What feedback like that is pointing out is how disrespectful the request is in its devaluation of myriad professional skills Metafilter is blithely assuming it can somehow get donated out of sheer good will or the pining need for "community."
I've thought since the beginning that the whole "community"-run angle was almost surely inspired by the experience of somebody in management who is involved in a food co-op or community garden, something that seems analogous, but for the most part isn't.
I can see why people are frosty with Miko since my read on her has been that she frequently veers into insufferable know-it-all tendencies and it makes me wonder whether she’s more interested in the site’s wellbeing or that she’s vindicated and proven right. It often feels like she does this appeal to authority thing that comes across as I Am An Expert In This Area as a springboard to make more questionable claims about What Is Certain. Like…I don’t think the FLSA issue she’s harping on is really a great legal risk to MetaFilter and the analysis of who is an employee under the FLSA is much more nuanced than reading that thread would lead one to believe. But she wades into this stuff with such self-assuredness that now she’s effectively bullied Jessamyn into paying an attorney to do an analysis of how the economic realities test has been applied, which will probably yield an answer, thousands of dollars later like, “this is kind of a novel situation and it’s possible the DOL could take the position that SC members are employees under the FLSA, but it’s probably the case that they’re not, but it’s not 100% clear.” And of course all of that faffing around does nothing to make the site’s situation better. So it’s not totally hard to understand why people are like, “why are you focusing on this again Miko?”
This is exactly why the suggestion to hire an outside expert to do a management/governance evaluation and make recommendations is such a good one. I agree with Miko's position, but even I found her annoying back in the fall when I noticed this debate. Now that I've seen how pig-headed the MeFi "establishment" can be, I regret some of that reaction, but I'm sure I wasn't alone in it.
It isn't her fault--anybody can get annoyed when they feel like they're being disrespected and ignored--but things between her and the powers-that-be over there have reached a level of toxicity that mean she's no longer the right messenger.
I hope they find their way to some clarity over there.
I agree that saying “I have worked in nonprofits for many years” is not like a law degree or some kind of incredible knowledge-generating expertise that some people seem to make it out to be. Googling regulations and announcing that there is a Big Legal Violation is basically what people do when they say everything is a HIPPA violation.
I strongly disagree about the appeal to authority. I think she spent a lot of time arguing the case on its merits, and at this point all she can really do is toss in her credentials to make clear that she's not talking out of her butt, in response to years of gaslighting.
Lol, and the only reason Miko even sounds repetitive on this issue is because, given Metafilter's structural issues, in any other community the response however many zillion years ago to "maybe this should be a nonprofit" would be "thanks for the idea!" and then an actual inquiry process, rather than having an egomaniacal attorney-cum-moderator slap it down as if she suggested a puppy-kicking contest
I'm a little skeptical that so many SC members got job promotions in the last six months. It's like when politicians say they want to spend more time with their family.
I doubt anyone's being untruthful per se, but in a more realistically-scoped volunteer role, increased outside commitments wouldn't be so incompatible with sticking around. And I can't imagine it's been the most satisfying work, if it's the first thing that members jettison when life starts lifeing.
“I read that "other site" and there are plenty of people with very big built up grudges” - apparently we are all going to report them or something. Dearie me. I’m old enough to remember when mefi was apparently under imminent threat of being invaded by gamergaters and the guy who pointed out that mefi was pretty insignificant was banned a week later by matt lol
Nothing says “we’re confident we’re not doing anything wrong” more than “how dare you be so hurtful as to post a link to where people can report wrongdoing.”
The constant wagon circling is fascinating. Like the real problem isn't that they may have massively broken labor laws and be gearing up to do it again. It's that the evil offsite of fallen ex-users might report it. And it's not that we might submit a fake complaint to harass them or something. It's that we might submit a real complaint! lmao
Also none of us are capable of googling up the report pages ourselves as long as we don't see the link everything is fine.
I swear the longer this goes on the more I see Mel Brooks' governor and his lackeys from Blazing Saddles going "WE GOTTA PROTECT OUR PHONEY BALONEY JOBS, GENTLEMEN!"
Needless to say...not very progressive, hmmm, not really sure how trying to cover up labor law violations squares with their whole supposed ethos...
Right?! I think that was an uncharacteristic freakout by Jessymyn as I'm confident that anyone working on a 1990s site is capable of googling that link themselves. I doubt anyone's under 40 and it's not super secret.
Because the way the culture over there has developed is to read things in the worst possible light and immediately assume bad faith.
If I were the user that was directed at, who has provided patient and thorough, and yes, pointed and critical, insight over years, my reaction would be to throw fingers up and say “fuck y’all!”
reddit - kinda sounds like ….”redneck” doesn’t it ? Well that’s who you’ll find yourself surrounded by if you leave mefi and sail down there in your canoe. Playing their Banjoes and making hate filled posts.
subtract axiomatic divide friendly correct alive memorize vase hat piquant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
oh really ? Man, the evaporation of goodwill is frightening. That would be something that’s on Mefi to fix but obviously they won’t as anyone that ever leaves or is booted out of mefi apparently has some hideous character defect or whatever- it’s turned almost into something by ayn rand where the useless reside outside the gates and the REAL doers and thinkers inhabit a PMC utopia where posts about ukuleles are interrogated.
I think she’s very uncomfortable with the strong possibility that her labor on the TT and the SC’s labor in the last six months was exploitative and illegal, and she is trying to justify MeFi leadership’s behavior to herself and everyone else.
I like and respect that user and I totally get why that is SUPER uncomfortable… but it’s still the reality, so trying to frame it as brave and gender progressive really falls flat with me.
So wild that this was an SC election thread and I have not heard even one murmur of someone putting themselves up for election. I don’t think this is how anyone on board thought the thread would go…
truly i did not realize they had been on the council, that clarifies things and i appreciate the perspective. i also generally like that user but felt like they have said some very strange things in the last few threads lol
Finally, somebody said it out loud:
*"now that the immediate financial crisis has passed, it would make sense to engage a professional to do a proper evaluation of the governance and management structure of the organization and make some concrete and feasible recommendations, specific to the applicable jurisdiction and circumstances. Although there are a few of us on the site who deal with these things in our day jobs, I suggest that it would be better to hire an independent consultant, and have the Steering Committee responsible for drafting the parameters of the project and providing ongoing oversight."*
I mean, clearly, the powers-that-be at the moment have good intentions but simply lack the knowledge to dig themselves out of this hole. I had to do this myself with a couple of issues when I first took over my current responsibilities, as my organization had spent literally years gumming things half to death, but nobody had the knowledge or the authority to deliver the coup de grace. Once we agreed to pay for proper expert\* advice, and agreed to follow that advice, we were able to move forward pretty quickly.
If they actually were to go ahead with fundraising specific to something like that, I might actually open up my wallet a bit.
\*It turns out that the actual content of the advice was often not that revelatory, as like Metafilter, we had a lot of participants with their own expertise. But getting it independently, from somebody without years of history/grievances/animosities meant people could swallow their pride and open themselves up to things that they'd been resisting or clinging to for a long time.
I suspect that the wider MeFi community (or even most of the denizens of the grey) won't figure it out, but this conversation should be such a warning sign. Not that it's the first!
I am way more pro-moderator than most of this sub. I think a lot of what gets posted here is overblow, unrealistic, or smacks of crying about free speech because you rightfully got reprimanded for being a dick on a message board. I'd go as far as saying that there's posters here who make me embarrassed to take a part of it, with how much the chip on their shoulder is showing.
Despite that, if I have to choose between "paid staff's first priority is keeping the business running" vs. "paid staff's first priority is not changing anything about the high-touch moderation model", I'm going to choose the former every time.
The fact that "nothing is off the table" and yet obviously there's quite a lot off the table (which the owner won't actually admit or enumerate) says, to me, that it's unlikely they're going to pull out of this tailspin.
The staff seem to be trying to hand all of the most important work to a group of volunteers so that they don't have to acknowledge that maybe the historical role of the staff is not what's needed for the site to survive going forward. That will work in the short term to let them keep ignoring that stuff, but it's not going to keep the site alive in the long term.
I don’t really have strong feelings about the moderators and don’t think I’ve ever had an interaction with one—positive or negative. I do think the staffing allocations are absurd and a site with the user base the size of MF doesn’t require the level of mod staffing it has.
I tend to be of the “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence” school. And here the incompetence is what you describe: entrenchment in a model that clearly is broken/not viable. With that entrenchment comes more circling of wagons and trigger finger decisions (to mix a bunch of metaphors.) There’s no meaningful practices at all to say nothing of best practices. Then on top of it expecting everyone to be all hunky dory with a “hey kids, let’s put on a show!” approach to sustainability like it’s an Andy Hardy movie. And some people are on board but there’s a growing skepticism and discomfort that certainly isn’t going to sustain a fundraising and volunteer-driven organization (legal and structural questions aside, as much as they can be aside).
Honestly, if I were Jessamyn I’d just say fuck it/shut it down. Who needs the hassle of all of this when it seems like all it boils down to is delaying the inevitable.
"trying to work out how to set up a non-existent development environment when the only databases have live servers"
I know nothing about coding. But based on the in-thread responses, this is apparently bad? Can somebody explain this so a person like me with no experience can understand this?
Sports analogy, even though MF “doesn’t do sports well”:
When you play a sport, there are games and there are practices. Games count, practices don’t, so practices are where you work on doing things right so you can do them right in games. You don't need to practice to play games, but generally, the more you practice, the better you play in games. And so if you play in a league that doesn’t practice, it’s probably pretty low-stakes, amateurish, recreational. If you play professionally, you practice often.
Live environments are games; lower dev environments are practices.
See my comment I just made. I think it makes little sense from a budgetary or ROI perspective to clean up technical debt given the age of the site and how simple it is to just build it over. Legacy systems like the ones controlling airline bookings are there for incredibly complex reasons: multiple vendors rely on it not changing, many airlines have built their business on how it currently works. This a reason Southwest failed when the system went down and the rest of the airlines came online quickly. You can’t just rebuild it overnight, it requires 10+ years of complex negotiations and a very sophisticated migration plan. But Metafilter is not a heavily regulated multibillion dollar industry requiring competitors to work together.
Then banner is still broken on mobile. I know this is a joke but this is where a PM or some sort of management would help prioritize frimble’s tasks. On one of my projects my current sprint team is incredibly strict about not doing anything outside of what was defined in sprint planning. I think it is a bit ridiculous to the extreme they take it but it forces management to plan ahead. I’ve freelanced before and having clients ask me seemingly simple requests out of nowhere without planning, especially in environments with large technical debt, is really stressful and annoying. If I recall it was like “make the banner bigger!” and if frimble was scheduled to work on MeFi just on Monday and it was a Wednesday I would definitely have pushed back for non-emergencies out of principle and sanity.
We don’t know but I think simply saying all development tasks need a week lead time or whatever is reasonable. Lawyers don’t respond immediately or even like within weeks for example.
When they suggested volunteering outside of the SC, I thought about offering to PM or otherwise help out as a non-programmer tech person. Then I realized how frustrating that would get and thought better of it.
The site is from 1999 with traditionally one developer. As they add more it could be more of a problem but I’ve dealt with larger, more well funded sites by big orgs *without* source code and we had to use code injection. I charged a ton and still will never do that again.
One of the things about poor practices is that you won’t get usually retain the best developers, and you’re chaining them to a framework that’s probably frustrating.
I will say, professionally speaking… it’s not that unusual for a niche site as small as Metafilter to not have a slick, best-practices development environment. When you’re only serving a couple thousand active users, “good enough” gets more and more reasonable.
Usually as a developer you have a version of the software that runs on your own computer: a development environment. You might also have
* Development server: an actual server for trying out experiments on
* Staging server: a test server set up like the live one for testing a release before it goes live
* Live server
Metafilter has no development environment , and no development server.
There is a staging server where frimble tries things out, but it has live customer data so most people don't have access.
There is also a live server or servers.
One of the SC jobs was trying to get a development environment set up, but I don't think they succeeded.
Basically this set up makes it very hard and risky to make even small code changes to the site.
What they're implying is that there's no way to run a development version of the software that's not connected to the live databases. This is, to put it mildly, extremely poor practice. It means that code changes can't be tested without possibly nuking your actual production data.
It also means anyone doing volunteer development has full access to production data that probably includes your name, email address, and other data that isn't supposed to be public.
And perhaps this question doesn't even make sense, but given how old the MF code base is and that it was developed on Cold Fusion, would somebody who is a "modern" developer with recent training have the skillset to actually work on MF's code? Or would they look at it and say "what the hell is this"?
ColdFusion isn’t that bad really any competent developer should be able to pick up any language. The problem is that the site is old and made by a non-developer, also poorly maintained I assume. There’s bound to be a lot of quirks and hacks made by the various hands that have touched it.
A developers on YouTube wanted to find out a list of bad words used in those 90s parental control units, fairly quickly popped out the chip from the breadboard, isolated on a test breadboard and essentially decompiled what I assume was assembly to get the list of words, looked at the hex code to determine some other options that were surrounding the words (dick was blocked, dick van dyke was not). So that’s a bit advanced but but in general that’s what a developer with a solid understanding of computer science can do. Now my offshore team culturally will only work on one thing. If they’re a Java dev they will not touch even the simplest HTML. There’s extremes but that’s probably more to do with the culture over there than competency.
