Don't think so. I really enjoyed my time there and I still hang out there a lot but it's pretty important to me to be doing "library things" and I couldn't do that and devote the time to modding that the job deserved.
Great interview, I enjoyed your insights into separating out the emotional issues from the technology issues and the challenges that UX / UI issues present.
Great, insightful interview. Getting people interested in coming to the library, esp for learning instead of web surfing, is something I wonder about periodically. Local libraries seem to use group activities for young people or rent out conference rooms. One thing going on that you might find interesting is merging libraries with maker spaces. It seems to be getting some results with added benefit of letting people apply their learning in creative, hands-on ways:
In smalltown Vermont libraries, we definitely see this as a win-win as long as there is funding for it. The big deal with hackerspaces is making sure they're accessible to everyone (sometimes tricky but a mandate of what a public library needs to do) and inclusive (so not just technically possible for people to use but welcoming to everyone as much as possible).
We've seen people do this well by combining things that are more like toolshops with things that are more like craft and home ec-type spaces (hey it's all about making things) and also recording/video studios. Anything where pooling community resources makes a lot of sense. The big deal is finding the funding and the right people working there to make it all work within library culture as well as within makerspace culture. The two cultures share a lot but there are some non-overlap areas that need to be negotiated well.
In Vermont there are a lot of older people with deep "knowledge of tools" who can find a great slot for them as they may age out of the work-all-day world but can be great mentors to younger folks who might not otherwise have these options. There's also a lot of tech ed where I am, so kids can learn some of this is school which is excellent as well.
I feel MeFi is a bit allergic to the politics of HN. For example, the recent Google discussion would have gone over very differently there. (I say this without passing judgement, since I tend to ping-pong back and forth between both sites.)
I do in fact love those kinds of MeFi threads, and I credit them with broadening my understanding of the world and helping me become a better feminist. I think many HN users wouldn't feel comfortable in that sort of discussion, however.
HN always felt like a bit of the agora, with the occasional thunderbolt from dang to shut down flagrant shitposting; MeFi seems more civil. People seem more caring there.
There is, right now, a fairy large (for MeFi - something like 1000+ comments at this point IIRC) discussion on that topic on MeFi. I think the moderators have been hard at it given the contentious nature of the topic.
My suspicion? A lot, and most of it from the older Metafilter users who, like me, miss the heyday of the link blog. That's basically what I use HN for.
It took me longer than I'd like to admit to get around to reading it, but that book's an absolute classic if you like the story of how things are built.
* Mary Walton - Car: A Drama of the American Workplace
* Chase Morsey Jr. - The Man Who Saved the V8 (Ford's flathead V8)
* Dealers of Lightning (Xerox PARC)
Related to that last, there's also a great Youtube video on the development of the laser printer. It goes into all sorts of details regarding the design of the laser scanning system, some corporate politics, etc.
Our local library is more like a free internet shop with half the terminals taken up by transients and the other half by kids from the nearby jr. high, playing shoot-em ups. It's impossible to get a terminal. They also have a huge DVD collection that rivals the old blockbusters. Not sure who's checking out books anymore.
People have moral panics about bedbugs in their library or perverts in the library or — you’ll catch a cold from the library, like, whatever the thing is. And there’s a shred of truth to that, but realistically people are afraid of their own public, I think, in a lot of ways. And so being kind of matter-of-fact about the fact that, “Well, these really are who your neighbors are. Like, you can choose just to ignore
that that’s how the world works, but you know, these are all your neighbors, and you see them all at the public library. You’re welcome.
My library is like that as well, except that there is a good "reserve a computer" system that means you just have to wait a bit to get one, and lots of people (including me!) are still regularly checking out books.
I don't think it's valid to prioritize access on the basis of social status, but I do think it's valid to prioritize need before entertainment. If you're playing a game and someone comes along who needs to fill out a job application form and there are no free terminals, you have a moral obligation to give up your seat.
I'd disagree with this. Entertainment is one of the basic human needs. Many games also require a certain amount of time to complete, and some games have severe penalties associated with leaving because it ruins the experience for all the other players.
One way to deal with this situation is to disallow entertainment on certain computers. That way there are always computers available. Still, in the era of everybody having an internet-capable mobile phone, the original premise seems suspect. In fact, the people using library computers to play games seem more likely to be the ones who need it most. Many kids don't have a home PC capable of running the games, whereas pretty much everybody has the internet.
You think that someone who wants to play WoW in a library is of the same importance as someone finishing a highschool assignment in the library because their parents can't afford a computer at home?
Get real.
How about going back to library of alexander and letting the commoners play dice games in it.
> Entertainment is one of the basic human needs.
Ok, if you believe that, then fine. But where is it writ-large that entertainment == playing video games on a free, public library computer? There's lots of entertaining books in the library too. Grab one and sit quietly on a chair if free entertainment is so important to you.
