Glad We're Not MetaFilter

[Muirium]

They're in trouble. Matt Haughey has a nice writeup about it here:

https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0

Basically, MetaFilter relies completely on Google for traffic and income, and the last few years Google's been really fucking around with them. What a surprise. As Marco Arment says, don't expect any better from a monopolist. Even when, for whatever reason, everyone else does.

Anyway, this bit made me think of how we deal with comment spam on DT:

Google calling links found on MetaFilter “inorganic” is troubling. We have a staff of six full-time moderators in five timezones throughout the world (two are in Europe) to make sure zero spam ends up on the site. We have a variety of internal tools that help us track all spam down: views of all activity by new users that contain links and lists of comments added to old questions that had a link in them (two patterns we found comment spammers trying in the past). Moderators scan every new user of the site looking for telltale signs of a possible spammer and we have ways of marking potentially problematic accounts behind-the-scenes that give us additional view of their activity on the site later on. Those views are checked every few hours and when we occasionally find people posting comment spam, we remove it and ban the accounts immediately. We also have a robust flagging system used by members of the site so they can alert us instantly when spotted and we take the same actions on spammy additions. We have a total of over ten million comments across on all our sites combined and we spend so much time and energy tracking the few problem comments down that I would be hard-pressed to find even a single public comment that could be considered comment spam.

Scale is probably the main thing keeping this at bay, here at DT. But am I glad we don't rely on Google for cash. The healthiest community is the one that funds itself.

[webwit]

We don't need that by design. When I went to the notary to discuss what it takes to start a club, she mentioned that nowadays almost no new clubs are started. And with club, I mean like an amateur football or stamp collector's club, not for profit. Of all their business, maybe one or two new clubs each year. Internet clubs? None. This is interesting because many new social communities arise on the Internet, not restricted by locality. The problem is everybody wants to make money on the Internet, even with hobby. This is exactly what deskthority was designed not to be. I also want to make money. But with my job. And when my job is done, I want leisure, and in our case, to enjoy a keyboard hobby. When dealing with a hobby, you don't want to worry about the money, or about google, or about advertising. It defeats the purpose of the hobby, where you obsess over something just because you can. We can give those things the finger and do what we want.

[sth]

We don't need that by design. When I went to the notary to discuss what it takes to start a club, she mentioned that nowadays almost no new clubs are started. And with club, I mean like an amateur football or stamp collector's club, not for profit. Of all their business, maybe one or two new clubs each year. Internet clubs? None. This is interesting because many new social communities arise on the Internet, not restricted by locality. The problem is everybody wants to make money on the Internet, even with hobby. This is exactly what deskthority was designed not to be. I also want to make money. But with my job. And when my job is done, I want leisure, and in our case, to enjoy a keyboard hobby. When dealing with a hobby, you don't want to worry about the money, or about google, or about advertising. It defeats the purpose of the hobby, where you obsess over something just because you can. We can give those things the finger and do what we want.

this is precisely why i believe deskthority to be the best blogging platform out there.