Steering Committee Check-In: October 2022

October 3, 2022 12:40 PM

The MetaFilter Steering Committee is excited to bring you the first Steering Committee Check-In! Inside we have some updates on what we’ve done in the past month, what we’re working on this month, and a request for input from the community.

Introduction

Hello, MetaFilter Community! This Steering Committee Check-In is our first chance to engage directly with you since being officially elected on August 29 and starting work on September 1.

As a reminder, the activities that the Steering Committee (SC) is primarily responsible for at the outset are:

• Setting and implementing site policies and priorities
• Directing and approving budget expenditures
• Communicating clearly and transparently to the community on SC issues and projects
• Acting as spokespeople, champions, and mediators for concerns of community members

The members who were elected to form the inaugural Steering Committee are, in alphabetical order:

aielen
bendy
GenjiandProust
It's Raining Florence Henderson
jacquilynne
JHarris
kimberussell
lazaruslong
Rhaomi
tavegyl
twelve cent archie
wesleyac

Before we get into it, we’d like to first thank some folks!

• Big thanks to the Transition Team for all of the great work they did managing the transition and setting us up for success. They also provided a starter packet document that contained some great advice and wisdom that was helpful in getting us rolling. We’re grateful to you all, and we won’t let you down!
• Big thanks to everyone at MeFi Admin, especially loup, for being welcoming and receptive as the SC has gotten started.
• Big thanks to the MetaFilter Global BIPOC Board (GBB) for their incisive and thoughtful feedback on how the SC and GBB can strive together towards a shared purpose of making MetaFilter the best version of itself.
• And lastly, huge thanks to the MetaFilter Community (MC) for making this place what it is! There are many different motivations for why the SC members are doing this work, but the fundamental thing we have in common is a love for this community and a desire to see it flourish. You are our reason for being here.

In this and the next few Check-Ins, we’re going to cover a few things:

• What we did last month
• What we’re doing this month
• A request for feedback from the MC on a particular question

In future, we’ll ask the community to provide feedback on how often you prefer to hear from the SC, what topics you prefer to discuss, and in what format you prefer these to occur. For now, this is just our idea of a good way to get started.

What We Did Last Month

In our first month we have prioritized:

• setting up our communication systems
• meeting with key stakeholders for intros, knowledge sharing, context building
• defining internal processes to facilitate feedback loops and consensus gathering
• organizing artifacts and supporting materials for our work
• forming working groups for particular efforts
• discussing how best to proceed beyond this initial admin setup.

Meetings we had last month:

• On September 1st we held our first one-hour synchronous SC meeting with all 12 members present. We will be sharing meeting minutes similar to how the GBB does, and will have an SC page with a record of minutes in place by next month.
  • Meeting highlights: introductions all around, decided on chair / secretary rotation positions, decided on threshold for consensus approval, decided that voting should be async-first, decided on primary communication platform (Zulip), reached consensus on desire to share minutes w/ community.
• On September 16th, we held our first meeting between SC and loup. Jessamyn was slated to attend but had a conflict, we look forward to next time with jessamyn included.
  • Meeting highlights: introductions all around, got a sense of loup (and jessamyn by proxy) perspective and ideas on priorities, reviewed basic financials and processes to understand current state of metafilter business operations, and an extensive Q&A where each SC member had the chance to ask questions of loup.
• On September 25th we held the first meeting between SC and GBB
  • Meeting highlights: introductions between members, thorough overview of current state of GBB, priorities, constraints, thoughts on SC + GBB collaboration.

We also began to work on some early-identified high priorities:

• Business Operations: MetaFilter needs some professionalization of the financial and business operations. The desired future state of these efforts looks like accounting tools, automated p&l reporting, budgets, and forecasting. We prioritize this item first as we believe adopting some small-business fiscal best practices will unlock cost/benefit analyses of all other priorities. We want to note and thank loup for providing some helpful data to give us a quick-glance overview of site revenue and expense.
• Revenue and Business Development: We began discussing what the SC can do to bring in some additional revenue in the short term as well as started collating and tagging the valuable revenue related feedback offered by the MC over time in MeTa and elsewhere.
• Site Development / Code: All parties are in agreement that single point-of-failure is undesirable. We have formed a working group for this priority and scheduled a first meeting with frimble for Thursday, October 7th.
• SC Charter / Elections/ Term Limits / Structure: We started talking about term limits and some structural questions.