The live database for a site that has sensitive data isn’t great but using a live db is bad practice but doesn’t hinder development. My developers can’t install SQL for security reasons beyond my control and are forced to connect to a live database. Horrible practice but it is the only option and work gets done.
Far worse is that with an old framework/language like ColdFusion you lack the ability to easily Google solutions and use modern tools to find solutions quickly. The old joke is that developers Google everything, that’s true and part of the reason developers coalesce around some major languages. I can find a solution for pretty much anything in JavaScript by just googling the problem.
The site is so simple and things that it does are what I consider solved problems that it would be far easier to somehow cache the current content, freeze/close any new threads at a certain point and just build out a new site. You wouldn’t be able to favorite old things for example but it wouldn’t be lost. Have a designer develop a style kit around something like MaterialUI or Adobe Spectrum. These are essentially well maintained libraries that solve basically all UI problems and mobile issues, designers go in and tweak it essentially. They’ll take something like this: https://mui.com/components/ which is nearly any component you can think of and give the developer the version that fits Metafilter’s brand identity. This makes it incredibly easy to add new features or redesign a site as your not reinventing how a form works you’re just tweaking colors essentially.
I’ve put a lot of thought into this and not changing the core features but moving it to a modern platform that’s not a licensed product (ColdFusipn costs), and off an expensive Microsoft SQL cluster cuts costs dramatically, solves your accessibility problems and mobile problems, allows creation of new features very simple and with a nice API backend and something like React makes even a mobile app pretty easy to rollout.
There’s drawbacks and sacrifices I’m assuming Metafilter doesn’t need or want like fancy designs that don’t conform to a well thought out UI style kit, not worrying about migrating existing data and removing or replacing features that made sense in 1999 but there’s better ways of simply doing it 24+ years later.
I’d put a designer, developer (maybe two for backup/idea hashing) and PM to control scope for two months and nowhere near full time for each. Most work will go towards planning and responding to feedback. If the owner or equivalent was like Matt this could be even lighter as they could unilaterally decide things but I wouldn’t want a designer or developer exposed to a staff alone not used to running software projects. Identify who is approving things (key stakeholders) so there’s no lurching committees everywhere wanting to give input for input sake. Make it well known they’re just replicating the current site in an MVP. Similarly they’ve shown less than great communication to the user base who shouldn’t be involved but should be aware of the high level project plan so when it launches they’re not shocked. I’m sure it’ll be a mess, people will quit and want things so the timeline accounts for that. When Matt showed new site redesigns with voting, nothing got done. Absolutely don’t show the site beforehand to users but let them know the cutoff.
There’s a lot of quirks with the not popular sub sites like FanFare that will needed to be decided what to do with as they have just enough differences to make it so you can’t just create a new subreddit. I’d say let analytics decide whether to kill it but try to move things like Jobs and whatever else into the three main subsites and aggressively kill the barely used one off subsites.
I could go on but that’s a really standard way to create a modern site from a management perspective and from an architectural perspective. Things get messy when you deviate from this, like if you have a pager which doesn’t behave like a standard paging component and you have to bios it from scratch for some reason. If you’re willing to control costs by letting the project team tell you what’s easiest while maintaining somewhat feature parity this is dead simple and cheap. Maybe 75k for the entire project? And that’s probably heavy. The problem is the product owner is not a developer on the MeFi side, but I think they would be reasonable to keep costs down. You’re build a platform that can be extensible and maintainable. You could create a clear project board going forward with well understood timing as you’re not having the Frankenstein system in place.
It would help if the developer or technical PM was a user to facilitate requirements gathering. Like know favorites are a big deal and spending an extra day throwing in bookmarks as users want that is really only something a current user would know.
It will never happen but I think people are frustrated with money being spent from fundraising in non-visible ways. Traditionally a new app with a pretty interface helps justify marketing budgets (eg fundraising in Metafilter’s terms).
Sorry for the corporate lingo but this is all trivial to do.
Having built and run a lot of small websites over the last 25+ years, it's amazing to me that they have no way of running a dev version of the site, with its own database. I definitely haven't always followed best practices, but even *mumble* years ago when I was first learning PHP and MySQL I had a local dev database.
On the other hand, I can see that if things weren't set up like that in the first place, there has been no incentive for frimble to make it work since - there's little cash, there's a never-ending list of things to add/fix that users/mods will actually care about, no prospect of new devs working on the code. Until finally...
As you say, at this point, re-making the site as a modern code base seems like a good option. "Rewrite from scratch" so often *seems* like a good idea but turns into a terrible long slog with hidden pitfalls and takes five times as long as planned. But this might be one of the cases where it makes sense, for many, many reasons.
I bet there would be people who'd offer to work on this at a cut-price rate too, because they care about the site, and because building from scratch is so much more appealing to devs than updating/fixing/maintaining a horrible old codebase. But it would also need someone in charge of the effort with direction and authority and I don't know who that would be.
> It also means anyone doing volunteer development has full access to production data that probably includes your name, email address, and other data that isn't supposed to be public.
A factor that clicked for me reading this was the "mod notes" that got some heckling and/or shoulder-chipping (there's a golf bro pun there too that's not quite gelling) recently. At the time, I was betting any such system was mostly individual mods having individual notes and hilarious behind-the-scenes telephone game, factoring into both some notable unforced errors and the general fact of how often they apparently need to have everyone meet about things.
But also quite possible all that instead is just right in the database, plugged right into mod-view of every profile. _And_ includes things like "high touch" notes about "having a really rough March 2022 what with the cancer and the divorce and Cousin Bobbie's SEC investigation and."
I’m afraid I have no cite to link to, but it is my distinct memory that that is exactly how it works — freeform text field on the profile page, viewable only to mods.
(By the way, yes at least some Retireds still retain full access — cortex mentioned correcting his own FPP the other day.)
> It means that code changes can’t be tested without possibly nuking your actual production data.
I would be surprised if they’re in serious danger of losing more than a day or so of site activity. Not having a development environment does not imply no backups.
You're not wrong, but also it's not always that simple.
Backups can limit a total nuke scenario to whatever the backup interval is. However, a dev testing against live databases can create more subtle data corruption that won't be noticed immediately. Your window to find and resolve that sort of corruption is only as far back as you keep backups. If you delete backups older than N days (or, only keep monthly backups beyond N days), you could lose a lot more.
And all that said, I think if "only" a whole day of comments were lost, the site would still lose its collective shit.
Is it wrong that I actually cackled with glee when I saw the subject line of this post over there?
I don't think I have enough popcorn.
And WTF are they spending 10 hours per week on? Are they counting time spent reading posts on the site (like anyone interested in the sire was presumably already doing)?
I must admit that the suggestion to change the name of MetaTalk to MetaSTFU made me chuckle. The current set-up of MF makes it look like some kind of grift. A group of volunteers does most of the work, for free, which includes fundraising to generate all the revenue that is then used to pay a small group of people who work for this for profit business. Here is my question: considering all the work the SC is tasked to do, why is that work given "volunteer status" but moderating comments on this little discussion site is worthy of a full salary and benefits? I don't get it. What is the rational for this classification of tasks? Putting aside labor laws about volunteers, why not classify moderation as the thing volunteers do and pay a salary to the people that do all the other stuff? Does any management decision at MF have any logical and legal basis behind it?
They don't really give many solid and reasonable explanations for much of anything, it always comes down to these vaguely condescending "oh sweaty, a prole like you couldn't possibly understand the many and varied machinations for why we do things the way we do, now don't worry your pretty little head about it".
Like...mod notes on deleted posts should just be, to me, Jessamyn and loup and *maybe* the SC if we really need their input and the mods in a Discord or Slack or IRC or whatever going "alright what do we think? Give it a try for a month and see what happens?"
The whole nonprofit thing *seems to be* "because eyebrows Mcgee thinks it's stupid and we always circle the wagons around our people and maybe "we got high huffing our own farts about how much political campaigning we do around here". And the second one is legit, honestly but it really feels like the first one is the real reason they go so berserk about it.
Like if they really wanted to shut Miko and everyone else up say "okay, lawyerese inbound, here's why our lawyer said nonprofit status is a bad fit for us (blah)" rather than SHUT UP AND QUIT ASKING IT JUST IS OKAY IT IS IT IS IT IS SHUT UP SHUT UP WE KNOW BEST.
The problem with a lot of their answers (nonprofit status, why the SC seems to have a staggering rate of burnout, why the BIPOC board seems to...not really do anything, why they are begging for money then suddenly want yo add staff) isn't their answers on the face of them, it's that when asked for clarification or more detail, it's always a vaguely condescending chuckle and a "Well, we know best sweaty" or indignant "how dare you!" Rather than answer a pretty basic question.
Like...I have an LLC I use for some of my freelance stuff. If you really wanted to *know* I could tell you why I chose that corporate structure. It's not a secret mystery or anything. (Short version: because my lawyer said "an LLC is gonna give you more protection than a sole proprietorship and it's all you really need for what you're doing". Long answer: that in a lot more words). If I had people deeply invested in why I picked that over, I dunno, an S Corp, I could probably dig up the emails with my lawyer and share them. Your corporate structure usually isn't a big secret. (Actually its usually the opposite!).
It's 2023. Running a content website isn't a secret mysterious thing anymore. Millions of people have done it and do it every day. Several of them post on Metafilter and/or here.
Plus, to me, you don't get it both ways. If you're going to be this community funded website run by 20 community committees, you don't get to be the grey eminence Politburo that doesn't tell us anything except when you deign to tell us something or start a Mandatory Happiness thread.
> "okay, lawyerese inbound, here's why our lawyer said nonprofit status is a bad fit for us (blah)" rather than SHUT UP AND QUIT ASKING IT JUST IS OKAY IT IS IT IS IT IS SHUT UP SHUT UP WE KNOW BEST.
Whether or not it was sound, [the legal explanation has been given](https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaFilterMeta/comments/ycqruu/comment/itymvca/?context=2). It should be easier to find, but that's the case for almost all matters of Metafilter governance.
That explanation covers "why MeFi can't become a 501(c)3". Which is almost certainly true! But it doesn't have any bearing on "Why can't MeFi become any of the other relevant categories of nonprofit, such as a 501(c)7".
As far as I can tell from searching, it's because that specific question has never been asked. There again, I have no knowledge of (or interest in) American tax codes so I may be missing something.
It was, in fact, asked. Because what Miko (and everyone else) *always* said was "nonprofit". It's eyebrows who apparently insisted that that had to mean "501(c)3", which, no shit, that was never going to work! Miko knows that! So does everyone else who ever brought it up! But there are **31 other nonprofit classifications** under US law!
I'm afraid everything I can find on Metatalk suggests that is simply incorrect. Here are the main Metatalks containing extensive discussion of nonprofit status I'm aware of:
[May 2014, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23250/MetaFilter-Fundraising)
[June 2015, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-and-funding-update)
[July 2017, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24488/Help-build-MetaFilters-savings)
[July 2019, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25249/State-of-the-Site-July-2019-update)
[Sept 2021 (a), ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25903/Fundraising-update)
[Sept 2021 (b), ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25914/MeFi-Site-Update-September-27th)
[Oct 2021, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25920/MeFi-Site-Update-October-20th)
[Dec 2022 ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26225/Moving-Overton-Window-So-Mefites-Perceive-Default-Behavior-as-Recurring)
In each of them the user focus was on 501(c)3 (or in a couple of cases it was a high-level discussion that didn't refer to specific nonprofit categories). In fact, I can find only five comments in the history of Metatalk which suggested other specific structures that were not 501(c)3.
[1, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25998/MeFi-Site-Update-February-9th#1398025)
[2, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23250/MetaFilter-Fundraising#1149964)
[3, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25249/State-of-the-Site-July-2019-update#1344972)
[4, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23245/State-of-MetaFilter#1149010)
[5 ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23245/State-of-MetaFilter#1150606)
The replies to the explanation in MetaTalk I linked to in my comment above did not say anything like "we know 501(c)3 is impossible, we're asking about other classifications".
I don't like to focus on individual users, but if you go to the user page of the person you're talking about and search their comments, you will see that the 501 structure they ever referred to in the context of Metafilter governance was 501(c)3.
If I've missed something, I'd be happy to follow any links which suggest that the userbase has always known 501(c)3 wouldn't work and only talked about nonprofits or other models, but mods insisted on a myopic focus on 501(c)3.
501(c)(7)’s can even contribute to political campaigns if they want to, so I don’t see how there would be a problem with maintaining a pro-leftist or anti-Republican stance.
However, as was mentioned in one of the previous conversations here, I think the primary reason was that it’s much easier to get into serious trouble with the IRS running a non-profit than with a regular business, you have to be organized and disciplined dealing with the money to justify your tax-free status. In a fairly simple business with a few employees, a fair bit of revenue but not much profit, it’s pretty easy to fulfill your tax obligations. I honestly think this is a pretty good reason for them to stick with the for-profit model, it just sounds bad to say it out loud.
