Metafilter struggling
2014-05-19 21:40:50.014789+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
Over the years I have stolen the occasional link from Metafilter, and several of the luminaries there were early members of the blog community and nice people. I have warm fuzzies about the site, even if I only signed up to participate in that community fairly recently.
State of MetaFilter announces that:
While MetaFilter approaches 15 years of being alive and kicking, the overall website saw steady growth for the first 13 of those years. A year and a half ago, we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates. ...
and as a result they'll be laying off 3 moderators.
eli neiburger @ulotrichous observed:
If MetaFilter has layoffs because Google can't distinguish it from garbage, then Google is intentionally building an empire made of garbage.
Searching on Google has become an exercise in frustration. Info on food stuff leads to the big spammy link farms, allrecipes.com, Food Network, etcetera. Programming to similarly spammy and worthless resources, from W3Schools to Stack Exchange.
So there are a couple of kind of scary net culture things here that I'm not sure how to unwrap. Combined with net neutrality, it suggests that the web is going to head the direction of broadcast TV, off to the lowest common denominator.