it ran with a "read the room" rule, which meant that disagreeing with the others in a thread was a mute/banworthy offense. So of course a site monoculture would develop under those circumstances...

There's an expectation on MeFi that people's lived experience trumps people's hot takes.

Whereas in a lot of communities, HN included, a majority viewpoint, even if it reflects a very shallow understanding, can be immensely popular.

To some extent that's just bike-shedding, and maybe that's okay on HN, but Metafilter covers a wider range of topics, and handles a lot of them well.

You should check out the subreddit rules for r/conservative.

Yeah for sure. Reddit's hivemind is mostly based on automod bots and two or three mods manually scanning & banning everything. MeFi was open and a pleasing place to hang out and tease out new ideas. Then the politics hit and the open-and-friendly feedback loop turned into a recursive folding inwards into one political view, for owner, mods (except jessamyn who didn't get into it) and commenters.

It wasn't just an automod bot banning keywords or your comments getting shadowbanned. You could say what you wanted and the people (entire user base and owners) would figure out the best way to reinforce their recursive implosion and completely destroy you and whatever point you were trying to say. Kind of impressive in a mechanical sense, and you know, horrible to participate in.

Looks way better than that now.

> Then the politics hit and the open-and-friendly feedback loop turned into a recursive folding inwards into one political view, for owner, mods (except jessamyn who didn't get into it) and commenters.

The funny thing is that I vaguely thought Ms. West was the owner, or at least ran things, so to hear that she's only now taken over is surprising. Certainly she was for years the closest thing Metafilter had to a public face.

>It wasn't just an automod bot banning keywords or your comments getting shadowbanned. You could say what you wanted and the people (entire user base and owners) would figure out the best way to reinforce their recursive implosion and completely destroy you and whatever point you were trying to say. Kind of impressive in a mechanical sense, and you know, horrible to participate in.

Yes; the shunning was entirely people-driven.

At least with Reddit, it's possible to find another subreddit if you don't like /r/politics. With MeFi, the only alternatives are off the site entirely. I never used my MeFi account much despite its age because I could see early on the trends that only accelerated as the years passed, so it's no surprise (but still sad, given the site's venerable history) to see that many, many others with much more participation decided to go off the site.

As unhappy as I was as a user of MetaFilter, this is a bad characterization. "Read the room," as practiced on MF, means that you can't storm into a thread with your guns blazing and make it all about you and your viewpoint by responding to everyone else in the thread and dominate by sheer volume of comments. Make your viewpoint known, but don't keep insisting that it deserves a response from others. Basically, don't be the asshole party guest who barges in and demands to be the center of attention. Compared to the rest of the internet, that is the mildest imaginable social norm.

I thought that for a long time, until I actually posted a fairly normal (for Europe) opinion from outside the spectrum of US centre-left thought and had it instantly deleted. Then I realised what appeared to be an unusually well behaved internet community is (was?) probably just a very strictly policed echo chamber.

Let's be honest - you're describing how it was in the before times. Once the most aggrieved people in the universe began holding sway, it devolved into a place where every thoughtful disagreement became a flashpoint.

I only left (err, closed my always-open browser tab) a few months ago, after reading through the discussion about the user survey. The number of comments saying, basically, “anyone who thinks the site changed for the worse is just a [insert right wing caricature here]” horrified me yet, by that point, was completely unsurprising. But after reading a few comments from people who had left the site, I finally realized that I could do the same, and I’d probably be happier for it.

I know what you mean - for awhile after 2016 you couldn't say anything remotely progressive without having your comments flagged by overzealous Clinton-or-nobody Dems. I almost left but I stuck around and it's gotten better. The no-U.S.-politics option made things easier.

Metafilter was the place I learned to be civil online, and that just makes the current state of things all the more devastating.

Yeah my interest in MeFi withered at that time as well. But not because I disagreed with those particular politics (because I don't) but because it suddenly started feeling like an annoyingly US-first type of community.

As Americans argue between each other, they also have a way of making it all sound like it is all about themselves and their world.