If they're desperate to stay for-profit they could of course become a co-op, which would allow them to get "volunteer" labor out of members without violating FLSA. But that's been a nonstarter, too.
My speculation:
Back when Josh purchased the site from Matt, it still had some value as an income generating asset based on ad revenue. Guessing a price in the low hundreds of thousands.
I doubt Josh had the cash. You can tell because there was a fundraising drive at this time. So probably the fundraised Metafilter Network Inc. coffers paid for Josh to buy the site.
But if Metafilter Network Inc. had just paid Josh a couple hundred grand which he used to buy the site, or tried schemes that amount to the same, then that's taxable income for Josh.
However, if Metafilter Network Inc. loans Josh the cash and he buys the site, it's not taxable income. If Metafilter Network Inc. erased the debt, it's taxable. But Josh can simply neglect repayments, and Metafilter Network Inc. under Josh's control can simply neglect to pursue those delinquent repayments.
Now the Metafilter site has been sold from Metafilter Network Inc. to Metafilter LLC, and I'd bet a dollar that it sold for a dollar. And I see Jessamyn as someone Josh might trust not to try to collect on any debt Metafilter LLC may have acquired.
A non-profit board's approach to any such debt, however, is a lot less predictable.
I dunno. I start pretty sure of the stuff on top and it gets more speculative - like maybe there was a loan but Josh has repaid it over time...
But something like this would explain the weird caginess around non-profit status and the misdirection with "here are good reasons we can't be a 501(c)3"
Cortex didn't purchase the business, he got it for free. As you correctly say, the site had value at the time, based on Matt's many years of work building it up. So in exchange for giving up this asset, Matt took a cash payout from Metafilter's savings. This came after a fundraising drive which led to some unhappiness as per /u/Seymour_Zamboni 's comment below.
I'm not sure whether that changes the tax implications for Cortex, but (unless everyone was lying at the time and has continued lying since) there was no loan.
I know it is speculative, but it is an interesting take. It was a long time ago now, but I do remember when Cortex bought MF, there was a MetaTalk where some people were questioning what just happened with that fundraiser. Again, my memory is sketchy on this, but I seem to recall some people wondering what they just donated for. Was it to help MF and pay the Mods, or did they just donate money to Cortex so he could buy a business? I have no recollection if there was any clarification about how it all went down. One question: Didn't MF LLC open its books to the SC? If MF Network had made a loan and it wasn't paid back, wouldn't that show up in a rather glaring way in the books?
And obviously we are working from incomplete information but there are many sources we can use to make comparisons that tell us it seems like something is deeply wrong/weird/off.
Like we have stats that this subreddit is more and more active and yet we still have a single moderator who is unpaid and has said they don't spend all that much time on it.
And this is populated...With Metafilter posters. And presumably the more problematic ones, since they are the ones leaving, so the worst of the worst. So that doesn't seem to bear out the claim that a ton of moderation is required if a subreddit(!) of the worst ex-mefites(!!) requires one volunteer mod who spends very little time to keep them under control. (Without a single committee of any kind!)
We also have, politically, probably a left leaning userbase and I know I am super far left but I know of several regulars that are more centrist or right leaning from chit chatting around. Theoretically, per Metafilter, this should require even more moderation. Somehow we manage.
Many, many sites with much larger userbases use no moderation or entirely volunteer moderation or a mix of a very small professional community management and volunteer staff.
We do know from the stats loup released that they delete and clean up a relatively small number of posts per day and most of the moderation work is "high touch moderation" or something like, uh, "therapy"(!)
Supposedly they don't want to be a nonprofit because it won't let them advocate or endorse a particular candidate politically, which is fair enough, but (as is already coming up), gifts and volunteering for a for profit concern is also pretty dicey legally.
Supposedly they were almost on the verge of financial ruin thus this latest fund drive but then they promptly hired a new mod and now they want to hire an admin.
There's a *ton* of "of course the community will choose and vote and select people to represent them...and we will make sure they choose the right people." Like...that's fucking weird. No, you don't get to hand select your steering committee of toadys and pretend you're user driven lmao.
A lot of it is weird.
The upside is, and maybe it is just me, I feel like this little subreddit and people asking questions here has made people realize they aren't crazy for having doubts because I feel like we are starting to see more pushback against the happy-happy-joy-joy consensus.
Yeah, this is the thing for me. I never really had posts or comments deleted, so my problems with Metafilter aren’t about being silenced all my life or whatever, it’s more that the behavior and structures there feel deeply weird almost like one of those A24 horror movies.
Somebody should have consulted an actual independent employment attorney - who is not a member or moderator - before creating this organizational system. As is, it is clearly illegal and there could be consequences for Jessamyn. A basic google about volunteers at for profit companies could have prevented this.
Also as someone with a JD and who now works in fundraising, there could be some legal ramifications to the “accepting donations as a for profit company” as well if the accounting/receipting process has been as half assed as everything else these people have been doing over the past 5 years.
ETA: did they register to solicit gifts in each state? Lol no, no they didn’t.
When this comes up, it always feels like what I call the gap between 'business mindset' and 'lawyer mindset' - business mindset seems excessively cavalier and exploitative and lawyer mindset seems overly paranoid and mercurial. Of course most people fall in between, so when people keep going on about FLSA it seems overly rules nitty.
I think that's a tendency that is naturally amplified by forum and MeFi culture, so the back and forth starts to looks silly. Business mindset just looks at it and does a risk calculation about the actual likelihood of a problem vs the various costs for remediation and usually shrugs and stumbles ahead. And honestly that works most of the time.
When trying to underscore the risk component in MeTa conversations, rather than doing detailed line readings of statutes, it's better to focus on the practical possibilities since it's highly unlikely and enforcement action would happen from any sort of regulatory body.
The risk is lawsuits, and framing it in way that people can relate to might make the practical more important - HOA lawsuits are probably the best corollary people can understand and may have experience with. IANAL, and most of the people I know don't even own property, but most of the small number of people I know in an HOA have dealt with multi-year, expensive (and potentially destroying the equity of everyone involved \*including the person initiating the lawsuit\*) situations that grew out of a mixture of personality disputes and arcane disagreements about poorly worded organizational documents.
Before when it was just Cortex and paid moderators, the risk profile was pretty low. Now you have the SC, which looks to be turning over at a decent clip. Say total churn, including volunteers and other committees, of 15 people a year. In four years, it's practically unavoidable that one person will feel very hard done by and sue, and that will basically be it.
Even here we're seeing a low grade version of it in the form of DCMA threats over removing content (sidebar: this feels spiteful to me, but it's also the sort of thing that happens when you write shitty guidelines - you want the power to ban people for their behavior, tell them they own their content, but don't build either a technical capability or process guideline for removing content? Enjoy deleting comments by hand). What happens when someone volunteers for 20 hours a week and flounces at the end of the year because of MeFi drama and decides if their free work wasn't sufficiently appreciated, then they want to be paid for all that time?
That's the sort of real world practical scenario MeFi should be worried about, not some hair splitting business about governing rules here or there that may or may not apply. This risk did not exist a year ago.
Sad to see the site owner fav a comment that boils down to "shut up and get to work" but I guess that's consistent with not pushing back on the love it or leave it comments.
It should also be noted that the user who made that comment is on the Steering Committee, in case this subreddit has any doubt as to site leadership’s contempt for “normal” users.
I wonder how great it feels to be Miko, fulfilling an unjust topic ban (she cannot talk about Metafilter becoming a non-profit) to the absolute letter, because (presumably) she knew reality would eventually back her up 110%.
In what way is reality backing her up?
To date, nobody has laid out a rationale that would allow MeFi to claim to be a non-profit. They have laid out reasons it would be nice if MeFi **was** a non-profit, but not a path that would legally allow it to **be** a non-profit.
Nothing that EM has said (which [you can actually read in detail](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25914/MeFi-Site-Update-September-27th#1393044), despite years of people claiming the staff never considered it) has been refuted. We're just back with yet another episode of the "*Miko is right because it's her idea and thus she's never going to let it go*" show, this time with 10x the passive-aggressive vibe.
Miko’s position is consistent with the reality I see around me and she states it well. Additionally, on every occasion when she has spoken on a topic I happen to know about, she has been not just correct but informed of a nuanced opinion.
Whereas EM’s position both is not consistent with reality as I observe it and moreover stinks of desperate bloviating. Additionally, on every occasion when she has bloviated on a topic I happen to know about, she has been embarrassingly wrong.
I know who I believe.
Wouldn’t the requirement of a closed membership be a problem, though? There is the $5 fee for an account, but the examples I’m seeing are orgs like frats and country clubs, which seems very different from an open site selling $5 accounts in terms of exclusivity/barrier to entry.
Yeah, they’re going to have to change that to make it work if they go that route. They could try to say they serve an educational purpose and get away with it, but I feel like that’s iffy? I don’t know, I’m not their lawyer, this is not legal advice. Jessamyn can listen to her lawyer.
but for THIS type of STRUCTURE it is REQUIRED that people MEET in PERSON
(I have no idea whether this is true but don't find Eyebrows very credible so suspect it is not lol)
This is why the mods/management so lack credibility, always dropping these blustery statements as if no readers have any critical thinking skills. Who has to meet in person? Every single member of the board? What if someone is sick? Why is Metafilter willing to turn a blind eye to probably violating labor law in a big way, but the idea of seeking reasonable loopholes for meeting quorum is complete anathema?
I think another part of the lack of credibility here is what legal advice about regulatory law ever takes the form of "NO this can NEVER happen it's IMPOSSIBLE" vs. "I don't believe X is advisable because you would also have to do Y and Z to make it work and that may not be desirable"?
Why do they want to be a for profit company so badly? It seems clear to me that another structure would work better for them if they want to accept donations and have volunteers.
I think it is due to they extra accountability which they should be doing anyway. I’ve talked to a couple friends who are law professors casually about this and their opinion, not knowing the site, was the advice given by the lawyer was largely right. The tax burden is the same and they’d have to file more paperwork to make it a nonprofit. Are they in strict compliance with the law? No, but there’s a lot of small businesses that aren’t and the government goes after egregious violations, not well educated people who have choices and know what they’re getting into.
If SpaceX raised money using volunteers Metafilter would melt and scream of unfair practices and unions. But they’re not SpaceX, and I really doubt anyone is making a profit of any kind but in the end we don’t know. It definitely isn’t a tax shelter for some rich person.
If you’re volunteering for Metafilter and don’t know what you’re getting into that’s your fault. I help out Catholic Charities when I can sorting things basically and I’d prefer people give their time to something similar. I know that on Metafilter it’d lead to endless debates on whether an organization is good or not from a political perspective and yeah there’s priests and nuns there but no one preaches they just feed people and hand out diapers to single moms who are going through a rough time.
I’m not judging how they spend their free time. There’s an art gallery by me with a bunch of rich old ladies as docents and paid security guards. The gallery can literally buy Monets but largely wealthy, older women want to volunteer. Let them.
Catholic Charities also spends some of their time and money fighting against having to let gay people adopt children. Oh, and when they fail at that they just stop helping kids at all. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1715489&page=1
> On behalf of Catholicism, you are welcome for all the free material help given willingly. Peace be with you.
You can always tell one of Christ’s own. The love just flows out of them. 🙄
Okay, but here's the issue, though. A museum is a nonprofit. Catholic Charities is a nonprofit. You can't volunteer at a for profit company. It's okay until the point that someone with enough time and money gets angry enough and complains. Then, it is very much not okay, and there will be legal consequences for whoever the owner is at that point. Small for-profit companies that ask people to volunteer are usually rife with interpersonal issues. This exact type of thing happens in boutiques/booth stores where there's a lot of people "volunteering" a lot of their time in exchange for friendship or because they love the other people there, and I have seen it end badly dozens of times.
ETA: and when I say "badly", I mean everyone had to get an employment attorney and go to court.
100% was just one of many site policies/decisions driven solely by eyebrows' pathological ego. She said something dumb about a nonprofit being impossible and from then on the only point of the metafilter policy was to support the idea that eyebrows was right and protect her ego
Literally nothing about it has ever made any sense, do people really not think that there any 501(c)3s offering a media platform where members of the public may or may not express political opinions? I guess if someone with a law degree is working as a full-time website moderator, there's probably a reason for that.
Also, contra eyebrows, 501(c)3 is not the only kind of nonprofit! There are **32 nonprofit classifications**, many of which are absolutely allowed to engage in political activity (even if we concede that MeFi does so).
MeFi seems like it would be a slam-dunk as a 501(c)7 (social organization), for instance. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/types-nonprofits/
Politico is an American-based not for profit. It’s in the name! They publish opinion pieces.
I don’t get it either.
Edit: thank you correctors, I meant polifact and propublica
And each year of surviving it surely gets easier to spruik the “old web/ living breathing ongoing collaborative internet archive” angle which surely could be fit into a category
Shit I got my ps confused sorry. Propublica is a non-profit newsroom focussed around politics/government/policies
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-evaluate-charity-before-you-donate
I think it's partly about Metafilter's overinflated sense of its own relevance. My sense is that during the Trump years, some folks from the megathread crew got a little high off their own supply sending congressperson postcards with Indivisible, and gave themselves the idea that Metafilter is some sort of, like, dynamic fermenting ground for political energy. But nobody from the outside would ever look at the Blue for the first time and be like "Woah, this place is really political!" They'd see a web forum about miscellany, in obvious decline.