Much of the work we did last month and will be doing in the coming couple of months will be one-time investments of effort that provide value over the long term.

What We’re Doing This Month
 

• Fundraising: MetaFilter usually does a big fundraising push around August, but this year that was delayed to allocate effort to the ownership transition, transition team, and steering committee formation. That fundraising push is important to the site's financial picture so this will be a high priority this month. We’d love your input as well, and our Question to the Community this month is all about fundraising ideas!
• SC Structure and Charter: We will be working on defining our charter, term limits, election processes, etc. Our current charter is a July 2022 edition given to us from the Transition Team. It is helpful but intentionally light on details – we will need to develop this as we go along. We note that there were significant concerns and constructive suggestions for how SC elections could be improved, and we will be reaching out to folks, soliciting feedback, and incorporating it in the charter. We also will solicit and incorporate feedback from the GBB in the hopes of facilitating more diverse election results in future.
• Global BIPOC Board Collaboration: We want to especially thank SC member and GBB member aielen who is the current liaison between the two groups and has put effort into getting the conversation going and facilitating the growth of this relationship. We will be prioritizing this moving forward as soliciting and incorporating the feedback from the GBB from the outset is key to enshrining anti-racist principles and conventions into the SC’s culture. In general, we are aware that a large part of our initial remit is setting up structure for future SCs, and setting expectations early regarding GBB collaboration is important. We will continue the dialogue with the GBB to establish our working relationship and alignment on next steps.
• Contributors: We will be looking at the list of Contributors and working out how to onboard and collaborate with them. The irony here is that before volunteers reduce work, they add work – we need to get a few processes in place to facilitate how the SC and contributors can work together and do the communications legwork. If you submitted yourself as a potential Contributor, rest assured that we have not forgotten that kindness and we will be reaching out in future. If you would like to sign up as a Contributor, please feel free to let us know using this form.
• Code: We will be meeting with frimble and the code working group will start figuring out a plan of action for external dev support at MetaFilter. This is a big question that won't get solved in a day – incremental but steady progress will be the name of the game for a bit. We look forward to:
  • tackling some low-hanging fruit using SC coder resources
  • getting a better understanding of the current state of the site's stack
  • figuring out what security-related and access control work needs to get done before we can have coders picking up tickets
  • reaching out to contributors who have expressed interest in donating their time to code stuff
  • collating / refining a backlog of tickets that additional dev capacity can tackle.
  We will be involving the GBB in these efforts directly and also plan to involve the Metafilter community in some form for backlog refinement here. It's a big stable of ponies, y'all, and we won't triage and prioritize them all ourselves.
  
  
• Community Feedback Mechanism: Generalizing the voting page used for the SC elections to be used for general voting by the MetaFilter community. We will also be working to define what sorts of things should go up for a community vote, how that should work, etc.
  
  
• Historical Feedback / Feature Suggestion Collection: We will continue to collect, centralize, and tag the very large backlog of suggestions and ideas from the MetaFilter community going back many years. Part of the work now is to collect as many of those ideas as possible in one place into a backlog so that they can be refined, triaged, cost/benefit analyzed, etc. This refinement is something we hope to involve the MetaFilter community in as well, enabling members to help decide which priorities get attention first.
  

Question For The Community

We’d like these Check-Ins to be more than status updates. Part of how we’d like to try doing that is including a question for the community in each one.

SC member kimberrussell will also be posting this request for input to Ask MetaFilter. In crossposting to Ask MetaFilter, we hope to gather feedback from a wider slice of the community. You’re welcome to leave your feedback in just one or the other or both! The Ask post will be linked in this thread when it's live.

