MetaFilter

MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-and-answer subsite Ask MetaFilter. The site has six paid staff members, including the owner, and, as of early 2011, about 12,000 active members.

Community

MetaFilter was founded by Matthew Haughey in 1999. Haughey wrote the software for the site himself, using Macromedia ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server. The earliest Front Page Post (FPP), concerning cats in scanners and the resulting pictures, debuted on July 14, 1999.

From its early beginnings as a small community of webloggers who traded links, the weblog now enjoys international popularity. Members are permitted to make one post to the front page per day, which must feature at least one link. Members may then comment on these posts.

Although membership was initially free and unrestricted, growing membership forced frequent extended closures of new-member signup. On November 18, 2004, Haughey reopened signups, but with a 5 USD life-time membership fee. According to Time magazine, this fee keeps the site "remarkably free of trolls, griefers and other anonymous jerks", resulting in a "public-spirited flavor of a small town or good university". Although the number of registrations has topped 100,000, a design flaw in the counting process means that it counts users who abandoned the signup process mid way; the actual number of posters is smaller, at around 38,700 as of October 2008.