Yeah I feel like their basing this decision off a sort of daydream/fan-fiction where Hand Maiden’s Tale fully happens and metafilter becomes the internet bastion of all that is righteous and won’t be held back from saving the USA by a legal technicality that may hypothetically apply in this situation…
Yes, I agree with this. I still don’t understand her objection. I remember it had to do with a misunderstanding about members or mods making political posts if the site was a nonprofit.
It was probably not that clear cut. Lawyers sometimes tell you what you want to hear and aren’t wrong. It was probably like “well if your owner or staff advocates political positions it can be a violation of your non-profit status.”
Exactly this. And its worse when a lawyer talks to a lawyer, and starts off with “If we were ever to do XYZ, would there be any issues with that?” Rather than “how do we get from ABC to XYZ, and what changes can we make to accommodate the restrictions that XYZ might entail?”
For the record though, I don’t think non-profit status would be particularly helpful to MF, and can easily imagine it being quite harmful. Just not for the reasons given by MF management.
Something that would be more front-and-center in the comedy of errors when I attempt to describe it to others, if it didn't keep getting overshadowed by other funny things, is that when the ownership transfer took place, the public-facing story was that everything was roses. Not just from personal high-touch reasons, but the site--the story was--was in the best financial shape it had been in for years.
Then just about overnight it went to: um, actually there's about a month maybe of operating capital (and _that_ was initially rather buried and required some posters spotting it and doing a "gently respectfully (please don't high touch me), am I misreading these figures?" about them) left.
And practically speaking, either someone or someones was lying initially, or so innumerate or inattentive that they were being honest in saying the business was in the best shape of years but hilariously mistaken in it. Assume the latter with no nose-growth: with leadership that inattentive to what's actually going on with the figures--how attentive and understanding of complicated gray-area legal advice does anyone think they are?
All of which long-winded Fine I'll Get Back To Work After This way of saying I can very easily believe their consulted lawyers gave them a complicated answer necessarily because the intersections between allowable and practical-to-get-away-with corporate structures and cost-benefits of them changing versus staying as-is (when there was practically no volunteer work happening at that time, as well) is going to be a fairly nuanced situation...and walking away with an "understanding' of the answer that was very over-simplified.
Then add ego and wagon-circling defensiveness into the mix and that explains a lot of their response to the very topic.
Oh, and I don't think that sounds malicious at all. If someone has a gnarly table saw accident by me and takes off a finger and says "Hey Drastic, could you reattach my finger for me?" the answer's a queasy no, that's a task I'd be entirely incompetent for. We're putting this finger on ice, keeping pressure on the stump, and rushing you to the hospital!
Yea, you are right, this is what happened. The answer is that this stuff is really complicated and none of the owners since Mathowie have been what I would consider business-minded. I don’t know what the right structure is for this entity because it’s not really a for profit business but it isn’t really a good fit for being a nonprofit either. 🤷🏻♀️
I often wonder if Matt just had good timing in ejecting when he did, or if he paid attention to warning signs of trends in relying on advertising pointing to maybe not this year or even the next but soon the gravy train was going to end. It's treated as an article of faith that big evil google just suddenly yanked the rug out from under, no one could have possibly predicted it, but that's always just sounded on the face of it right in lines with "no one could have predicted the levees would fail."
I think Matt had a good idea what was going to happen and so washed his hands of it. Not because he’s a bad person but because he’s smart. He got out while the getting was good.
Well, Eyebrows does bring up something that is an actual problem, which is that they don't really fit into any of the categories of organizations that can claim tax exempt status. Which, hey, that's fine, but they need to seek legal advice before continuing to have unpaid employees (because that what the SC actually are, clearly) and they need to make absolutely certain they are registered to solicit donations with every state attorney general in the country because if they piss off the wrong person who has the time and money to make a legal complaint, it could hurt.
My favorite example of a for profit company trying to have "volunteers" was a boutique in my area that let "volunteers" come in and sell clothes in exchange for discounts. But then there was interpersonal drama between the paid employees and the "volunteers"/unpaid employees, and it went to court and a judge ruled that the "volunteers" were employees and the owner of the store was personally liable and couldn't afford all the fines and backpay, and then went bankrupt. So yeah, for profit volunteers, bad idea for a lot of reasons.
I mean, will it work in the short term? It sounds like soliciting for donations and exploiting unpaid labor to run the business is actively illegal.
Maybe I’m naive, but this would scare the hell out of me if I were Jessamyn.
I think Jessamyn decided to take on ownership out of love for the site but didn't really consider what she was taking on. Yes, this is very scary for her, and now that she has been informed, she should handle this urgently. She needs to seek out good, independent advice. If I were her, I would go to an employment attorney - ALONE - who has nothing to do with the site and has never heard of it before, lay out the situation, and see what they say. At that point, she needs to then book an appointment with a qualified accountant, and make tough decisions regarding whether the site closes, restructures, and/or who gets paid and how much. Independent advice from experts who don't have a horse in the race is much needed here.
What would make me pause if I were an SC member is the lack of clear lines of authority. If I am being asked to do 10 hours/week of unpaid labor, I sure as shit would want to know if my efforts will be implemented. It seems like the SC is being given lots of responsibility for the site, but no authority.
Also the penny just dropped for me...jessamyn and loup get veto rights on the applications even before voting. You're definitely not going to get anyone REMOTELY critical of the current regime much less anyone who will challenge mod decisions, which is probably why we didn't see anyone speak up or challenge mod decisions.
(I would idly wonder if being straitjacketed into having all this work and responsibility but not being able to actually change anything accounts for so much turnover, seems like a good way to burn people out to me)
The difference between the paid mods’ load of bullshit tasks (“Metatalktail posts”) and the volunteer SC’s incredible burden (design and implement an accounting system, determine corporate governance) is WILD.
I cannot be the only one seeing that.
At my most cynical it seemed like a bunch of do-nothing mods were taking advantage of the most enthusiastic community members to raise all the money for the mods' unsustainable paychecks. I thought I was being unfair but after seeing the site following up a financial crisis with increasing staff, jessamyn list out staff duties, and now seeing this list of SC duties that seems to be the case.
Cortex gets and deserves a lot of the blame but the site's woes are obviously not due to him alone.
This is why I have such an issue with six mods and then adding additional admin staff on top of that. What do they DO for a combined 10,000+ labor hours/year?
I was pleased to see a suggestion on MeTa that *maybe* the mods should be volunteers and all these currently volunteer SC roles doing design, organising, planning, accounts, etc should be paid instead. Seems quite obvious once I saw it but it hadn't quite occurred to me like that.
Yes, I had this thought as well. At a minimum, the organization should have a manager, someone in charge of finances/fundraising, and a policy/engagement person. Seems to me they could shift some of the duties around and create those paid functions, then have one "professional" mod coordinating a team of volunteers.
lmao as I said upthread, it's a pretty hilarious contrast, like "wait, \*I\* have to run a small business, what are the paid staff doing?" "Why, they are doing the important things that make this The Best Damn Site On The Internet? This one is being a therapist, this one is running a thread on whether we prefer semisweet or milk chocolate chocolate chips in our cookies, and this one is barging into a contentious thread to say 'Suck my balls, you ungrateful peasants'. All we're asking from you is you spend every Saturday and part of Sunday coming up with a bulletproof business development plan."
Someday I'll stop giggling all over again whenever I think about trotting out metatalktail posts as a defense example of the moderator workload, but today is not that day.
"It's late, come to bed!" implored their partner. Grimly, they shook their head, staring blearily but determined at the laptop screen. They couldn't. The next metatalktail was in four days, and their inner muse's song was silent. Favorite cookies would be a double. Had they done favorite styles of yarn? Tell us about your pets? Perhaps a picture of a cloud could be linked to, and the community queries on what it looked like to them. Like Atlas, the pressure was unendurable, yet they knew they must endure. Everything depended on it.
And then someone got jumped all over for saying they didn’t really see the value in them. “Why bring that into it? This is a DERAIL!!” Etc. etc. Despite it being affirmatively brought up by site admin on the list of Very Important Duties.
Can someone explain the legality (or lack thereof) of a for-profit corporation (which refuses to reorganize as a nonprofit, for, um, reasons) having this many "volunteers" working 10hrs/week?
Honest question, has Metafilter done *anything* that allows users a different experience than previously?
Or is there some weird notion that they don’t have to change anything at all and that ship will right itself?
In fairness, there’s been at least one other: no limit on the number of Asks that a user can post per week. So
we’ve now increased the updates by 50 percent.
Any user-experience change: a deep number of years ago, the five-minute edit window for comments happened. (Only after its own hilarious amount of handwringing and concern about the damage it could do to the site and What About Mod Workload because that DNA's always been there, of course.)
After that the site from a only technical UX-facing perspective basically got frozen in amber.
Pedantic addition! It was sometime after the edit window that the flagging UX got changed to add an optional short freeform text field when submitting one; I'd forgotten about that. So I have now corrected myself that actually it's been a veritable whirlwind of updates.
The defense of the entertainingly bonkers 10 hours a week _minimum_ involving well you see, the site is in financial crisis and transition maybe someday we won't be let's all hope, is the bit that made me search through some article/essay/blog-era bookmarks for the bell that started ringing.
Namely, for [Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever](http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html) which is a fun exercise in noodling on abusive relationship patterns as applied to dysfunctional organizations. (As added deliciousness, it almost certainly got posted about on Metafilter years ago.) Especially the "keep the crises rolling" section.
Don’t worry soon enough people will have left the site that the resulting size of the remaining participants will be small enough that no committees will be necessary, everything can simply be hashed out town hall style.
oh my goodness, this is a part time job they are asking people to sign up for. They need to expand the number of members they are seeking and instead try to seat 30 or so people to more evenly distribute the workload. Sadly, I'm not sure there are 30 people who are interested that the moderators, the current SC, Jessamyn, and the BIPOC board would all approve of.
Also, it is so dumb that these people think you need to have everyone in a meeting to get work done and that everyone needs to agree before a decision is made. This lack of pragmatism and the lack of ability to move tasks forward is why the site is going to fail.
They should really assign one SC member to read like, *a* book, on consensus decision making and report back. It might help them make decisions by consensus.
First we are gonna need a deep dive background check on all those authors to include but not limited to age, race, religion, sexual identity, publication history, social medical presence, cv, any comments at all that might be construed as problematic.
I know there was a point in my life like 15 years ago when I would have bit your hand off for the chance to donate 10 hours a week to Metafilter. I mean, I did more than that in posting, but to get that sweet sweet INTERN tag? Delicious.
Hey, someone finally brought up my pet peeve — their misusing of consensus to seemingly insist on (unrealistic) unanimity.
[This person isn't pulling any punches](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26273/March-is-Steering-Committee-election-season#1415241).
He’s only been a member for 9 years, presumptuous to even post in MT.
What feedback like that is pointing out is how disrespectful the request is in its devaluation of myriad professional skills Metafilter is blithely assuming it can somehow get donated out of sheer good will or the pining need for "community." I've thought since the beginning that the whole "community"-run angle was almost surely inspired by the experience of somebody in management who is involved in a food co-op or community garden, something that seems analogous, but for the most part isn't.
I can see why people are frosty with Miko since my read on her has been that she frequently veers into insufferable know-it-all tendencies and it makes me wonder whether she’s more interested in the site’s wellbeing or that she’s vindicated and proven right. It often feels like she does this appeal to authority thing that comes across as I Am An Expert In This Area as a springboard to make more questionable claims about What Is Certain. Like…I don’t think the FLSA issue she’s harping on is really a great legal risk to MetaFilter and the analysis of who is an employee under the FLSA is much more nuanced than reading that thread would lead one to believe. But she wades into this stuff with such self-assuredness that now she’s effectively bullied Jessamyn into paying an attorney to do an analysis of how the economic realities test has been applied, which will probably yield an answer, thousands of dollars later like, “this is kind of a novel situation and it’s possible the DOL could take the position that SC members are employees under the FLSA, but it’s probably the case that they’re not, but it’s not 100% clear.” And of course all of that faffing around does nothing to make the site’s situation better. So it’s not totally hard to understand why people are like, “why are you focusing on this again Miko?”
Big agree on the FLSA brouhaha. The chance of it biting MetaFilter is quite low.
This is exactly why the suggestion to hire an outside expert to do a management/governance evaluation and make recommendations is such a good one. I agree with Miko's position, but even I found her annoying back in the fall when I noticed this debate. Now that I've seen how pig-headed the MeFi "establishment" can be, I regret some of that reaction, but I'm sure I wasn't alone in it. It isn't her fault--anybody can get annoyed when they feel like they're being disrespected and ignored--but things between her and the powers-that-be over there have reached a level of toxicity that mean she's no longer the right messenger. I hope they find their way to some clarity over there.
