8 votes

Life lessons from a lifestyle business - An interview with Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter

2 comments

  1. LikeAFox
    Link
    I haven't been participating on tildes very much for the past couple months, but a couple of posts on reddit this week had me thinking about the community here, why I haven't been checking in very...

    I haven't been participating on tildes very much for the past couple months, but a couple of posts on reddit this week had me thinking about the community here, why I haven't been checking in very much, and the primordial ooze from which sites like reddit and tildes sprung. I was a user of metafilter for a number of years, and still check in there at least several times a month - often finding myself frustrated that the community seems to have stagnated and become more dominated by an ever smaller number of legacy users (especially on the blue). I recalled a keynote talk by the sites' founder Matt Haughey on the challenges of balancing growth and community - which I did not find - but this 2016 interview with him seems to cover much of the same ground.

    5 votes
  2. moriarty
    Link
    While his journey was pretty interesting, what really hit home for me is this -

    While his journey was pretty interesting, what really hit home for me is this -

    Here’s another thing: community doesn’t scale very well. There’s a high human cost of running community sites. That’s what I realized myself. I was depressed and feeling overwhelmed and terrible and in therapy and every day I was just combing through the muck. [...]
    It would have all the problems Reddit has: terrible people controlling the conversation. It’s just really hard to run a human-curated anything at scale. I think that’s why I never wanted to do anything at scale.

    4 votes