> But where is it writ-large that entertainment == playing video games on a free, public library computer? There's lots of entertaining books in the library too. Grab one and sit quietly on a chair if free entertainment is so important to you.
Who are you to dictate which fun is Proper and Allowed?
No, not WoW. You can leave WoW whenever you want and come back later. It also consumes huge amounts of time, so it's not at all the same.
Dota / LoL / CSgo matches last an hour and have severe penalties for leaving, and they are very popular at internet cafes so I wouldn't be surprised if that was what's being played.
Let's be honest: that highschooler will almost certainly spend as much or more time on Facebook than on their assignment. The poorer the person, the more likely this becomes.
Meanwhile you get to use that extremely-uncommon corner case to penalize everybody else just because you dislike video games.
Those people reserved their computer time like everybody else. You don't get a say in how they use it as long as they're following the rules. It's doubly important to protect a shared public resource: we live in an era where anyone can attack X as immoral, especially when X is harmless.
> No, not WoW. You can leave WoW whenever you want and come back later. It also consumes huge amounts of time, so it's not at all the same.
> Dota / LoL / CSgo matches last an hour and have severe penalties for leaving, and they are very popular at internet cafes so I wouldn't be surprised if that was what's being played.
Perhaps not the most fair comparison, as soon as you get into even casual raiding/mythic+ dungeons.
If kids are in dire need of entertainment, they can read a book or something. There's no obligation to provide people with any form of entertainment they desire.
Playing games and other "frivolous" activities are a primary source of learning computer literacy for children. If you say poor kids can't play games on a public computer, you are putting them at a serious disadvantage compared to their wealthier peers, who are much more likely to have access to computers at home and generally have more computer time and latitude. You are putting an additional burden of restriction on an already disadvantaged group.
Years ago, I sent my mother-in-law our old computer when we upgraded, and I made sure to include kid-friendly software on it so my very poor nieces and nephews would have reason to get on their grandmother's computer when they were at her house. I saw this as a very important element in trying to make sure they didn't wind up on the wrong side of the digital divide. At the time, computers were not nearly as central to modern life as they are currently.
I see where you're going with this. The benefits you're getting at is worthwhile if the software brings those benefits. Most of what kids are doing on games isn't like the other things they'll be doing. The games are just designed to suck up their time if anything making them better at doing that. Lots of their fun apps, esp social media, are the same. Here's a nice article by an educator on how kids don't know how to use computers despite all the time they spend on them:
You'd have to curate the experience to do something that forces them to learn necessary skills. I've seen those skills dressed up as games or something on occasion. Most fun apps don't do that, though.
True, but the vast majority of anything is bad. When I was a kid I spent many years playing an old roleplaying game called Underlight: https://underlight.com/ It sparked an interest in creative writing.
The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.
And you posit that their computer literacy will go up if we start throwing them off the public computers so they can't even use Facebook and Youtube?
Your argument that they aren't so hot currently in no way rebuts my assertion that if you start throwing poor kids off the internet at public libraries they will be left even further behind than they already are currently.
My argument isn't against throwing them off the Internet: it's against keeping them on things that don't develop the improvements in thinking or skill we want. I deal with the masses on a daily basis. Most of them don't gain serious skills by screwing around with the popular tech. It's a distraction preventing that. Most of them that did get skills did so by ignoring that in favor of putting time and work in. It was usually drudgery but sometimes a mix of that and fun. I see a small percentage of people on computers at the local library doing those things.
I was arguing against simply throwing kids off of public computers willy nilly. I was not advocating actively promoting the pursuit of such activities. There is a difference.
It's a different format from Reddit though — Reddit is a service where anyone can make their own subreddit, MeFi consists of a few sites created by the administrators. MeFi also doesn't have downvotes, algorithmic filtering for "hot" results, stuff like that.
Unfortunately you are several years too late. The site and community used to be amazing when Matt and Jessamyn ran the show, but went it started going downhill after Josh Millard took over and is now a shadow of its former self.
Huh? I've been hanging around Metafilter for many years. There have been changes since it ran on a box under Matt's desk, but "used to be amazing" to "going downhill"? Not seeing it. It's still one of the most civil places around.
It is very civil. But that's because it's an echo chamber where everyone must have the same views.
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.
The site has always skewed left of center for as long as I can remember. But you don't even need to go that far to the right to reach dissent. The shift towards identity politics over the past 10(?) years has been pretty insufferable.
I know some people have avoided the blue for a number of years and others have given up on the site altogether.
Mefi has always been to the left, everyone knows it. Just because it doesn't align your your politics doesn't make it bad. Probably does you good to get out of your own bubble.