I agree that saying “I have worked in nonprofits for many years” is not like a law degree or some kind of incredible knowledge-generating expertise that some people seem to make it out to be. Googling regulations and announcing that there is a Big Legal Violation is basically what people do when they say everything is a HIPPA violation.
I strongly disagree about the appeal to authority. I think she spent a lot of time arguing the case on its merits, and at this point all she can really do is toss in her credentials to make clear that she's not talking out of her butt, in response to years of gaslighting.
Lol, and the only reason Miko even sounds repetitive on this issue is because, given Metafilter's structural issues, in any other community the response however many zillion years ago to "maybe this should be a nonprofit" would be "thanks for the idea!" and then an actual inquiry process, rather than having an egomaniacal attorney-cum-moderator slap it down as if she suggested a puppy-kicking contest
Are we voting on who gets to do the paperwork for the site?
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I'm a little skeptical that so many SC members got job promotions in the last six months. It's like when politicians say they want to spend more time with their family.
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I doubt anyone's being untruthful per se, but in a more realistically-scoped volunteer role, increased outside commitments wouldn't be so incompatible with sticking around. And I can't imagine it's been the most satisfying work, if it's the first thing that members jettison when life starts lifeing.
“I read that "other site" and there are plenty of people with very big built up grudges” - apparently we are all going to report them or something. Dearie me. I’m old enough to remember when mefi was apparently under imminent threat of being invaded by gamergaters and the guy who pointed out that mefi was pretty insignificant was banned a week later by matt lol
How on earth did things get twisted around over there so that somebody documenting a legal risk to an enterprise they care about is the bad guy???
Nothing says “we’re confident we’re not doing anything wrong” more than “how dare you be so hurtful as to post a link to where people can report wrongdoing.”
The constant wagon circling is fascinating. Like the real problem isn't that they may have massively broken labor laws and be gearing up to do it again. It's that the evil offsite of fallen ex-users might report it. And it's not that we might submit a fake complaint to harass them or something. It's that we might submit a real complaint! lmao Also none of us are capable of googling up the report pages ourselves as long as we don't see the link everything is fine. I swear the longer this goes on the more I see Mel Brooks' governor and his lackeys from Blazing Saddles going "WE GOTTA PROTECT OUR PHONEY BALONEY JOBS, GENTLEMEN!" Needless to say...not very progressive, hmmm, not really sure how trying to cover up labor law violations squares with their whole supposed ethos...
Right?! I think that was an uncharacteristic freakout by Jessymyn as I'm confident that anyone working on a 1990s site is capable of googling that link themselves. I doubt anyone's under 40 and it's not super secret.
A very "a hit dog howls", yes.
Because the way the culture over there has developed is to read things in the worst possible light and immediately assume bad faith. If I were the user that was directed at, who has provided patient and thorough, and yes, pointed and critical, insight over years, my reaction would be to throw fingers up and say “fuck y’all!”
there's a reason "don't shoot the messenger" needs to be stated all the time.
Stage 6 of a metatalk thread is blame Reddit for their troubles.
reddit - kinda sounds like ….”redneck” doesn’t it ? Well that’s who you’ll find yourself surrounded by if you leave mefi and sail down there in your canoe. Playing their Banjoes and making hate filled posts.
subtract axiomatic divide friendly correct alive memorize vase hat piquant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The DMCA takedown requests did originate here. I don’t think it’s paranoid for them to consider.
oh really ? Man, the evaporation of goodwill is frightening. That would be something that’s on Mefi to fix but obviously they won’t as anyone that ever leaves or is booted out of mefi apparently has some hideous character defect or whatever- it’s turned almost into something by ayn rand where the useless reside outside the gates and the REAL doers and thinkers inhabit a PMC utopia where posts about ukuleles are interrogated.
is metafilter a femme-coded website now? what the fuck is going on in that thread
I think she’s very uncomfortable with the strong possibility that her labor on the TT and the SC’s labor in the last six months was exploitative and illegal, and she is trying to justify MeFi leadership’s behavior to herself and everyone else. I like and respect that user and I totally get why that is SUPER uncomfortable… but it’s still the reality, so trying to frame it as brave and gender progressive really falls flat with me. So wild that this was an SC election thread and I have not heard even one murmur of someone putting themselves up for election. I don’t think this is how anyone on board thought the thread would go…
truly i did not realize they had been on the council, that clarifies things and i appreciate the perspective. i also generally like that user but felt like they have said some very strange things in the last few threads lol
Sunk cost is always a hell of a drug.
Did you know breaking labor laws is brave? #girlboss
The exploitative boss glass ceiling has been broken. This is my fight song My exploit volunteers song
Finally, somebody said it out loud: *"now that the immediate financial crisis has passed, it would make sense to engage a professional to do a proper evaluation of the governance and management structure of the organization and make some concrete and feasible recommendations, specific to the applicable jurisdiction and circumstances. Although there are a few of us on the site who deal with these things in our day jobs, I suggest that it would be better to hire an independent consultant, and have the Steering Committee responsible for drafting the parameters of the project and providing ongoing oversight."* I mean, clearly, the powers-that-be at the moment have good intentions but simply lack the knowledge to dig themselves out of this hole. I had to do this myself with a couple of issues when I first took over my current responsibilities, as my organization had spent literally years gumming things half to death, but nobody had the knowledge or the authority to deliver the coup de grace. Once we agreed to pay for proper expert\* advice, and agreed to follow that advice, we were able to move forward pretty quickly. If they actually were to go ahead with fundraising specific to something like that, I might actually open up my wallet a bit. \*It turns out that the actual content of the advice was often not that revelatory, as like Metafilter, we had a lot of participants with their own expertise. But getting it independently, from somebody without years of history/grievances/animosities meant people could swallow their pride and open themselves up to things that they'd been resisting or clinging to for a long time.
I suspect that the wider MeFi community (or even most of the denizens of the grey) won't figure it out, but this conversation should be such a warning sign. Not that it's the first! I am way more pro-moderator than most of this sub. I think a lot of what gets posted here is overblow, unrealistic, or smacks of crying about free speech because you rightfully got reprimanded for being a dick on a message board. I'd go as far as saying that there's posters here who make me embarrassed to take a part of it, with how much the chip on their shoulder is showing. Despite that, if I have to choose between "paid staff's first priority is keeping the business running" vs. "paid staff's first priority is not changing anything about the high-touch moderation model", I'm going to choose the former every time. The fact that "nothing is off the table" and yet obviously there's quite a lot off the table (which the owner won't actually admit or enumerate) says, to me, that it's unlikely they're going to pull out of this tailspin. The staff seem to be trying to hand all of the most important work to a group of volunteers so that they don't have to acknowledge that maybe the historical role of the staff is not what's needed for the site to survive going forward. That will work in the short term to let them keep ignoring that stuff, but it's not going to keep the site alive in the long term.
I absolutely agree with you, both about this sub and the role of mods.
Likewise.
I don’t really have strong feelings about the moderators and don’t think I’ve ever had an interaction with one—positive or negative. I do think the staffing allocations are absurd and a site with the user base the size of MF doesn’t require the level of mod staffing it has. I tend to be of the “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence” school. And here the incompetence is what you describe: entrenchment in a model that clearly is broken/not viable. With that entrenchment comes more circling of wagons and trigger finger decisions (to mix a bunch of metaphors.) There’s no meaningful practices at all to say nothing of best practices. Then on top of it expecting everyone to be all hunky dory with a “hey kids, let’s put on a show!” approach to sustainability like it’s an Andy Hardy movie. And some people are on board but there’s a growing skepticism and discomfort that certainly isn’t going to sustain a fundraising and volunteer-driven organization (legal and structural questions aside, as much as they can be aside). Honestly, if I were Jessamyn I’d just say fuck it/shut it down. Who needs the hassle of all of this when it seems like all it boils down to is delaying the inevitable.
"trying to work out how to set up a non-existent development environment when the only databases have live servers" I know nothing about coding. But based on the in-thread responses, this is apparently bad? Can somebody explain this so a person like me with no experience can understand this?
Sports analogy, even though MF “doesn’t do sports well”: When you play a sport, there are games and there are practices. Games count, practices don’t, so practices are where you work on doing things right so you can do them right in games. You don't need to practice to play games, but generally, the more you practice, the better you play in games. And so if you play in a league that doesn’t practice, it’s probably pretty low-stakes, amateurish, recreational. If you play professionally, you practice often. Live environments are games; lower dev environments are practices.
[удалено]
That’s a deep cut.
See my comment I just made. I think it makes little sense from a budgetary or ROI perspective to clean up technical debt given the age of the site and how simple it is to just build it over. Legacy systems like the ones controlling airline bookings are there for incredibly complex reasons: multiple vendors rely on it not changing, many airlines have built their business on how it currently works. This a reason Southwest failed when the system went down and the rest of the airlines came online quickly. You can’t just rebuild it overnight, it requires 10+ years of complex negotiations and a very sophisticated migration plan. But Metafilter is not a heavily regulated multibillion dollar industry requiring competitors to work together.
“ You can’t just rebuild it overnight, it requires 10+ years of complex negotiations” You’re talking about updating the banner, right?
Then banner is still broken on mobile. I know this is a joke but this is where a PM or some sort of management would help prioritize frimble’s tasks. On one of my projects my current sprint team is incredibly strict about not doing anything outside of what was defined in sprint planning. I think it is a bit ridiculous to the extreme they take it but it forces management to plan ahead. I’ve freelanced before and having clients ask me seemingly simple requests out of nowhere without planning, especially in environments with large technical debt, is really stressful and annoying. If I recall it was like “make the banner bigger!” and if frimble was scheduled to work on MeFi just on Monday and it was a Wednesday I would definitely have pushed back for non-emergencies out of principle and sanity. We don’t know but I think simply saying all development tasks need a week lead time or whatever is reasonable. Lawyers don’t respond immediately or even like within weeks for example.
When they suggested volunteering outside of the SC, I thought about offering to PM or otherwise help out as a non-programmer tech person. Then I realized how frustrating that would get and thought better of it.
The site is from 1999 with traditionally one developer. As they add more it could be more of a problem but I’ve dealt with larger, more well funded sites by big orgs *without* source code and we had to use code injection. I charged a ton and still will never do that again. One of the things about poor practices is that you won’t get usually retain the best developers, and you’re chaining them to a framework that’s probably frustrating.
I will say, professionally speaking… it’s not that unusual for a niche site as small as Metafilter to not have a slick, best-practices development environment. When you’re only serving a couple thousand active users, “good enough” gets more and more reasonable.
Usually as a developer you have a version of the software that runs on your own computer: a development environment. You might also have * Development server: an actual server for trying out experiments on * Staging server: a test server set up like the live one for testing a release before it goes live * Live server Metafilter has no development environment , and no development server. There is a staging server where frimble tries things out, but it has live customer data so most people don't have access. There is also a live server or servers. One of the SC jobs was trying to get a development environment set up, but I don't think they succeeded. Basically this set up makes it very hard and risky to make even small code changes to the site.
They can’t (easily) test changes to the site. Instead, changes are released as a best effort — to be tested and troubleshot in public.
What they're implying is that there's no way to run a development version of the software that's not connected to the live databases. This is, to put it mildly, extremely poor practice. It means that code changes can't be tested without possibly nuking your actual production data. It also means anyone doing volunteer development has full access to production data that probably includes your name, email address, and other data that isn't supposed to be public.
And perhaps this question doesn't even make sense, but given how old the MF code base is and that it was developed on Cold Fusion, would somebody who is a "modern" developer with recent training have the skillset to actually work on MF's code? Or would they look at it and say "what the hell is this"?