This month’s question is related to Fundraising. In the past couple of years, there have been some fun initiatives to accompany the fundraising drive, e.g. the wonderful Crouton Petting Zoo, or jessamyn’s excellent Sponsored Posts.

We’d love your input on this and future year's fundraising drives. Some specifics prompts:

• Any general fundraising ideas would be great, along the lines of fun activities that can accompany the drive to encourage participation
• Merch slogan / phrase ideas – what would you like to see on some MeFi merch?
• Requests for contributors for in-kind / non-financial ways. Are you able to contribute something to the fundraising drive? Perhaps you are up for running a theme posting week, are willing to donate a cool piece of art, or can offer a service as a reward for a raffle? Let us know!

We will be working with MeFi admin to spin up the fundraising drive in the next couple of weeks, and look forward to incorporating community feedback as much as possible.

That's all for now, thanks for reading! We welcome your questions and feedback.

posted by lazaruslong to MetaFilter-Related at 12:40 PM (84 comments total)

Special thanks to frimble for fixing an RSS issue that was delaying this post! For reference, here's the posts that were missed during the downtime for anybody (like me) who reads the site through a feed reader:

MeFi
"Don't camp outdoors, or the cows will trample you." by rory [Scottish island travelogue]
The Mothership Landed in Houston, October 31st, 1976 by wellifyouinsist [Parliament Funkadelic concert]
Our Cancers are Filled with Fungi by tiny frying pan [cancer fungi research]
tubby teddy time by fight or flight [Fat Bear Week 2022]

AskMe
What tactics does Julia Child use on Paul in HBO's Julia Episode 1?
How does one pray without feeling sad and anxious?
Favorite Oracle/Journal Prompting/Meditation Card Decks
Unpeeling the layers of this old dresser

Also, while we welcome your ideas for cool fundraising ideas, you don't have to wait to help support MeFi today! This place can't exist without you. ❤️
posted by Rhaomi at 1:03 PM on October 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

This is really really really really good.
posted by mochapickle at 2:00 PM on October 3, 2022 [11 favorites]

This is a FANTASTIC, details-filled update, and I am immensely grateful to the SC for all the hard work of the past month and to lazaruslong for posting this.

Thank you for EVERYTHING you're doing!
posted by kristi at 2:15 PM on October 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

aielen, serving as a member of both groups was already a lot of work -- thanks so much for taking on the liaison role, too.
posted by Iris Gambol at 2:43 PM on October 3, 2022 [14 favorites]

Just set up a Sustaining Member paradigm, where a monthly fee is charged to user's bank account.

And publicize it better than you're doing now.

Merch and other cute perks are more trouble than they're worth.

Set it and forget it is the way to go.
posted by JimN2TAW at 3:06 PM on October 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

Well done y’all, looks like a damn fine start!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:19 PM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sounds fantastic!
posted by warriorqueen at 3:52 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Please spell out the names of things instead of using initials. I know it’s a little extra work, but it will really help make these posts less impenetrable to people who aren’t knee deep in it. They reduce reading comprehension and with so many moving parts creates a lot of “who now?” type moments. Thank you
posted by Bottlecap at 5:21 PM on October 3, 2022 [20 favorites]

Thanks for the update. You've achieved a lot in a short time and it's important for everyone to remember that, before concrete actions can be taken, some setting up needs to be done and I'm impressed with how much of that you've achieved already.

'You've all done very well!' /youngmrgrace
posted by dg at 9:03 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Tiny note: yay for Zulip!
posted by brainwane at 9:37 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Any general fundraising ideas would be great, along the lines of fun activities that can accompany the drive to encourage participation Requests for contributors for in-kind / non-financial ways.

Are you able to contribute something to the fundraising drive? Perhaps you are up for running a theme posting week, are willing to donate a cool piece of art, or can offer a service as a reward for a raffle? Let us know!