I've lurked there for years, precisely as an antidote to my own bubble. Probably in part because of Jessamyn's presence, it was a good proxy for well-educated, New England-style liberalism, with a sprinkle of granola. The Steven & Elyse Keatons as foil to my inner Alex P. Keaton.
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 always been to the left, which has suited me pretty well, better than some of the glibertarian and technoutopian edges of HN. But I think the moderation had a lighter hand and less of a political slant in the past. And it used to be easier to make an argument against the grain and get it engaged on its merits (on top of the usual clever mockery and insults).
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.
>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.
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.
Sure, that's very true about it being to the left. But there was more dissent in the past and perhaps with fewer people who actually knew and respected each other there was better discussion.
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.
metafilter used to have left slant but a degree of diversity. i specifically recall ironhands(? or similar) as a respected conservative commenter. those days are long, long gone. having the wrong opinion gets you run out.
IronMouth I think? I don't mod there anymore and haven't in a while but I still see some of the respected conservative commenters there but fewer than in the past.
Can't recall, but maybe? We have people all over the map in terms of conservatism in a fiscal sense (some but not many Libertarians, in the US sense) but socially it's a pretty liberal place, so it depends what the overlap is between those things for a lot of people.
MeFi does tend to paint places such as HN with a broad brush, but such opinions should also cause some soul-searching in HN when the opportunity arises.
You're the second person I've heard make that claim but I don't think it's anywhere near as accepted as you're presenting it.
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:
There has been no decline in quality and blaming cortex is utter bullshit. My guess is that the haters never liked mefi in the first place and are abusing the change in management to attack the site.
> there are people commenting who say they have visited the site for a decade and got bored of it
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.
I think it's more likely that we're seeing the average drift upwards and a non-trivial percentage of the community is less involved than they were in the earlier days of the web, so the active community isn't as varied as it used to be.
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.
I could probably be convinced that a bit of decline has occurred (though, its a different world with some different priorities/urgencies, too), but "shadow of its former self" massively overstates it IMO.
I'm skeptical "the active MetaFilter community" is actually representative of "the MetaFilter community." It seems like is just the fraction who likes or at least tolerates the way it is now.
Count me as part of the strange group that is dismayed at the quality but for some reason I can't fully explain, keeps showing up.
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.
FYI, the political threads during the American election tended to be very fast moving and there was a new thread every day - so there was plenty of discussion of her resignation, but it was mostly done before the thread you were in.
I recall looking around at the time but didn't see anything. The most recent thread was already done when it happened, and then the convention one was opened with pretty much no mention of it at all. Even now I can't find any substantial discussion of it.[1] It seemed to happen between threads and then the topic was just strangely ignored. I just can't imagine it would be so quiet if the RNC chair had resigned and the R convention was underway. At the time it felt like it came under the same bucket as the mod warning at the top of the convention thread about not "re-litigating the primaries" ... don't talk about it!
Metafilter has certainly alienated a lot of its community. You can see it whenever it comes up, in a forum outside of Metafilter. Some of its old users show up and often don't have nice things to say. I used to read it (more as a lurker), and remember noticing one day that many of the fun and interesting users had left (verified by checking accounts that I'd remembered). Eventually I left too, after I realized it wasn't a positive thing anymore.
What was once an open place is now very, very constrained. The acceptable range of viewpoints has ratcheted into a narrower and narrower consensus, to the point where the discussions are boring and you have to be careful to not make them interesting. The viewpoint racheting alienated a lot of people from the site who used to feel like they were part of the community.
So true! Controversial topics and confrontation are avoided at all costs. So from one side metafilter it is very civil and quiet, but from the other side is quite uninspired and dull.
Metafilter is like the American suburbs of the internet. Nice and tidy, but boring.
Maybe its just me, but back in the day (early 2000s) we used to have raucous (but still very civil) discussions about controversial topics, with little or no moderator interference.
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.
To put it another way, the mods are modding. They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons. That's what makes it great and better than most of Reddit on any given day. That modding affects everyone. I had a comment deleted just last week: I was too chatty on an Ask Metafilter response and bloop, away it went.
> They're modding out reposts. Repetitiveness. Copypasta. The same-old rehashes. Trolls. Vitriol. Attacks on other users. Rule violations. Pile-ons.
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.
What you call "topics Metafilter doesn't do well" I call "same-old rehashes." They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug.
> They're topics the world doesn't do well. It's a feature of the site, not a bug.
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 just your opinion, which not everyone will share, and it is rather gauche to say it here. It is possible to compliment mefi on HN without insulting HN in the process.
> It doesn't believe in absolute "free speech" like Reddit or HN. The moderators will tell you to cut it out.
HN absolutely moderates certain speech, and every subreddit is different - I'm a mod on one, and I absolutely do not hesitate to swing the hammer when necessary.