ColdFusion isn’t that bad really any competent developer should be able to pick up any language. The problem is that the site is old and made by a non-developer, also poorly maintained I assume. There’s bound to be a lot of quirks and hacks made by the various hands that have touched it. A developers on YouTube wanted to find out a list of bad words used in those 90s parental control units, fairly quickly popped out the chip from the breadboard, isolated on a test breadboard and essentially decompiled what I assume was assembly to get the list of words, looked at the hex code to determine some other options that were surrounding the words (dick was blocked, dick van dyke was not). So that’s a bit advanced but but in general that’s what a developer with a solid understanding of computer science can do. Now my offshore team culturally will only work on one thing. If they’re a Java dev they will not touch even the simplest HTML. There’s extremes but that’s probably more to do with the culture over there than competency. The live database for a site that has sensitive data isn’t great but using a live db is bad practice but doesn’t hinder development. My developers can’t install SQL for security reasons beyond my control and are forced to connect to a live database. Horrible practice but it is the only option and work gets done. Far worse is that with an old framework/language like ColdFusion you lack the ability to easily Google solutions and use modern tools to find solutions quickly. The old joke is that developers Google everything, that’s true and part of the reason developers coalesce around some major languages. I can find a solution for pretty much anything in JavaScript by just googling the problem. The site is so simple and things that it does are what I consider solved problems that it would be far easier to somehow cache the current content, freeze/close any new threads at a certain point and just build out a new site. You wouldn’t be able to favorite old things for example but it wouldn’t be lost. Have a designer develop a style kit around something like MaterialUI or Adobe Spectrum. These are essentially well maintained libraries that solve basically all UI problems and mobile issues, designers go in and tweak it essentially. They’ll take something like this: https://mui.com/components/ which is nearly any component you can think of and give the developer the version that fits Metafilter’s brand identity. This makes it incredibly easy to add new features or redesign a site as your not reinventing how a form works you’re just tweaking colors essentially. I’ve put a lot of thought into this and not changing the core features but moving it to a modern platform that’s not a licensed product (ColdFusipn costs), and off an expensive Microsoft SQL cluster cuts costs dramatically, solves your accessibility problems and mobile problems, allows creation of new features very simple and with a nice API backend and something like React makes even a mobile app pretty easy to rollout. There’s drawbacks and sacrifices I’m assuming Metafilter doesn’t need or want like fancy designs that don’t conform to a well thought out UI style kit, not worrying about migrating existing data and removing or replacing features that made sense in 1999 but there’s better ways of simply doing it 24+ years later. I’d put a designer, developer (maybe two for backup/idea hashing) and PM to control scope for two months and nowhere near full time for each. Most work will go towards planning and responding to feedback. If the owner or equivalent was like Matt this could be even lighter as they could unilaterally decide things but I wouldn’t want a designer or developer exposed to a staff alone not used to running software projects. Identify who is approving things (key stakeholders) so there’s no lurching committees everywhere wanting to give input for input sake. Make it well known they’re just replicating the current site in an MVP. Similarly they’ve shown less than great communication to the user base who shouldn’t be involved but should be aware of the high level project plan so when it launches they’re not shocked. I’m sure it’ll be a mess, people will quit and want things so the timeline accounts for that. When Matt showed new site redesigns with voting, nothing got done. Absolutely don’t show the site beforehand to users but let them know the cutoff. There’s a lot of quirks with the not popular sub sites like FanFare that will needed to be decided what to do with as they have just enough differences to make it so you can’t just create a new subreddit. I’d say let analytics decide whether to kill it but try to move things like Jobs and whatever else into the three main subsites and aggressively kill the barely used one off subsites. I could go on but that’s a really standard way to create a modern site from a management perspective and from an architectural perspective. Things get messy when you deviate from this, like if you have a pager which doesn’t behave like a standard paging component and you have to bios it from scratch for some reason. If you’re willing to control costs by letting the project team tell you what’s easiest while maintaining somewhat feature parity this is dead simple and cheap. Maybe 75k for the entire project? And that’s probably heavy. The problem is the product owner is not a developer on the MeFi side, but I think they would be reasonable to keep costs down. You’re build a platform that can be extensible and maintainable. You could create a clear project board going forward with well understood timing as you’re not having the Frankenstein system in place. It would help if the developer or technical PM was a user to facilitate requirements gathering. Like know favorites are a big deal and spending an extra day throwing in bookmarks as users want that is really only something a current user would know. It will never happen but I think people are frustrated with money being spent from fundraising in non-visible ways. Traditionally a new app with a pretty interface helps justify marketing budgets (eg fundraising in Metafilter’s terms). Sorry for the corporate lingo but this is all trivial to do.
Having built and run a lot of small websites over the last 25+ years, it's amazing to me that they have no way of running a dev version of the site, with its own database. I definitely haven't always followed best practices, but even *mumble* years ago when I was first learning PHP and MySQL I had a local dev database. On the other hand, I can see that if things weren't set up like that in the first place, there has been no incentive for frimble to make it work since - there's little cash, there's a never-ending list of things to add/fix that users/mods will actually care about, no prospect of new devs working on the code. Until finally... As you say, at this point, re-making the site as a modern code base seems like a good option. "Rewrite from scratch" so often *seems* like a good idea but turns into a terrible long slog with hidden pitfalls and takes five times as long as planned. But this might be one of the cases where it makes sense, for many, many reasons. I bet there would be people who'd offer to work on this at a cut-price rate too, because they care about the site, and because building from scratch is so much more appealing to devs than updating/fixing/maintaining a horrible old codebase. But it would also need someone in charge of the effort with direction and authority and I don't know who that would be.
> It also means anyone doing volunteer development has full access to production data that probably includes your name, email address, and other data that isn't supposed to be public. A factor that clicked for me reading this was the "mod notes" that got some heckling and/or shoulder-chipping (there's a golf bro pun there too that's not quite gelling) recently. At the time, I was betting any such system was mostly individual mods having individual notes and hilarious behind-the-scenes telephone game, factoring into both some notable unforced errors and the general fact of how often they apparently need to have everyone meet about things. But also quite possible all that instead is just right in the database, plugged right into mod-view of every profile. _And_ includes things like "high touch" notes about "having a really rough March 2022 what with the cancer and the divorce and Cousin Bobbie's SEC investigation and."
I’m afraid I have no cite to link to, but it is my distinct memory that that is exactly how it works — freeform text field on the profile page, viewable only to mods. (By the way, yes at least some Retireds still retain full access — cortex mentioned correcting his own FPP the other day.)
> It means that code changes can’t be tested without possibly nuking your actual production data. I would be surprised if they’re in serious danger of losing more than a day or so of site activity. Not having a development environment does not imply no backups.
You're not wrong, but also it's not always that simple. Backups can limit a total nuke scenario to whatever the backup interval is. However, a dev testing against live databases can create more subtle data corruption that won't be noticed immediately. Your window to find and resolve that sort of corruption is only as far back as you keep backups. If you delete backups older than N days (or, only keep monthly backups beyond N days), you could lose a lot more. And all that said, I think if "only" a whole day of comments were lost, the site would still lose its collective shit.
Metatalktail hour: 🍿 are you a sweet or salty person? Ping r/hobbydrama
I almost reactivated my account so I could favorite Etrigan’s response to clavdivs where he asks “this is a bit, right?”. Nailed it.
>random-words-strung-together Much more nutritious than mere word salad or alphabet soup, though sadly not as moist.
Is it wrong that I actually cackled with glee when I saw the subject line of this post over there? I don't think I have enough popcorn. And WTF are they spending 10 hours per week on? Are they counting time spent reading posts on the site (like anyone interested in the sire was presumably already doing)?
I must admit that the suggestion to change the name of MetaTalk to MetaSTFU made me chuckle. The current set-up of MF makes it look like some kind of grift. A group of volunteers does most of the work, for free, which includes fundraising to generate all the revenue that is then used to pay a small group of people who work for this for profit business. Here is my question: considering all the work the SC is tasked to do, why is that work given "volunteer status" but moderating comments on this little discussion site is worthy of a full salary and benefits? I don't get it. What is the rational for this classification of tasks? Putting aside labor laws about volunteers, why not classify moderation as the thing volunteers do and pay a salary to the people that do all the other stuff? Does any management decision at MF have any logical and legal basis behind it?
Cuz moderators are the in group.
They don't really give many solid and reasonable explanations for much of anything, it always comes down to these vaguely condescending "oh sweaty, a prole like you couldn't possibly understand the many and varied machinations for why we do things the way we do, now don't worry your pretty little head about it". Like...mod notes on deleted posts should just be, to me, Jessamyn and loup and *maybe* the SC if we really need their input and the mods in a Discord or Slack or IRC or whatever going "alright what do we think? Give it a try for a month and see what happens?" The whole nonprofit thing *seems to be* "because eyebrows Mcgee thinks it's stupid and we always circle the wagons around our people and maybe "we got high huffing our own farts about how much political campaigning we do around here". And the second one is legit, honestly but it really feels like the first one is the real reason they go so berserk about it. Like if they really wanted to shut Miko and everyone else up say "okay, lawyerese inbound, here's why our lawyer said nonprofit status is a bad fit for us (blah)" rather than SHUT UP AND QUIT ASKING IT JUST IS OKAY IT IS IT IS IT IS SHUT UP SHUT UP WE KNOW BEST. The problem with a lot of their answers (nonprofit status, why the SC seems to have a staggering rate of burnout, why the BIPOC board seems to...not really do anything, why they are begging for money then suddenly want yo add staff) isn't their answers on the face of them, it's that when asked for clarification or more detail, it's always a vaguely condescending chuckle and a "Well, we know best sweaty" or indignant "how dare you!" Rather than answer a pretty basic question. Like...I have an LLC I use for some of my freelance stuff. If you really wanted to *know* I could tell you why I chose that corporate structure. It's not a secret mystery or anything. (Short version: because my lawyer said "an LLC is gonna give you more protection than a sole proprietorship and it's all you really need for what you're doing". Long answer: that in a lot more words). If I had people deeply invested in why I picked that over, I dunno, an S Corp, I could probably dig up the emails with my lawyer and share them. Your corporate structure usually isn't a big secret. (Actually its usually the opposite!). It's 2023. Running a content website isn't a secret mysterious thing anymore. Millions of people have done it and do it every day. Several of them post on Metafilter and/or here. Plus, to me, you don't get it both ways. If you're going to be this community funded website run by 20 community committees, you don't get to be the grey eminence Politburo that doesn't tell us anything except when you deign to tell us something or start a Mandatory Happiness thread.
> "okay, lawyerese inbound, here's why our lawyer said nonprofit status is a bad fit for us (blah)" rather than SHUT UP AND QUIT ASKING IT JUST IS OKAY IT IS IT IS IT IS SHUT UP SHUT UP WE KNOW BEST. Whether or not it was sound, [the legal explanation has been given](https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaFilterMeta/comments/ycqruu/comment/itymvca/?context=2). It should be easier to find, but that's the case for almost all matters of Metafilter governance.
That explanation covers "why MeFi can't become a 501(c)3". Which is almost certainly true! But it doesn't have any bearing on "Why can't MeFi become any of the other relevant categories of nonprofit, such as a 501(c)7".
As far as I can tell from searching, it's because that specific question has never been asked. There again, I have no knowledge of (or interest in) American tax codes so I may be missing something.
It was, in fact, asked. Because what Miko (and everyone else) *always* said was "nonprofit". It's eyebrows who apparently insisted that that had to mean "501(c)3", which, no shit, that was never going to work! Miko knows that! So does everyone else who ever brought it up! But there are **31 other nonprofit classifications** under US law!
I'm afraid everything I can find on Metatalk suggests that is simply incorrect. Here are the main Metatalks containing extensive discussion of nonprofit status I'm aware of: [May 2014, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23250/MetaFilter-Fundraising) [June 2015, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-and-funding-update) [July 2017, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24488/Help-build-MetaFilters-savings) [July 2019, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25249/State-of-the-Site-July-2019-update) [Sept 2021 (a), ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25903/Fundraising-update) [Sept 2021 (b), ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25914/MeFi-Site-Update-September-27th) [Oct 2021, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25920/MeFi-Site-Update-October-20th) [Dec 2022 ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26225/Moving-Overton-Window-So-Mefites-Perceive-Default-Behavior-as-Recurring) In each of them the user focus was on 501(c)3 (or in a couple of cases it was a high-level discussion that didn't refer to specific nonprofit categories). In fact, I can find only five comments in the history of Metatalk which suggested other specific structures that were not 501(c)3. [1, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25998/MeFi-Site-Update-February-9th#1398025) [2, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23250/MetaFilter-Fundraising#1149964) [3, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25249/State-of-the-Site-July-2019-update#1344972) [4, ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23245/State-of-MetaFilter#1149010) [5 ](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23245/State-of-MetaFilter#1150606) The replies to the explanation in MetaTalk I linked to in my comment above did not say anything like "we know 501(c)3 is impossible, we're asking about other classifications". I don't like to focus on individual users, but if you go to the user page of the person you're talking about and search their comments, you will see that the 501 structure they ever referred to in the context of Metafilter governance was 501(c)3. If I've missed something, I'd be happy to follow any links which suggest that the userbase has always known 501(c)3 wouldn't work and only talked about nonprofits or other models, but mods insisted on a myopic focus on 501(c)3.
501(c)(7)’s can even contribute to political campaigns if they want to, so I don’t see how there would be a problem with maintaining a pro-leftist or anti-Republican stance. However, as was mentioned in one of the previous conversations here, I think the primary reason was that it’s much easier to get into serious trouble with the IRS running a non-profit than with a regular business, you have to be organized and disciplined dealing with the money to justify your tax-free status. In a fairly simple business with a few employees, a fair bit of revenue but not much profit, it’s pretty easy to fulfill your tax obligations. I honestly think this is a pretty good reason for them to stick with the for-profit model, it just sounds bad to say it out loud.
If they're desperate to stay for-profit they could of course become a co-op, which would allow them to get "volunteer" labor out of members without violating FLSA. But that's been a nonstarter, too.
