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A comment on Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN?.

Re:Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN? by pg on Thursday February 05, 2009 @12:46PM (#468339)
I'm pretty sure this is not the answer. Metafilter does this, and I would not want the kind of culture they have there. What's prized there is sounding clever, and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5 fee was partly responsible-- if people were more willing to pay $5 to hear themselves talk than to e.g. answer a question someone had asked.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN? by bd on Thursday February 05, 2009 @01:45PM (#468462)
Wow, that's rather harsh. You must had some really bad luck with Metafilter, or it must have had changed significantly since I frequented it more often.

I remember Ask Metafilter as an excellent resource for questions on many topics with many thoughtful responses (especially from people that knew a lot about what was being asked [1], not just the internet-usual - "I'm clever so I think X is the answer").

Indeed, it was usually worth to start your search on some particular problem on Ask Metafilter before turning to more general Google search.

Metafilter also has much less transient feeling than HN. There is a strong culture of not repeating yourself, so people detect duplicates and link to previous instances of similar questions/answers.

This leads to answers have more "archival" feeling to them. You know that it's worth to spend a lot of time on your answer, because if anybody in the future will ask a similar question, there is a very high chance that somebody from the community will remember your answer and link to it.

[1] As an example, here is Steven Wozniak paying $5 just to post one comment:

http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-rite#...

Or Adam Savage looking for inspiration for the MythBusters episodes:

http://ask.metafilter.com/55694/Old-west-Mythbusters

http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone-hangs-...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN? by gojomo on Thursday February 05, 2009 @01:09PM (#468397)
Even before the token fee, MetaFilter's culture valued witticisms and welcomed contributions whose value was primarily entertainment. So I doubt the fee is responsible, given that the behavior was in the founding ethos. The fee may have prevented that clever-competition from becoming as coarse as it has become elsewhere.
[ Parent | on HN ]