I believe these could be combined. Have 12 official theme weeks (1 week of each month) and use a fundraising drive to decide them. I can think of several ways this could be done:

• Auctioning or raffling off the theme weeks, letting each winner decide and host the topic.
• Have a system in which mefites donate to the themes they are most interested in and the highest earners become the next years worth of official themes.
• As a lottery where [donation amount] = 1 theme idea submission and topics are drawn from the pool.

posted by forbiddencabinet at 12:29 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Please spell out the names of things instead of using initials. I know it’s a little extra work, but it will really help make these posts less impenetrable to people who aren’t knee deep in it. They reduce reading comprehension and with so many moving parts creates a lot of “who now?” type moments. Thank you

Will do - thank you for this feedback
posted by lazaruslong at 1:07 AM on October 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Congratulations on the work so far – this is an incredible start!
posted by adrianhon at 1:09 AM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

How much money would straight-up selling a FPP to an advertiser make? Like, suspend the Pepsi Blue rule, let someone have at it for one post. I'm thinking like once a week or something, not every other post, and clearly marked.

The catch: the poster would be responsible for sticking around and fielding comments like a Reddit AMA, softballs not guaranteed. I don't know if that's still a thing.

I don't know anything about the economics of advertising (as you can see) but I have to think the banner ads on the side don't make that much money either, might as well cut out the middle-man.
posted by ctmf at 1:11 AM on October 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I recently paid for two weeks of display ads on Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day newsletter, partly because I wanted to promote my book, and partly because I like the newsletter. It wasn't an enormous amount, but knowing what I know about the site's finances and traffic, ads could make a good contribution without being too disruptive.
posted by adrianhon at 1:58 AM on October 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

There should be a notice or a post on the Blue too, about this stuff, I reckon.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:17 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ah - just saw it - those notices are so tiny!
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:18 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is an excellent first update post by the Steering Committee! I think we've all been eager to hear how you're settling in and what your plans are, and this is a very comprehensive report! Thanks so much!

In the future it might be best to post official status reports on a quarterly or six-month basis, lest the report itself becomes an unnecessarily onerous, time-consuming task. The detail of this initial report is greatly appreciated (speaking for myself), but I'd hate to see the frequency and effort exceeding any true utility. But transparency is important! So maybe some occasional informal updates to supplement the more detailed, less frequent official updates? Just a thought.

“We prioritize this item first as we believe adopting some small-business fiscal best practices will unlock cost/benefit analyses of all other priorities.”

Yes, if this has been an issue, I think this should have a very high priority. I'd expect that the SC's ability to understand and make useful recommendations for the business side of things will be greatly dependent upon how fully documented and clear all the relevant practices and statuses are.

Finally, I'd also expect that the Steering Committee would establish standards of conduct and responsibilities that SC members must continue to meet (such as being present at meetings, participation in meetings and subcommittees, completing assigned tasks, and some basic ethical standards) and, if a member fails to do so, what sort of evaluation and remediation will be implemented.

The Steering Committee can only be productive if members are present and participating responsibly, and we have to anticipate that at some point one or more members won't. This concern isn't about blame or anything, just that MetaFilter's survival is going to rely upon this community governance model actually working and so there need to be mechanisms in place to ensure the committee is actually functioning (and not, for example, continuously placing undue burdens on a few active members while most others are absent or unproductive).
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:27 AM on October 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

$ Fundraising -> Moar merch!

"The product being sold...." t-shirt re-issue?

Maybe do a poll for "quote or catchphrase from MeFi history that you'd most like emblazoned on a shirt or geegaw?"
posted by lalochezia at 5:44 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I couldn't have done this better myself. Actually, honestly, I couldn't have done this at all, whatsoever.
Bravo - and thank you.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:54 AM on October 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

Oh hey, question: if someone wants to offer a suggestion for a fundraising activity and wants to do so privately, not in this MetaTalk thread, should we do that through the Contributor form? Or is there an email address or MeMail inbox we could contact? Thank you!
posted by brainwane at 7:15 AM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is a good post and y'all should feel good.
posted by Too-Ticky at 7:56 AM on October 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

Oh hey, question: if someone wants to offer a suggestion for a fundraising activity and wants to do so privately, not in this MetaTalk thread, should we do that through the Contributor form? Or is there an email address or MeMail inbox we could contact? Thank you!