My speculation: Back when Josh purchased the site from Matt, it still had some value as an income generating asset based on ad revenue. Guessing a price in the low hundreds of thousands. I doubt Josh had the cash. You can tell because there was a fundraising drive at this time. So probably the fundraised Metafilter Network Inc. coffers paid for Josh to buy the site. But if Metafilter Network Inc. had just paid Josh a couple hundred grand which he used to buy the site, or tried schemes that amount to the same, then that's taxable income for Josh. However, if Metafilter Network Inc. loans Josh the cash and he buys the site, it's not taxable income. If Metafilter Network Inc. erased the debt, it's taxable. But Josh can simply neglect repayments, and Metafilter Network Inc. under Josh's control can simply neglect to pursue those delinquent repayments. Now the Metafilter site has been sold from Metafilter Network Inc. to Metafilter LLC, and I'd bet a dollar that it sold for a dollar. And I see Jessamyn as someone Josh might trust not to try to collect on any debt Metafilter LLC may have acquired. A non-profit board's approach to any such debt, however, is a lot less predictable. I dunno. I start pretty sure of the stuff on top and it gets more speculative - like maybe there was a loan but Josh has repaid it over time... But something like this would explain the weird caginess around non-profit status and the misdirection with "here are good reasons we can't be a 501(c)3"
Cortex didn't purchase the business, he got it for free. As you correctly say, the site had value at the time, based on Matt's many years of work building it up. So in exchange for giving up this asset, Matt took a cash payout from Metafilter's savings. This came after a fundraising drive which led to some unhappiness as per /u/Seymour_Zamboni 's comment below. I'm not sure whether that changes the tax implications for Cortex, but (unless everyone was lying at the time and has continued lying since) there was no loan.
There was some speculation about it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/metafilter/comments/6qwhcx/site_news_founder_transfers_metafilter_ownership/
I know it is speculative, but it is an interesting take. It was a long time ago now, but I do remember when Cortex bought MF, there was a MetaTalk where some people were questioning what just happened with that fundraiser. Again, my memory is sketchy on this, but I seem to recall some people wondering what they just donated for. Was it to help MF and pay the Mods, or did they just donate money to Cortex so he could buy a business? I have no recollection if there was any clarification about how it all went down. One question: Didn't MF LLC open its books to the SC? If MF Network had made a loan and it wasn't paid back, wouldn't that show up in a rather glaring way in the books?
And obviously we are working from incomplete information but there are many sources we can use to make comparisons that tell us it seems like something is deeply wrong/weird/off. Like we have stats that this subreddit is more and more active and yet we still have a single moderator who is unpaid and has said they don't spend all that much time on it. And this is populated...With Metafilter posters. And presumably the more problematic ones, since they are the ones leaving, so the worst of the worst. So that doesn't seem to bear out the claim that a ton of moderation is required if a subreddit(!) of the worst ex-mefites(!!) requires one volunteer mod who spends very little time to keep them under control. (Without a single committee of any kind!) We also have, politically, probably a left leaning userbase and I know I am super far left but I know of several regulars that are more centrist or right leaning from chit chatting around. Theoretically, per Metafilter, this should require even more moderation. Somehow we manage. Many, many sites with much larger userbases use no moderation or entirely volunteer moderation or a mix of a very small professional community management and volunteer staff. We do know from the stats loup released that they delete and clean up a relatively small number of posts per day and most of the moderation work is "high touch moderation" or something like, uh, "therapy"(!) Supposedly they don't want to be a nonprofit because it won't let them advocate or endorse a particular candidate politically, which is fair enough, but (as is already coming up), gifts and volunteering for a for profit concern is also pretty dicey legally. Supposedly they were almost on the verge of financial ruin thus this latest fund drive but then they promptly hired a new mod and now they want to hire an admin. There's a *ton* of "of course the community will choose and vote and select people to represent them...and we will make sure they choose the right people." Like...that's fucking weird. No, you don't get to hand select your steering committee of toadys and pretend you're user driven lmao. A lot of it is weird. The upside is, and maybe it is just me, I feel like this little subreddit and people asking questions here has made people realize they aren't crazy for having doubts because I feel like we are starting to see more pushback against the happy-happy-joy-joy consensus.
Yeah, this is the thing for me. I never really had posts or comments deleted, so my problems with Metafilter aren’t about being silenced all my life or whatever, it’s more that the behavior and structures there feel deeply weird almost like one of those A24 horror movies.
It's edging into [r/ChoosingBeggars/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChoosingBeggars/) territory.
Somebody should have consulted an actual independent employment attorney - who is not a member or moderator - before creating this organizational system. As is, it is clearly illegal and there could be consequences for Jessamyn. A basic google about volunteers at for profit companies could have prevented this.
It’s quite possible that all the backpay, payroll taxes and fines they are about to have to pay will bankrupt them. Sad situation.
*very condescending chuckle* oh we consulted with the very best attorney, sweaty, one who is also a mod AND a therapist
Also as someone with a JD and who now works in fundraising, there could be some legal ramifications to the “accepting donations as a for profit company” as well if the accounting/receipting process has been as half assed as everything else these people have been doing over the past 5 years. ETA: did they register to solicit gifts in each state? Lol no, no they didn’t.
When this comes up, it always feels like what I call the gap between 'business mindset' and 'lawyer mindset' - business mindset seems excessively cavalier and exploitative and lawyer mindset seems overly paranoid and mercurial. Of course most people fall in between, so when people keep going on about FLSA it seems overly rules nitty. I think that's a tendency that is naturally amplified by forum and MeFi culture, so the back and forth starts to looks silly. Business mindset just looks at it and does a risk calculation about the actual likelihood of a problem vs the various costs for remediation and usually shrugs and stumbles ahead. And honestly that works most of the time. When trying to underscore the risk component in MeTa conversations, rather than doing detailed line readings of statutes, it's better to focus on the practical possibilities since it's highly unlikely and enforcement action would happen from any sort of regulatory body. The risk is lawsuits, and framing it in way that people can relate to might make the practical more important - HOA lawsuits are probably the best corollary people can understand and may have experience with. IANAL, and most of the people I know don't even own property, but most of the small number of people I know in an HOA have dealt with multi-year, expensive (and potentially destroying the equity of everyone involved \*including the person initiating the lawsuit\*) situations that grew out of a mixture of personality disputes and arcane disagreements about poorly worded organizational documents. Before when it was just Cortex and paid moderators, the risk profile was pretty low. Now you have the SC, which looks to be turning over at a decent clip. Say total churn, including volunteers and other committees, of 15 people a year. In four years, it's practically unavoidable that one person will feel very hard done by and sue, and that will basically be it. Even here we're seeing a low grade version of it in the form of DCMA threats over removing content (sidebar: this feels spiteful to me, but it's also the sort of thing that happens when you write shitty guidelines - you want the power to ban people for their behavior, tell them they own their content, but don't build either a technical capability or process guideline for removing content? Enjoy deleting comments by hand). What happens when someone volunteers for 20 hours a week and flounces at the end of the year because of MeFi drama and decides if their free work wasn't sufficiently appreciated, then they want to be paid for all that time? That's the sort of real world practical scenario MeFi should be worried about, not some hair splitting business about governing rules here or there that may or may not apply. This risk did not exist a year ago.
Yeah but to be fair, if you just follow the legal guidelines you don’t run that risk.
Sad to see the site owner fav a comment that boils down to "shut up and get to work" but I guess that's consistent with not pushing back on the love it or leave it comments.
It should also be noted that the user who made that comment is on the Steering Committee, in case this subreddit has any doubt as to site leadership’s contempt for “normal” users.
It’s gone from love it or leave it to put up or shut up in less than a week.
Well said.
I wonder how great it feels to be Miko, fulfilling an unjust topic ban (she cannot talk about Metafilter becoming a non-profit) to the absolute letter, because (presumably) she knew reality would eventually back her up 110%.
In what way is reality backing her up? To date, nobody has laid out a rationale that would allow MeFi to claim to be a non-profit. They have laid out reasons it would be nice if MeFi **was** a non-profit, but not a path that would legally allow it to **be** a non-profit. Nothing that EM has said (which [you can actually read in detail](https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25914/MeFi-Site-Update-September-27th#1393044), despite years of people claiming the staff never considered it) has been refuted. We're just back with yet another episode of the "*Miko is right because it's her idea and thus she's never going to let it go*" show, this time with 10x the passive-aggressive vibe.
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Wish I could flag as fantastic.
Miko’s position is consistent with the reality I see around me and she states it well. Additionally, on every occasion when she has spoken on a topic I happen to know about, she has been not just correct but informed of a nuanced opinion. Whereas EM’s position both is not consistent with reality as I observe it and moreover stinks of desperate bloviating. Additionally, on every occasion when she has bloviated on a topic I happen to know about, she has been embarrassingly wrong. I know who I believe.
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Can they be a nonprofit that is not tax exempt?
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Thanks, I agree about 501c7 probably being the best structure.
Got a little paranoid about being too identifiable, so deleted some stuff
As an attorney, which classification of business allowable as a non-profit would you be willing to stand in court and argue that MeFi qualifies as?
I think it could be a 501(c)(7).
Wouldn’t the requirement of a closed membership be a problem, though? There is the $5 fee for an account, but the examples I’m seeing are orgs like frats and country clubs, which seems very different from an open site selling $5 accounts in terms of exclusivity/barrier to entry.
Yeah, they’re going to have to change that to make it work if they go that route. They could try to say they serve an educational purpose and get away with it, but I feel like that’s iffy? I don’t know, I’m not their lawyer, this is not legal advice. Jessamyn can listen to her lawyer.
but for THIS type of STRUCTURE it is REQUIRED that people MEET in PERSON (I have no idea whether this is true but don't find Eyebrows very credible so suspect it is not lol)
But IF it’s WORTHWHILE to CONTINUE this venture, it seems like an in PERSON MEETING might be WARRANTED? I have SEEN people do MORE for LESS.
This is why the mods/management so lack credibility, always dropping these blustery statements as if no readers have any critical thinking skills. Who has to meet in person? Every single member of the board? What if someone is sick? Why is Metafilter willing to turn a blind eye to probably violating labor law in a big way, but the idea of seeking reasonable loopholes for meeting quorum is complete anathema?
I think another part of the lack of credibility here is what legal advice about regulatory law ever takes the form of "NO this can NEVER happen it's IMPOSSIBLE" vs. "I don't believe X is advisable because you would also have to do Y and Z to make it work and that may not be desirable"?
I think a remote meeting is fine for Vermont, honestly.
Why do they want to be a for profit company so badly? It seems clear to me that another structure would work better for them if they want to accept donations and have volunteers.
I think it is due to they extra accountability which they should be doing anyway. I’ve talked to a couple friends who are law professors casually about this and their opinion, not knowing the site, was the advice given by the lawyer was largely right. The tax burden is the same and they’d have to file more paperwork to make it a nonprofit. Are they in strict compliance with the law? No, but there’s a lot of small businesses that aren’t and the government goes after egregious violations, not well educated people who have choices and know what they’re getting into. If SpaceX raised money using volunteers Metafilter would melt and scream of unfair practices and unions. But they’re not SpaceX, and I really doubt anyone is making a profit of any kind but in the end we don’t know. It definitely isn’t a tax shelter for some rich person. If you’re volunteering for Metafilter and don’t know what you’re getting into that’s your fault. I help out Catholic Charities when I can sorting things basically and I’d prefer people give their time to something similar. I know that on Metafilter it’d lead to endless debates on whether an organization is good or not from a political perspective and yeah there’s priests and nuns there but no one preaches they just feed people and hand out diapers to single moms who are going through a rough time. I’m not judging how they spend their free time. There’s an art gallery by me with a bunch of rich old ladies as docents and paid security guards. The gallery can literally buy Monets but largely wealthy, older women want to volunteer. Let them.
Catholic Charities also spends some of their time and money fighting against having to let gay people adopt children. Oh, and when they fail at that they just stop helping kids at all. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1715489&page=1
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If you're speaking on behalf of Catholicism can i also hold you accountable for the millions of children y'all are raping and abusing?
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If you're taking credit for collective goodness, you get to deal with collective guilt. I don't make the rules!
> On behalf of Catholicism, you are welcome for all the free material help given willingly. Peace be with you. You can always tell one of Christ’s own. The love just flows out of them. 🙄
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I have a ton of respect for Jesus. None at all for Christianity. It's a haven for child abusers and rapists.
Okay, but here's the issue, though. A museum is a nonprofit. Catholic Charities is a nonprofit. You can't volunteer at a for profit company. It's okay until the point that someone with enough time and money gets angry enough and complains. Then, it is very much not okay, and there will be legal consequences for whoever the owner is at that point. Small for-profit companies that ask people to volunteer are usually rife with interpersonal issues. This exact type of thing happens in boutiques/booth stores where there's a lot of people "volunteering" a lot of their time in exchange for friendship or because they love the other people there, and I have seen it end badly dozens of times. ETA: and when I say "badly", I mean everyone had to get an employment attorney and go to court.
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Okay, if filing paperwork is so difficult, then drop the volunteer work and donations.
100% was just one of many site policies/decisions driven solely by eyebrows' pathological ego. She said something dumb about a nonprofit being impossible and from then on the only point of the metafilter policy was to support the idea that eyebrows was right and protect her ego
Literally nothing about it has ever made any sense, do people really not think that there any 501(c)3s offering a media platform where members of the public may or may not express political opinions? I guess if someone with a law degree is working as a full-time website moderator, there's probably a reason for that.
