MetaFilter

1. The introduction of favs. Favs encourage superficial short posts. Prior to favs, posts stood or fell based on participation and one-on-one interaction. Now we are "hot-or-not" and responding not just to one another but the invisible "like" crowd. It leads to shorter and less interesting comments.

2. Over moderation. The moderation at MeFi has calmed things down but led to an atmosphere not unlike being in an institution. It stifles creativity. MeFi is calmer than before but also lost its edge and energy. MeFi has become gentrified.

3. Repeats. Much of the same stuff keeps showing up. There used to be a memory where posters would link to prior discussions but even that is less common.

4. Closed license. This is a personal pet peeve but MeFi has never included an *option* (OPTION) in the profile menu for posts to have *alternative* licensing such as Creative Commons. To clarify, by default all posts are regular copyright but there exists the smallest nudge to give users the option to post under other license. YouTube and many other services do this. MeFi is behind the times and has said they don't plan on changing for whatever reason (though I can guess saying so here might lead to this post being removed).

6. Personal politics. I'm somewhat guilty of this on the topic of global warming, but certain topics get so much repeated coverage I'm sick of wading through these topics daily. I can't even say which ones because..

7. Political correctness. All of the above have converged to create a toxic level of political correctness. Every comment is being tightly scrutinized for the most extreme views by anyone with a trigger - of which more and more keep showing up. The nanny patrol and finger waggers are stifling, emboldened by the tight moderation creating ever more restrictive norms of behavior. "Outrageism" is awful.

8. Competition. MeFi was for a time a core place of creative individuals in the early days of blogging. The changing nature of blogging and competition (Reddit etc) has made it less essential. Not to say any other site is perfect.

9. Money. Despite having a strong community, it needs to raise money (voluntarily) to pay for moderators. Something is wrong. Any strong community should be able to manage itself by way of volunteers. See Wikipedia which is mostly self-moderating through volunteers by way of rules (not at the level of WMF). And if that doesn't work it's probably being over-moderated for its own good, or is a poorly managed resource. Create a Wiki, create admin accounts, create a "Constitution" and rules of procedure and let the community handle shit. See also traffic circles vs stop lights.

10. Too many people. It used to be threads could be read top to bottom but it's now become an ocean of comments. Who has time to read all this? Why should I bother contributing to such an ocean of stuff? There are too many users posting. The scale is breaking down the sites small group atmosphere and making it more like a Yahoo! News comments section.

1. Metafilter's genius is to allow 1 post per day. A similar system could be used in the comments section. It would encourage longer and more thoughtful posts. Not sure if 1 is the right number. Or limit to 1 comment every X minutes. Or X comments per day. etc..

2. Keep the favs but make them invisible, in effect turn them into personal bookmarks. Allow the bookmarks to be sorted into categories with comments so users can keep a better memory of the site.

3. MeFi is best of the web. Is the post really "best of the web" or something else. Move the "something else" posts to another forum.