Oh, sure -- feel free hit us up at [e-mail]
posted by lazaruslong at 8:17 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Seconding all of the accolades, it feels so good to finally see shit happening.

Long live Metafitler! Hurrah!
posted by Meatbomb at 9:59 AM on October 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

if a member fails to do so, what sort of evaluation and remediation will be implemented.

Seconding this motion & adding that it will be easier if you have this to refer to when you need it instead of having to make it up as you go.
posted by bleep at 11:23 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Great work.

Also, I just noticed that this question from the steering committee, Community Question: How can MetaFilter put the FUN into FUNdraising?, was posted to ask. Of course, this would typically be posted in Meta, not Ask. Some sort of crossposting or notification is necessary here.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:43 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, thanks for pointing out the obvious. Very helpful.

My point remains: many might overlook that thread in Ask, which poses a more extensive inquiry into fundraising than the detailed overview of SCC progress here in this Meta thread.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:16 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

You're correct! This would be a question typically only posted to MeTa, but in order to get it in front of more eyeballs I copied the actual fundraising question text from this MeTa over to AskMe. I believe it's the best place on the web to ask questions so why not leverage that? It's shaping up to be a nice companion post to this one and of course we're monitoring both posts for ideas and feedback.

I made sure to let them know that the entire Steering Committee update is here but next time I'll do a better job phrasing the Ask question and say that portions of it were crossposted from the MetaTalk post.
posted by kimberussell at 3:37 PM on October 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

How much money would straight-up selling a FPP to an advertiser make? Like, suspend the Pepsi Blue rule, let someone have at it for one post. I'm thinking like once a week or something, not every other post, and clearly marked.

This is 100% a way for me to stop visiting MetaFilter.
posted by curious nu at 7:19 PM on October 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

Like just absolutely nope-ing out of the site for good. I understand if that's a decision that the SC feels the need to make and the staff support it, but damn, what a last line to cross.
posted by curious nu at 7:21 PM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Like just absolutely nope-ing out of the site for good. I understand if that's a decision that the SC feels the need to make and the staff support it, but damn, what a last line to cross.

When it comes to a theoretical major change like trying to fund the site through sponsored posts, that's not something that the SC would implement without first passing that by the metafilter community. We want all ideas and are grateful for them -- we're also not going to force a massive shift in the site unilaterally. Rest easy.

Some sort of crossposting or notification is necessary here.

My point remains: many might overlook that thread in Ask, which poses a more extensive inquiry into fundraising than the detailed overview of SCC progress here in this Meta thread.

I'm a little confused and want to make sure we get the feedback here clear so we can improve: we noted the cross-posting in this post, and the Ask question is a copy paste of the same question here, not a more extensive or different version of the question. Is there something else we could have done better here?
posted by lazaruslong at 1:17 AM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Regarding advertising – Metafilter has had it on the front page for a very long time in various guises. It has Google displays ads in the sidebar on the homepage, and on post pages it has ads in the sidebar and above the comments. I don't see those because I always use an adblocker, which I'm glad of because they're very ugly (fwiw, I also donate to Mefi!)

It also used to have nicer-looking text-based ads in the sidebar (at least the homepage, maybe also posts) served via the Deck, which focused on indie websites and shut down in 2017. It is probably more possible to make those appear despite ad blockers, though would require more custom coding. I quite liked seeing these as they were a bit better targeted and tasteful!

I very much trust that the Steering Committee will act considerately in all of this and I think it's worth others placing their trust in them, too. There are good ways to do ads and there are bad ways to do ads and we can all thread that needle together.
posted by adrianhon at 1:40 AM on October 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

While we're throwing out fundraising ideas, Reddit lets users buy Coins with real money; coins can buy Awards (little images, basically) that can be attached to posts and comments you like. They don't help promote posts or comments, they're almost like a super-fave. I doubt it raises much money for Reddit in the grand scheme of things but worth considering.
posted by adrianhon at 1:50 AM on October 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

we noted the cross-posting in this post, and the Ask question is a copy paste of the same question here, not a more extensive or different version of the question. Is there something else we could have done better here?

