what I think you mean



Uh oh, those are some dangerous words there, Rogers. I think I can handle telling people what I mean all by myself....you know, with my "power" and everything.



"MetaFilter's too crowded. Nobody goes there any more."



MetaFilter, for me, has been disappointing because it's not what it was supposed to be (based upon my understanding of what Matt initially wanted the site to be and my observations of the site's first few months). (Matt, you should correct me if I'm wrong on any of this...)



MetaFilter was designed primarily to be a group weblog and for the first months of the site (not counting those months at the very beginning when it was just Matt posting), it functioned very well like that. The community, such as it was at the time, brought good links and intelligent commentary to the site. You could read an entire day's output in a few minutes. People seemed to care about keeping the quality high and the noise low. It was a group weblog, it belonged to every member equally, there was a sense of ownership.



Gradually (but almost completely at this stage), MetaFilter changed into something else: a watercooler conversation with 10,000 participants. MetaFilter became a discussion board with a weblog tacked on the front of it...a place to have conversations about things. In the shift from weblog to conversations and with the addition of several thousand more people, the linking aspect was de-emph