

"I give you the ability to do this because I trust you" - Metafilter Guidelines - resdirector
http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

======
niyazpk
_Due to a few opportunistic members that ignored guidelines in the past, there
is a one-week waiting period after signup, before you are allowed to post a
new question to Ask MetaFilter or a new post to MetaFilter. You can post
comments to MetaFilter and MetaTalk, and answers to Ask MetaFilter right away
though._

Trust works best in small communities. A few bad apples can ruin the whole
experience as the community grows. Within no time the community degrades if it
is just based on trust. A saner way to do this will be to trust people to do
the right thing, but verify that they are not doing anything malicious.

~~~
joshmillard
Heya, I'm one of the other two mods at mefi, along with Matt Haughey and
Jessamyn West. I go by "cortex" over there.

 _A saner way to do this will be to trust people to do the right thing, but
verify that they are not doing anything malicious._

Absolutely. And Mefi's definitely been of a size for a long while now where
trust-but-verify has been an essential part of keeping it working. Our
approach these days is pretty much the same as Matt's approach years back when
it was just him running the place: welcome people in with the benefit of the
doubt but keep an eye out for trouble -- whether of the malicious or the
clueless variety.

And we see both: keeping spam in check (even after the $5 speedbump) is a
daily project, though thankfully not a high-volume one (we probably ban a
couple of spammers/linkfarmers/astroturfers/SEO-marketers a week), and we're
daily working with new users who are varyingly conspicuously not getting how
the place works or what it's for or what the local tone and community
expectations are.

One nice thing is that we've been able to take long experience with dealing
with spammy behavior in particular and use that to build a pretty decent local
toolset to keep a close eye on problem areas with a minimum of effort, so what
spam does actually try to manifest these days tends to get spotted and nixed
with quick turnaround. Which by itself is good news but doesn't say anything
directly about the community, but the implication is important: because we can
get on top of one of the major sorts of bad behavior very responsively, it
leaves us free to continue to let everybody else on the site have the sort of
general community freedom that Matt talks about in those guidelines re: trust.
Because our small administrative team can effectively and promptly corral the
problems that do occur, we don't have to clamp down on the basic posting and
commenting rights of the vast majority of users acting in good faith.

~~~
jessamyn
I'm jessamyn the other other mod. We're lucky in that we're not angling for
selling the place to some giant other site, so we can manage the community we
have and not just push for growth non-stop. Matt is a great guy and has a
pretty light touch with the site: basic trust; "please don't be an asshole";
and then a progressive series of time-outs to try to get people who have a
hard time understanding how the site works to get to still stay there. And
that's it, no cutesy vowel-removal, no hard-line hellbans.

It's really rare that, with the exception of spammers and self-linking
douchebags, we have to forcibly tell someone to leave. I always figure we're
doing something right if people on both sides of whatever argument people are
having think we're favoring the other side.

The really big thing we "do" such as it is, is spend a lot of time in
MetaTalk, the part of the site that is dedicated to community discussion of
etiquette, bugs and sitewide norms. All of our moderator decisions can, if
people want, be discussed there. This can be a pretty under-the-microscope
why-did-you-say-it-this-way sort of thing, but it usually involves a lot of
people talking about why the guidelines are the way they are.

And if you just want to read the site, or answer a question on Ask MetaFilter,
you can ignore the navel gazing part of the site entirely.

My favorite thing about MeFi is the high conversion factor. That is, lots of
people meet online but then go on to become friends or associates or
colleagues or coworkers in real life. I love internet land, but I think
there's got to be crossover between that and the big blue room and we have a
lot of that which I think, in turn, reinforces community trust and cohesion.

------
starnix17
Metafilter's $5 sign-up fee is incredibly smart. I imagine it brings in a
decent amount of income and it really keeps the community top notch.

~~~
sjs382
A $5 registration fee is one of the things that killed kuro5hin.org. God, I
miss k5.

~~~
boredguy8
As a long-time member of K5 with a pretty low uid, I seem to recall there
being some open question about how earlier fundraising efforts were
apportioned.

There were also problems in that the initial setup of k5 was completely user-
driven and user-generated with votes on the mod queue determining what was
good. Early attempts to 'control' the crapflooding issue was to create the
"diary" section, which functioned as license to post anything you wanted. The
$5 fee was a reversal of that approach AND didn't add anything for users
(Scribd?), so people mostly left.

~~~
sien
K5 needed more user generated content. Metafilter posts are links strung
together. They are easier to do.

Another thing that probably drove the decline of K5 was the rise of blogs for
everyone. Why post at K5 when some bunch of goons could remove what you regard
as worth publishing while on your own blog it went live always?