I'm not the original poster, but I do think it it would be helpful if the AskMe was actually linked in the post itself. Not a big deal, but a small one that would be helpful, IMO.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:39 AM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

Online auctions raise surprising amounts of cash. It would be a big logistical pain for sure but it could also be a lot of fun.
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:38 AM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Thanks, lazaruslong. Sorry, I realize I wasn't that clear and a bit snarky. I think it'd be good to link to the post, to make it clear, and to have a post on Meta that is explicitly about fundraising (which this one isn't, really—it's many discussions, which is great!), with the same or similar title, to reflect the crosspost. Hope this makes sense (i.e. you'd receive feedback on fundraising on both subsites, in other words, not primarily on ask, which is what is happening imo).
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:13 AM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

How much money would straight-up selling a FPP to an advertiser make? Like, suspend the Pepsi Blue rule, let someone have at it for one post. I'm thinking like once a week or something, not every other post, and clearly marked.

Doesn't bother me at all -- go for it!

If such posts are clearly marked, as Reddit does, my eye skips right over them. Heck, maybe they can be included in the "don't show ads" option that paid members get.

But even if I can't hide them, it's no harder to skip over them than any other FPPs that don't interest me.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:14 AM on October 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

But even if I can't hide them, it's no harder to skip over them than any other FPPs that don't interest me.

This is not a universal skill, which is why ads exist in the first place.
posted by aniola at 9:35 AM on October 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

former member kanata here. left over the trans incidents and had no plan to come back so i just wanted to say that this fabulous update someone linked me to has convinced me to return to help support the progress being made.
posted by Bemused Recluse at 11:46 AM on October 5, 2022 [54 favorites]

Thank you, Bemused Recluse, for coming back.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:09 PM on October 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

Happy to see you back, Bemused Recluse (nice name!)
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:25 PM on October 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

Bemused Recluse, welcome back! My dog says hi!
posted by mochapickle at 12:29 PM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

aniola, that is a fair point! It's why I wondered if the staff would enable these to be hidden along with front-page ads.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:01 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

hi to all the puppos and thanks for the welcome. i added a tiny recurring donation and look forward to seeing what you all have been up to. i did miss the place i used to call home.
posted by Bemused Recluse at 1:28 PM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

I wonder if we could start some kind of cottage [online community] industry thing, like put our minds together to create something together that _then_ other people would pay for and/or be inspired by.
posted by amtho at 4:29 PM on October 5, 2022

We need similar to an Only Fans page in the sense of it being something random people on the internet are willing to subscribe to.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:04 PM on October 5, 2022

How much money would straight-up selling a FPP to an advertiser make? Like, suspend the Pepsi Blue rule, let someone have at it for one post. I'm thinking like once a week or something, not every other post, and clearly marked.

To be clear I was thinking like one post per week (or even day) sitewide, not per paying advertiser. It should be easily over-lookable, not like having to search for the real posts among the spam. At that low level, it probably wouldn't make a ton of money, but more than zero is... more than zero.
posted by ctmf at 6:08 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

I like the idea of a cookbook (or cocktail book?) and I think a print on demand version would be a good idea, even if it is a pretty modest fundraiser. It could, of course, also be available online. There are so many things in even a modest lifestyle that use more resources than producing a printed book. If print is not one’s lifestyle, that’s fine, but I honestly don’t think the production or purchase of printed books will be the evil that destroys life on this planet. Or even aside from a cookbook, other anthologies that members wanted to contribute to.
posted by snofoam at 6:10 PM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Echoing the appeciation!

A cookbook sounds like a great idea, one I had though of suggesting as well. With so many enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and varied discussions on food and even ocassional recipes shared here, it makes a lot of sense.

