Mod-on-user, mod-on-mod WORDS of violence as antient site Metafilter circles the drain. Moderate Effort background within.

Brief rundown on Metafilter:

• The site was started in 1999 by Matthew "mathowie" Haughey as a "community weblog", an early vision of the typical link aggregation site we are all familiar with. Early on it was noted for a live thread on the September 11, 2001 attacks, when such live discussion of a momentous event was a novelty.

• Became known for mathowie's enforcement of editorial standards on posts, resulting in higher quality posts. As site traffic grows he's raking in the Google ad bux and needs help moderating, so hires first Jessamyn "jessamyn" West and then Josh "cortex" Millard. Metafilter jannies never did it for free!

• Around 2007, prefiguring the Current Year, Metafilter goes proto-Woke. Now it requires more exacting ideological enforcement, beginning the employment of a rotating cast of mods, with staff headcount ranging anywhere from about 6-10. Things are flush for Metafilter and mathowie for some years, though the site undergoes continual spasms of woke cultural revolution.

• In the early 2010s, however, the Google ad bux start to dry up. Adjustments have to be made. Mathowie has a falling out with jessamyn when he lays her off and, when finances stabilize for a while, doesn't rehire her but instead hires a cheaper new mod.

• Mathowie tires of his creation and its drama and grows increasingly hands-off, leaving operations to cortex. Their relationship also seems strained. Site finances never really stabilize long-term.

• Things come to a head in 2014. Cortex announces the site needs to run a donation drive for funds to continue operating, and then he takes ownership of the site corporation, Metafilter Inc., from mathowie.

• What the heck just happened there? Speculation: mathowie wanted to shut down the financially unsustainable site, firing all the staff, making it read-only, and just taking the residual ad revenue. Cortex wanted to buy the site and continue to run it, but didn't have the cash. So Metafilter Inc., took donations and loaned the donated money to its employee cortex, which cortex used to purchase Metafilter Inc. from mathowie. Very speculative!

• Cortex starts taking continual donations, so the site is now run off dwindling ad bux and a dwindling stream of donations.

• Woke drama and financial drama continue from time to time as the site slowly decays. It's expensive for userbase size as the few thousand monthly actives demand 24/7 strict janitorial patrols, though recently finances have gotten to the point that 24/7 cannot quite be maintained.

• The site feedback / meta discussion area "MetaTalk", used to host enormous dramatic arguments, but has been thoroughly locked down in recent years. This post is a rare eruption of the constant thinly-veiled seething that is Metafilter.

• One issue is that the site would make a lot more sense as a non-profit, because it is not going to make a profit ever. The userbase has often suggested this, to which the mods first responded cagily, and then with misdirection by saying it was infeasible to become a tax-exempt charity, which is not necessarily the same as becoming a non-profit.

• Certainly if the site became a non-profit cortex would no longer have the option of archiving it and extracting any residual ad revenue for himself. If the speculation of him purchasing the corporation with a loan from the corporation is true, perhaps there might still be debt cortex would have to pay in the process of becoming a non-profit?

In this post, longtime user "Miko" has experience running non-profit organizations and has over the years been one of the users vocal about transforming the site into one. Finally cortex goes from ignoring her to telling her to frick off in the passive-aggressive Metafilter moderator way. People rage-quit the site, block cortex on social media, tell him to hand the site over to someone else, etc. Cortex announces he is burnt out and will let his employees run the site, just as mathowie once stepped back and let cortex run the site.

Then current (higher-ranked?) moderator "Eyebrows McGee" makes a comment putting Miko on blast. This gets jannied by cortex and replaced with a link to a prior statement, but snippets of the deleted comment are still there as quotations. Some of the users are catching on about "become a non-profit" and "become a 501(c)3" not being the same thing. Moderator "LobsterMittens" finally y'alls the thread because users, moderators, and owner cannot behave.