Recently MetaFilter turned 10 years old. I’m pretty much a MeFi lurker, surfing the frontpage feed for interesting nuggets. I don’t even have a MeFi account to participate in the discussion. But I was interested to read in Matt Haughey’s birthday ode that the site was circling the drain in 2003. Somehow it managed to recover and become a force on the web.
There are probably lessons to be learned from MetaFilter as an example of a community that could have petered out (self-immolated?) but somehow managed to leap the chasm into what looks like a sustainable equilibrium. Clearly strong gardening and moderation is a key factor. I think that the academic community has documented that prescription for online communities. Opening up Ask MetaFilter seems like a distinctive action from the maintainers and response from the community.
I wonder if anyone’s done a cross site analysis of some of the more prominent sustainable web discussion communities e.g. The Fray, Flickr, MeFi, Slashdot, etc. This would be especially interesting in comparison with the new breed of “karma and commentary” sites like Digg, Reddit, Stack Overflow and Hacker News, which seem to be explicitly designed to avoid some of the pitfalls of their predecessors.
Speaking of those headline driven karma sites, has anyone thought to force the writing of summaries before submitting an article? I find myself more often clicking on the discussion to get a sense of flamage or utility before clicking the headline. Said feature would enhance these sites immeasurably and provide more grist for voting.