One thing I very strongly disagree with is having monthly theme weeks. I'm still having flashbacks to potato week(s). A theme day or days now and then would be fine, one topic all the time repeatedly would be very tiresome frankly!

I would fine as well with a small amount of Pepsi Blue, but I'm afraid it would be controversial and possibly a slippery slope, so would need to have wide support.
posted by blue shadows at 7:16 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

All parties are in agreement that single point-of-failure is undesirable.

Um, oh yeah, right...?

There is something to be said for every so often writing in English that dogs and cats can read.
posted by y2karl at 9:16 PM on October 5, 2022

To follow up on adrianhon's comment about ads, from above, although really most of this was written before I spotted it:

I have been doing some musing. Note, this is ONLY MUSING, like the threading thing a month ago: I'm more floating it to see what objections and advantages people put up more than seriously suggesting it right now, both to see about the idea's viability and to help advance the discussion around this flavor of fundraising--

Metafilter runs ads for people who aren't logged in. It used to run ads from The Deck. The Deck is dead.

Why doesn't it run the ad service itself? In addition to donations, someone who wanted to help the site and had something they wanted to promote could pay Metafilter directly for some ad impressions. Since the site would run the code itself we could be sure there wasn't any fishy code or trackers in the ad system, which these days might be the only way we could be sure about that? If other sites wanted to run the ads too it would be an even better value proposition for buying a MeFi Ad, but the main idea is that, mostly, members would be both targets and clients. (Well, not-logged-in readers would be targets. Didn't there used to be a checkbox that members could check if the wanted to see ads too? I haven't been able to find it lately.)

Of course, ads would require coding, backend, server space, bandwidth, and admin support. That is a lot! Would the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? That link to the announcement of The Deck dying lists the reasons it failed, but if we courted members, who presumably all hate the things that The Deck refused to stoop to, could it work out?
posted by JHarris at 12:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

All parties are in agreement that single point-of-failure is undesirable.

Um, oh yeah, right...?

Everyone thinks that having only one person who can fix or change the web site is bad. But we don’t think that person is bad, just the fact that we have no backup person/option.
posted by snofoam at 3:17 AM on October 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

former member kanata here. left over the trans incidents and had no plan to come back so i just wanted to say that this fabulous update someone linked me to has convinced me to return to help support the progress being made.

cough i'm not crying nope

thank you for saying this, i hope we can continue to earn your trust.
posted by lazaruslong at 4:22 AM on October 6, 2022 [12 favorites]

I would buy a t-shirt of good quality and fit that was the exact color of the blue (with green and other sub-site colors also being available I assume) and had some relatively benign logo or in-joke that other Metafilter readers would get, but not non-readers. This wouldn’t help advertise Metafilter more broadly, of course, but it’s the sort of t-shirt I wear. Probably other folks would buy shirts more directly advertising the site.

A post every so often gently reminding users to donate, that includes the details of what is involved (what payment processor options are available, internationalization, that a recurring donation is an option) would be the sort of thing I would find helpful.

(Side note: using the abbreviations the Steering Committee folks are familiar with I’m sure makes writing updates like this quicker and easier. Just write the post in an editor with a search and replace feature, and replace with the full names before copy-and-pasting here to make a good balance of convenience for the writers and readable for all users?)
posted by eviemath at 4:58 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like the abbreviations, and suspect I’d find the fully expanded version cumbersome and unreadable. The one change I’d suggest is that “Mefites” is only one character longer than “the MC”.
posted by zamboni at 5:05 AM on October 6, 2022

I pretty much just want to +1 everything in this comment. Almost exactly my same thoughts.

Cookbook/cocktail book sounds awesome. I would contribute and purchase.

I also still shudder even at hearing the word potato.

Which leads to the ad supported story idea. I think a lot of us read or use to have read Boing Boing and fear that slippery slope of what it has become. Even in my feed reader, it is distressingly annoying to read.

