Metafilter is great at stopping spammers and obvious belligerents. It is very poor at keeping out thankless community-ruiners (the “hobby revolutionaries” from the article.) They burnt out mathowie and are currently sniping at cortex for refusing to turn the community over to them (presumably without wanting to take on liability.) The story of a communal online space and physical space can be similar.
Sorry, it’s such a chore to go through those long Mets threads. I think in the thread about the sale being finalized last year, a couple of the fundraising threads, and possibly the t-shirt thread? Probably not worth reading through all that, but there are some disgruntled people who use the excuse of being involved and well/behaved to make passive-aggressive demands. A lot of it happens in private slacks and Twitter now, too.
It’s still an interesting site, and stronger financially than a community space, just vulnerable similarly.
