Stardate 20011019.1712 (On Screen): Well, I've gone out on a limb before here with predictions, so I'm going to make another one now: I expect that
Matt will finally get fed up with Metafilter and do one of two things within the next month: either stop managing it and let it freerun (i.e. no fixes of front-page mistakes, no deletion of objectionable or double posts, no nothing -- maybe he even stops reading it) or else he's going to take it down outright. It's going to be a collaborative decision between him and
Jason (since Jason is providing the bandwidth and may be regretting that now, considering how busy the site is, and because Jason has to do any hands-on management like backups). The inmates have taken over the asylum and they're
thoroughly abusing his hospitality.
I've written about how I think of my discussion system as being a virtual party that I've invited you all to participate in. Matt's party (featuring about ten thousand of his closes friends) has turned into a riot. Unfortunately, the worst thing about it is that the majority of people participating there no longer think of themselves as being guests in Matt's virtual home; they think of themselves as being residents in a community.
Just today someone wrote to me and asked why I decided to use UBBS for my discussion system instead of taking advantage of the commenting feature that Graymatter supports. There are several reasons. First, it's more convenient for me. Graymatter's discussion system works very well for someone who posts no more than twice per day, but I have sometimes written fifteen per day, and I average well above that (1155 posts in 145 days since I started using Greymatter). In every other regard Greymatter seems to be scaling pretty well (though a "rebuild all" now takes quite a long time; fortunately it isn't necessary to do that very often). But its comment system isn't really right for that: For me to keep up with comments (because they're usually discussions rather than comments), I'd have to load the front page myself regularly and try to remember how many comments each thread had so I could figure out which ones had new comments. With UBBS, on the other hand, all the comments are collected in one place and UBBS itself tells me which ones are new since the last time I looked. It's far easier for me.
But another reason is that UBBS has far stronger management mechanisms. I'm not using them all, but they can be turned on if I wish. Right now there are somewhat above 80 registered members and that's fine. But these kinds of things tend to follow an exponential curve, and it could very easily explode. If that happens, I'll enable a feature which makes it so that I have to manually approve new memberships, and I'll meter the rate at which new people are let in. To some extent, I observed the decline of MetaFilter (beginning about the time membership hit 2000 or so) and thought deeply about it before I decided what to do with a discussion system here, and my choice of UBBS was heavily driven by that. I don't want Clueless Comments to become Son of MetaFilter. (Tokyo would never survive it.) (discussion in progress)
