MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-and-answer subsite Ask MetaFilter. The site has eight paid staff members as of December 2021, including the owner. MetaFilter has about 12,000 active members as of early 2011.
Community
MetaFilter was founded by Matthew Haughey in 1999. Haughey wrote the software for the site himself, using Macromedia ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server. The earliest Front Page Post (FPP), concerning cats in scanners and the resulting pictures, debuted on July 14, 1999.
From its early beginnings as a small community of webloggers who traded links, the weblog now enjoys international popularity. Members are permitted to make one post to the front page per day, which must feature at least one link. Members may then comment on these posts.
Although membership was initially free and unrestricted, growing membership forced frequent extended closures of new-member signup. On November 18, 2004, Haughey reopened signups, but with a US$5 life-time membership fee. According to Time magazine in 2009, this fee had kept the site "remarkably free of trolls, griefers and other anonymous jerks", yielding a "public-spirited flavor of a small town or good university". Although the number of registrations has topped 100,000, a design flaw in the counting process means that it counts users who abandoned the signup process mid-way; the actual number of posters is smaller, at around 38,700 as of October 2008.
MetaFilter has developed a fairly stable community with a variety of in-jokes. Members regularly gather for meetups in cities around the world, and there are numerous websites with strong connections to MetaFilter members and subgroups, including MetaChat and MonkeyFilter, the latter getting its start during the period when MetaFilter memberships were closed. Readers can mark other users' comments as a favorite, and commenters derive pride from how many times they have been "favorited".
MetaFilter was included in Times 50 Best Websites 2009 feature.
At SXSW 2011, Haughey gave a talk in which he noted that MetaFilter had about 125,000 user accounts, of which 12,000 are active.
In November 2012, MetaFilter experienced a huge drop of traffic due to the Google Panda search update; specifically, the Ask MetaFilter page lost 40% of its traffic. This made MetaFilter overnight lose money and led to the letting go of multiple paid moderators.
In July 2017, the ownership of MetaFilter was transferred from Matthew Haughey to long-time moderator Josh Millard.
In June 2018 the site was losing US$8,000 per month but rebounded with new sources of ad revenue and increased member contributions.
In May 2022, the ownership of MetaFilter was transferred to Jessamyn West, who had been MetaFilter's first volunteer and first employee. Additionally, a Steering Committee of community members was proposed in March and elected in August.
Content
MetaFilter's name derives from the idea that weblogs "filter" the "best of the web", and MetaFilter posts would be the best of the best. Posters are presumed responsible for selecting only the most interesting or novel websites to link, and users' reputations are largely determined by overall posting quality. Half-baked posts, self-promotion, open-ended questions, and other fare common on other community sites and internet forums are strongly discouraged at MetaFilter. Posts must contain a link, and the site linked must be of high quality.
Best of the Web
What gets posted is diverse. Online art, award-winning web design, photography galleries, and the like fit into a cool site of the day theme that is highly prized but often generates scant discussion. Flash games and funny online movies also appear. Net and blog culture discussions also percolate through MetaFilter, reflecting its early connections with Blogger, but this is becoming less common as membership expands.