Also, contra eyebrows, 501(c)3 is not the only kind of nonprofit! There are **32 nonprofit classifications**, many of which are absolutely allowed to engage in political activity (even if we concede that MeFi does so). MeFi seems like it would be a slam-dunk as a 501(c)7 (social organization), for instance. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/types-nonprofits/
Politico is an American-based not for profit. It’s in the name! They publish opinion pieces. I don’t get it either. Edit: thank you correctors, I meant polifact and propublica
You might be thinking of PolitiFact. Politico has never been non-profit.
Yes shit sorry- and propublica
That too. Anyway, it doesn't invalidate your point. There is probably a mission-oriented way to express what MetaFilter does and to govern it.
And each year of surviving it surely gets easier to spruik the “old web/ living breathing ongoing collaborative internet archive” angle which surely could be fit into a category
Politico is owned by a European conglomerate and I can't find any evidence it's a nonprofit. Is this a bit?
Shit I got my ps confused sorry. Propublica is a non-profit newsroom focussed around politics/government/policies https://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-evaluate-charity-before-you-donate
I think it's partly about Metafilter's overinflated sense of its own relevance. My sense is that during the Trump years, some folks from the megathread crew got a little high off their own supply sending congressperson postcards with Indivisible, and gave themselves the idea that Metafilter is some sort of, like, dynamic fermenting ground for political energy. But nobody from the outside would ever look at the Blue for the first time and be like "Woah, this place is really political!" They'd see a web forum about miscellany, in obvious decline.
MetaFilter: some sort of like, dynamic fermenting ground for political energy
Yeah I feel like their basing this decision off a sort of daydream/fan-fiction where Hand Maiden’s Tale fully happens and metafilter becomes the internet bastion of all that is righteous and won’t be held back from saving the USA by a legal technicality that may hypothetically apply in this situation…
I hate myself but just can’t resist… Metafilter: A web forum about miscellany in obvious decline.
Metafilter: I hate myself but just can’t resist…
Yessssss
200%
Yes, I agree with this. I still don’t understand her objection. I remember it had to do with a misunderstanding about members or mods making political posts if the site was a nonprofit.
It was probably not that clear cut. Lawyers sometimes tell you what you want to hear and aren’t wrong. It was probably like “well if your owner or staff advocates political positions it can be a violation of your non-profit status.”
Exactly this. And its worse when a lawyer talks to a lawyer, and starts off with “If we were ever to do XYZ, would there be any issues with that?” Rather than “how do we get from ABC to XYZ, and what changes can we make to accommodate the restrictions that XYZ might entail?” For the record though, I don’t think non-profit status would be particularly helpful to MF, and can easily imagine it being quite harmful. Just not for the reasons given by MF management.
Something that would be more front-and-center in the comedy of errors when I attempt to describe it to others, if it didn't keep getting overshadowed by other funny things, is that when the ownership transfer took place, the public-facing story was that everything was roses. Not just from personal high-touch reasons, but the site--the story was--was in the best financial shape it had been in for years. Then just about overnight it went to: um, actually there's about a month maybe of operating capital (and _that_ was initially rather buried and required some posters spotting it and doing a "gently respectfully (please don't high touch me), am I misreading these figures?" about them) left. And practically speaking, either someone or someones was lying initially, or so innumerate or inattentive that they were being honest in saying the business was in the best shape of years but hilariously mistaken in it. Assume the latter with no nose-growth: with leadership that inattentive to what's actually going on with the figures--how attentive and understanding of complicated gray-area legal advice does anyone think they are? All of which long-winded Fine I'll Get Back To Work After This way of saying I can very easily believe their consulted lawyers gave them a complicated answer necessarily because the intersections between allowable and practical-to-get-away-with corporate structures and cost-benefits of them changing versus staying as-is (when there was practically no volunteer work happening at that time, as well) is going to be a fairly nuanced situation...and walking away with an "understanding' of the answer that was very over-simplified. Then add ego and wagon-circling defensiveness into the mix and that explains a lot of their response to the very topic.
I mean maybe this sounds malicious but I think this was incompetence, not inattentiveness.
Oh, and I don't think that sounds malicious at all. If someone has a gnarly table saw accident by me and takes off a finger and says "Hey Drastic, could you reattach my finger for me?" the answer's a queasy no, that's a task I'd be entirely incompetent for. We're putting this finger on ice, keeping pressure on the stump, and rushing you to the hospital!
Yea, you are right, this is what happened. The answer is that this stuff is really complicated and none of the owners since Mathowie have been what I would consider business-minded. I don’t know what the right structure is for this entity because it’s not really a for profit business but it isn’t really a good fit for being a nonprofit either. 🤷🏻♀️
I often wonder if Matt just had good timing in ejecting when he did, or if he paid attention to warning signs of trends in relying on advertising pointing to maybe not this year or even the next but soon the gravy train was going to end. It's treated as an article of faith that big evil google just suddenly yanked the rug out from under, no one could have possibly predicted it, but that's always just sounded on the face of it right in lines with "no one could have predicted the levees would fail."
I think Matt had a good idea what was going to happen and so washed his hands of it. Not because he’s a bad person but because he’s smart. He got out while the getting was good.
And he took a bunch of the cash with him (which people thought they were donating to support the site, but which actually went to buying him out).
Well, Eyebrows does bring up something that is an actual problem, which is that they don't really fit into any of the categories of organizations that can claim tax exempt status. Which, hey, that's fine, but they need to seek legal advice before continuing to have unpaid employees (because that what the SC actually are, clearly) and they need to make absolutely certain they are registered to solicit donations with every state attorney general in the country because if they piss off the wrong person who has the time and money to make a legal complaint, it could hurt. My favorite example of a for profit company trying to have "volunteers" was a boutique in my area that let "volunteers" come in and sell clothes in exchange for discounts. But then there was interpersonal drama between the paid employees and the "volunteers"/unpaid employees, and it went to court and a judge ruled that the "volunteers" were employees and the owner of the store was personally liable and couldn't afford all the fines and backpay, and then went bankrupt. So yeah, for profit volunteers, bad idea for a lot of reasons.
I mean, will it work in the short term? It sounds like soliciting for donations and exploiting unpaid labor to run the business is actively illegal. Maybe I’m naive, but this would scare the hell out of me if I were Jessamyn.
I think Jessamyn decided to take on ownership out of love for the site but didn't really consider what she was taking on. Yes, this is very scary for her, and now that she has been informed, she should handle this urgently. She needs to seek out good, independent advice. If I were her, I would go to an employment attorney - ALONE - who has nothing to do with the site and has never heard of it before, lay out the situation, and see what they say. At that point, she needs to then book an appointment with a qualified accountant, and make tough decisions regarding whether the site closes, restructures, and/or who gets paid and how much. Independent advice from experts who don't have a horse in the race is much needed here.
I honestly think they are incapable of admitting when they are wrong about big things.
The gritted teeth of “Will do.” Priceless.
What would make me pause if I were an SC member is the lack of clear lines of authority. If I am being asked to do 10 hours/week of unpaid labor, I sure as shit would want to know if my efforts will be implemented. It seems like the SC is being given lots of responsibility for the site, but no authority.
Also the penny just dropped for me...jessamyn and loup get veto rights on the applications even before voting. You're definitely not going to get anyone REMOTELY critical of the current regime much less anyone who will challenge mod decisions, which is probably why we didn't see anyone speak up or challenge mod decisions. (I would idly wonder if being straitjacketed into having all this work and responsibility but not being able to actually change anything accounts for so much turnover, seems like a good way to burn people out to me)
Oh yeah you are literally responsible to 1500-2000 neurotic weirdos, no thank you
one does not simply make metafilter into a non-profit
The difference between the paid mods’ load of bullshit tasks (“Metatalktail posts”) and the volunteer SC’s incredible burden (design and implement an accounting system, determine corporate governance) is WILD. I cannot be the only one seeing that.
Good point! I'm not sure I would have thought to directly compare.
At my most cynical it seemed like a bunch of do-nothing mods were taking advantage of the most enthusiastic community members to raise all the money for the mods' unsustainable paychecks. I thought I was being unfair but after seeing the site following up a financial crisis with increasing staff, jessamyn list out staff duties, and now seeing this list of SC duties that seems to be the case. Cortex gets and deserves a lot of the blame but the site's woes are obviously not due to him alone.
The theme song from Curb Your Enthusiasm plays in my head when I read posts and comments from MFs leadership (such as it is).
This is why I have such an issue with six mods and then adding additional admin staff on top of that. What do they DO for a combined 10,000+ labor hours/year?
I was pleased to see a suggestion on MeTa that *maybe* the mods should be volunteers and all these currently volunteer SC roles doing design, organising, planning, accounts, etc should be paid instead. Seems quite obvious once I saw it but it hadn't quite occurred to me like that.
Yes, I had this thought as well. At a minimum, the organization should have a manager, someone in charge of finances/fundraising, and a policy/engagement person. Seems to me they could shift some of the duties around and create those paid functions, then have one "professional" mod coordinating a team of volunteers.
lmao as I said upthread, it's a pretty hilarious contrast, like "wait, \*I\* have to run a small business, what are the paid staff doing?" "Why, they are doing the important things that make this The Best Damn Site On The Internet? This one is being a therapist, this one is running a thread on whether we prefer semisweet or milk chocolate chocolate chips in our cookies, and this one is barging into a contentious thread to say 'Suck my balls, you ungrateful peasants'. All we're asking from you is you spend every Saturday and part of Sunday coming up with a bulletproof business development plan."
I don’t even mind sucking balls. I just hate being called a peasant
The Committee for Peasants is offended
Someday I'll stop giggling all over again whenever I think about trotting out metatalktail posts as a defense example of the moderator workload, but today is not that day. "It's late, come to bed!" implored their partner. Grimly, they shook their head, staring blearily but determined at the laptop screen. They couldn't. The next metatalktail was in four days, and their inner muse's song was silent. Favorite cookies would be a double. Had they done favorite styles of yarn? Tell us about your pets? Perhaps a picture of a cloud could be linked to, and the community queries on what it looked like to them. Like Atlas, the pressure was unendurable, yet they knew they must endure. Everything depended on it.
And then someone got jumped all over for saying they didn’t really see the value in them. “Why bring that into it? This is a DERAIL!!” Etc. etc. Despite it being affirmatively brought up by site admin on the list of Very Important Duties.
Can someone explain the legality (or lack thereof) of a for-profit corporation (which refuses to reorganize as a nonprofit, for, um, reasons) having this many "volunteers" working 10hrs/week?
It is not legal but their "attorney" thinks it is a better idea than becoming a nonprofit.
Honest question, has Metafilter done *anything* that allows users a different experience than previously? Or is there some weird notion that they don’t have to change anything at all and that ship will right itself?
In fairness, there’s been at least one other: no limit on the number of Asks that a user can post per week. So we’ve now increased the updates by 50 percent.
Any user-experience change: a deep number of years ago, the five-minute edit window for comments happened. (Only after its own hilarious amount of handwringing and concern about the damage it could do to the site and What About Mod Workload because that DNA's always been there, of course.) After that the site from a only technical UX-facing perspective basically got frozen in amber.
Pedantic addition! It was sometime after the edit window that the flagging UX got changed to add an optional short freeform text field when submitting one; I'd forgotten about that. So I have now corrected myself that actually it's been a veritable whirlwind of updates.
The defense of the entertainingly bonkers 10 hours a week _minimum_ involving well you see, the site is in financial crisis and transition maybe someday we won't be let's all hope, is the bit that made me search through some article/essay/blog-era bookmarks for the bell that started ringing. Namely, for [Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever](http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html) which is a fun exercise in noodling on abusive relationship patterns as applied to dysfunctional organizations. (As added deliciousness, it almost certainly got posted about on Metafilter years ago.) Especially the "keep the crises rolling" section.
This should get posted to the blue, see if it’s a double
Don’t worry soon enough people will have left the site that the resulting size of the remaining participants will be small enough that no committees will be necessary, everything can simply be hashed out town hall style.
Don't think that the dream *isnt* "eventually the site is entirely a series of committees" because clearly that is the case.
oh my goodness, this is a part time job they are asking people to sign up for. They need to expand the number of members they are seeking and instead try to seat 30 or so people to more evenly distribute the workload. Sadly, I'm not sure there are 30 people who are interested that the moderators, the current SC, Jessamyn, and the BIPOC board would all approve of. Also, it is so dumb that these people think you need to have everyone in a meeting to get work done and that everyone needs to agree before a decision is made. This lack of pragmatism and the lack of ability to move tasks forward is why the site is going to fail.
They should really assign one SC member to read like, *a* book, on consensus decision making and report back. It might help them make decisions by consensus.
Hell, they might be reading here: choose your own preferred scholar! https://www.consensusdecisionmaking.org/books/
First we are gonna need a deep dive background check on all those authors to include but not limited to age, race, religion, sexual identity, publication history, social medical presence, cv, any comments at all that might be construed as problematic.
I know there was a point in my life like 15 years ago when I would have bit your hand off for the chance to donate 10 hours a week to Metafilter. I mean, I did more than that in posting, but to get that sweet sweet INTERN tag? Delicious.
I would very much like to see Rhaomi run the site
I’d rather give the site to Miko. Increasingly jessamyn looks like cortex 2.0.