Does MetaFilter's $5 entry fee succeed in enforcing good behaviour? (also, MetaFilter is small)

deepdeeppuddle
2025-02-17T17:50:37Z

I joined MetaFilter in 2016, but I've only ever posted a handful of things there and I've browsed the site very little. I always thought it was a fantastic idea to charge $5 to join. It seems like a great way to counteract ban evasion and prevent people from trolling or behaving badly.

Does this idea that sounds great to me in theory work in practice? MetaFilter seems cool, but my experience with the site is shallow. So, I don't really know.

I'm also curious about people's thoughts and experiences with MetaFilter, perceived differences and similarities with Tildes, and theories about what makes social media and forums and online communities good or bad in general.

Also: wow, while I was writing this, I looked up how big MetaFilter is and it's tiny! This site compiles statistics. Note this important definition:

Active users means users who made at least one comment or post on the selected site in the given month.

There have only been around 2,800 to 2,900 monthly active users for the past year. It's been about 3,000 to 4,000 for the past 5 years. And the absolute peak was January 2011 with 8,100 active users.

The number of users who have ever posted anything to the site is a little less than 48,000.

A stats page from 2013 has more info:

about 62,500 accounts existed at that time (this means at least 14,500 people have paid $5 for an account and have never posted anything)

about 39,400 people visited the site while logged into their account that year

there were 81.7 million unique visitors to the site that year

the site got 231.4 million pageviews that year

That is wild. I had no idea the number of readers was so much astronomically larger than the number of writers. 39,400 writers (tops!) to 81.7 million readers is crazy.

I'm sad that MetaFilter is so small, has always been small, and seems to be dwindling over the last 12 years. I would have guessed that it had 100,000 monthly active users or 1 million, not 2,900.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tech/1m2a/does_metafilters_5_entry_fee_succeed_in_enforcing_good_behaviour_also_metafilter_is_small

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