> my initial impression is that the design feels outdated and I can't quickly identify how the site works or the value it provides

Part of the problem is that you're right, identifying the value it provides isn't a quick process, and it's less because of design problems and more because the kind of value it provides needs longer periods of evaluation to identify.

It can take more than a casual visit or two to run across the illuminating post or comment that's basically a small dissertation where someone drops the knowledge.

And it will probably take a little bit before someone offers to just send you some hardware they're not using, just because you expressed an interest in something like it.

Some examples that might be more amenable to evaluation:

* This went viral in January:

"Holy cow! 14 minutes to solve the back of the card that has been bugging my family for 20 years! That is amazing!"

http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramb... http://mashable.com/2014/01/21/internet-grandma-mystery/

* This is completely non-viral a system administration question I asked a few years ago in a couple of different forums:

http://ask.metafilter.com/143963/Trouble-setting-up-printing...

Within a half hour on AskMeFi, someone picked out the answer to my problem.

It's probably notable that if you search for the exact title to my question (but not in quotes), you will get the SuperUser/StackExchange answer first in Google results (AskMe second). I did post the answer a Metafilter user helped me pull together on SU, so it's got the same content, but that's not where I got help.

It is one of the better link blogs on the web. I've been reading it since 2005? and I gave them my $5 back in 2008. Prior to the rise of the fractal advice subreddits, askmetafilter was (and probably still remains) one of the best general purpose advice forums on the web.

The point is, it has an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio and it's a damned shame it's getting penalized for it.

Really? I've had several links posted to metafilter, in every instance the comment thread was full of petty, small minded nagging. Seems like just another 'intellectual' echo chamber to me.

>petty, small minded nagging

I think you'll find this to be a facet of every forum or comment box ever made available on the internet :).

>Seems like just another 'intellectual' echo chamber to me.

Are big words bad? What's 'intellectual' about it?

I remember a few years ago when I didn’t know MetaFiler, I often left MetaFilter pretty quickly when it showed up in search results because it looks like one of these spammy link aggregator websites. (I had the same initial hurdle with StackOverflow because I thought it was similar to Yahoo Answers). Maybe this is a common behavior among new visitors and Google lowered some bounce rate threshold?

Given the leaked Google Rating Guidelines file, Metafilter's design, and running multiple blended Adsense units, it would be marked as spam when manually reviewed.

Yes, I believe it's possible that bounce rate is a factor. I'd guess Google uses bounce rate as one factor in determining user interest in the target link.

Thus something like a dated design might have an impact on search ranking.

Can you use hacker news? Because it is not hugely dissimilar.