Thanks for pointing this out (article submitter here). People make points in other comments about MetaFilter's business strategy, varied content, or grousing about the moderation. Your comment instead emphasizes the positive about how how MetaFIlter is one of the longest running online communities and it is trying to sustain itself. One comment I saw on MetaFilter compared these donations to the end of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
http://metatalk.metafilter.com...
I've never been a MetaFilter member. Nor have I paid much attention to it anytime recently other than seeing stories on it now and then found by whatever random process. But a couple months ago I added it to my list of interesting news sites. Every day it has some interesting and generally pleasant (non-trollish) discussions linked to on the main page as the best of the discussions. I can see the value in that and the work that goes into it. As I wrote to someone just before hearing this news, Slashdot is like the discussions I had in college around the computer center and the engineering buildings; MetaFilter is like the more randomly varied discussions I had in the dorm hallways, dining halls, and maybe the social science buildings.
Having recently "discovered" this jewel that reminds me of the better part of what the internet was in the late 1990s, it is sad to see it struggling. Slashdot is a community I have long enjoyed and participated in, and itself may itself be facing some of the same general issues. It's a bit surprising to me to see in some of the comment here a lack of acknowledgement of the parallels. Why do they think "Beta" is being pushed? People may say MetaFilter is not "original" content like a news articles. Nonetheless, I feel discussions about new articles are themselves important content. I read Slashdot not so much for the articles but for the discussions which often point out how the articles are wrong or misleading, or add lots of details to the articles, or put the articles into a broader context. Discussion has its own value, both for participants and for lurkers. I don't know if it is true, but I did find interesting the speculative comment by someone that the fall in traffic could reflect that maybe Google does not want competition with its own Google+?
Another story has a link to a video where Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, explains the size of the site and the moderation infrastructure and its history:
http://newstorystudio.com/why-...
http://vimeo.com/21043675
Matt sounds like someone who really cares about his community, sort of like a town mayor (and a founder who never "sold off" from the early internet days, unlike Slashdot getting sold off to various new owners). Guestimating from their staff size and their revenue loss and member base (on the order of 10,000 active members), it must be take at least US$20K - US$40K a month to keep that community humming along for staffing costs (mostly for moderation I would think)? Or guessing on the order of about US$2 to US$5 per active member per month? Computers and bandwidth for hosting used to cost something significant, but nowadays for a text-mostly site I would not think those matter much?
It seems to me that the financing of all this has been for the past few years mostly that people not in the community (non-posters) drive by via Google and generate ad revenue, and that revenue then supports the community. The people who actively participate in the community must be a much smaller percentage of views. It looks like with MetaFilter, the people who funded the community were not the people who actually inhabited the social process of it.
That reminds me a bit of where I live in the Adirondack Park. Much of the money coming into the community is from summer tourists or summer residents when the population swells 5X or so during the summer. But these tourists and summer residents are not usually people who make up the volunteer firefighters, the emergency ambulance squad, the boards of various non-profits, or the store owners and most of the other workers. These are all groups the summer visitors rely on though. My local community would be a financial basket case fairly soon if, like with MetaFilter, the "summer people" stopped coming. And yet there are various social distinctions and resentments all around related to social class, rich/poor divides, political views, and so on. The two groups eye each other warily because they have different interests and outlooks. (The local social dynamics are even more complex than that, including retirees sometimes moving full-time to the area after being summer residents, so this is a simplification.)
People can say that MetaFilter is just another discussion site, but that misses the point. MetaFilter is another community of people, the same way that small towns that dot the US landscape are communities. There is a lot of value to the people in the community that the community exists for them and that it persists. The community relationships and history are in that sense unique to the people involved. But like my physical community, MetaFilter is in trouble if the "summer people" stop coming -- unless it can figure out a different strategy for funding itself, or getting the basic moderation tasks done by volunteers, or if it scales back services painfully (which it just did, hopefully not to the point where people move to the big cities of Facebook or Google+ though). I've seen several internet communities fade away during the past decade. It generally has been a painful experience for many. Slashdot itself has has struggles with this, and the new controversial push to "Beta" to increase ad revenues is part of that struggle.
Slashdot has a very different model of moderation and "free speech" than MetaFilter, which has its pros and cons. I'd expect it might be cheaper to operate Slashdot than MetaFilter in that sense? To work from the "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exhanged, Planned, Theft" perspective I've written about, it seems that MetaFilter's moderators (paid staff) work in the "exchange" economy, whereas Slashdot's moderators (site members) mostly work in the "gift" economy. That is a big difference in scalability. There are certainly many moderated mailing lists out there, so volunteer moderation is nothing new. But Slashdot came up with a workable system for the web (including meta-moderation) and more importantly got the community to actually use it well. It is not clear if some new community could succeed the same way because Slashdot got its critical mass of people by being in the right place in the right time in the early years of the web.
Still, any large community of humans like a small town tends to have things like taxes (for a "planned" economy enforced ultimately at the Sherrif's gunpoint), elected or affirmed governance who spends those taxes on democratically planned projects, and some paid staff to do routine-but-essential work like road repair & garbage collection & animal control & so on (and for some towns, policing if not done by the county or state). Slashdot has a budget no doubt (not sure what it is or what it goes towards). Both MetaFilter and Slashdot are small towns in that sense (thousands of participants). They are both small towns that have survived for over a decade across big shifts in the internet, which means they are something special as far as being healthy communities (even with problems). It is not unreasonable for such small towns to need to fund themselves somehow. But the question is how? Or, will they just be replaced by something else as no longer being economically viable?
And if so, what will replace such communities? Paul Jones has his #noemail campaign to move to social media. But if not email, as I pointed out to him early on, so many other social media options people actually chose seem to entail moving to big providers like Facebook or Google and a loss of local control and local archives. I suggested we need a decentralized social semantic desktop if we were to move beyond email. His blog on "noemail":
http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog...
But in any case, communities are not software, nor are they the artifacts of communities (like archived discussion posts). Clay Shirky writes about how hard it is to write software for communities here:
http://www.shirky.com/writings...
"Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse."
My wife has worked towards some other FOSS social software (Rakontu), and I have my ideas about a FOSS "Pointrel/Twirlip Social Semantic Desktop & Public Intelligence Platform". So, I've been thinking about what it takes nowadays to make an economic success of such ventures. Discussion about MetaFilter and the web has been illuminating in that regard. I'm glad to see the MetaFilter community trying to sustain itself somehow. I can hope the Slashdot community could do the same if it had to.
Because what is the alternative to essentially voluntary communities with some degree of self-determination with control over their own software and content? There was a time in the USA when there were lots of small corner stores like cafes and bookstores and barber shops and five-and-dime stores which acted as community centers as well as what they sold. Then came shopping malls (Facebook and Google+?) and these small stores mostly went under or at least lost so much traffic their community value diminished. But the big malls full of national chains (or now Walmart everywhere) do not fulfill the same extra social functions the small stores did (including just running into neighbors going into or out of local stores and chatting with them).
And further, the big stores, being large zones of private property, became protest-free areas, because being surrounded by big parking lots they were very different than small stores with public sidewalks in front of them. Several comments to this article are by people who are afraid to put various content on their web sites for fear of losing Adsense accounts and related revenue or who felt they had to take down such content in response to email from Google. What would they do if the complaints from Google Adsense became about political content on their site or links to political sites? If we want a "free" web, paradoxically do we have to pay for it (either in money or volunteer time or perhaps even in taxes)?