Many, many awesome ideas in all of the comments. Thanks, all, for suggesting!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 7:29 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

We’d love your input on this and future year's fundraising drives. Some specifics prompts:
Any general fundraising ideas would be great, along the lines of fun activities that can accompany the drive to encourage participation

Merch slogan / phrase ideas – what would you like to see on some MeFi merch?

Requests for contributors for in-kind / non-financial ways. Are you able to contribute something to the fundraising drive? Perhaps you are up for running a theme posting week, are willing to donate a cool piece of art, or can offer a service as a reward for a raffle? Let us know!
We will be working with MeFi admin to spin up the fundraising drive in the next couple of weeks, and look forward to incorporating community feedback as much as possible.

Hi Steering committee. I don't write much here anymore but I still read a lot. I'm also a professional fundraiser who raises over $2M a year for my org.

What you're really talking about are two different things here:
-- fundraising (which is just philanthropy, where people support the site to support the site)
and
-- revenue generation (which encompasses things like tshirts, reddit gold, advertising/sponsored posts, etc)

Be careful in your language not to comingle the two, because they are different things and they speak to consumers/donors in very different ways.

I have some .... opinions ... on what makes people participate in a fundraising drive, but your first question should be "what is the value of the time we put into this that we could be devoting to other things" -- auctions, as noted above, can be very lucrative *if you know at the start you have a dedicated donor pool with deep pockets* but they're a ton of work, and time has value.

Do you know who your current donors are? Let's start there. How are you stewarding those donors? Thanking them? Acknowledging them? The biggest thing that gets donors to give again is not "I got stuff" but rather feeling engaged and thanked by the org they're supporting. (I'll note here that I gave a couple of hundred dollars a year to this site for a long time, but was never once thanked or acknowledged personally by anyone, which is an issue for sure in retaining donors)

Do you know how much you want to raise? There are tools to track that (progress indicators) and you'll want to be very public about what your progress to goal is.

Because I don't know if you already have a development professional in your volunteer pool, I'm not going to go on at length about this ... but my big suggestions are this:

- know your goal, and have a plan to thank your donors individually and tell them about the impact of their donation on the site
- in general, fundraising works best when people understand both the need, and the impact of their donation in meeting the need. You'll raise more money if you can tell people both these things, vs. "This is our annual fundraising drive to raise money to run the site" (Wikipedia does a great job with this kind of thing, by the way)
- as noted above, create more of mental, systematic, and linguistic divide between actual fundraising, and revenue generation. Those things appeal to two very different people, and you'll want to address those audiences in different ways.

I'm really excited for this new chapter in Mefi history. Thanks to the steering committee for doing this.
posted by anastasiav at 9:10 AM on October 6, 2022 [44 favorites]

I cancelled my donation to the site some time ago when one too many trans MeFites whose voices I valued were driven off the site and this stopped being a place I felt I could support financially. The best thing you could do to convince me to return to being a regular financial MeFi supporter is to live up to the promise of this post - regular, transparent updates about solid priorities and actions from a member-driven steering committee and real, sustained prioritization of two-way communication with the community is a big part of what I would need to see to feel good about giving this site my money again.

This is a great start, and clearly a lot of work. Thank you for your hard work here. Please keep it up.
posted by Stacey at 10:39 AM on October 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

Everyone thinks that having only one person who can fix or change the web site is bad. But we don’t think that person is bad, just the fact that we have no backup person/option.

IOW Well, duh. I am so far behind the curve on my technonymetry.
posted by y2karl at 11:45 AM on October 6, 2022

We need similar to an Only Fans page in the sense of it being something random people on the internet are willing to subscribe to.

OnlyScans. Bring the whole thing whole circle. Just premium-access pictures of smeary cats.

(You're all doing great and I appreciate the energy and work going into all of this even more than I appreciate being able to basically entirely not keep track of any of it, which I have been appreciating greatly. Viva mefi.)
posted by cortex (retired) at 12:08 PM on October 6, 2022 [22 favorites]

OnlyScans. Bring the whole thing whole circle. Just premium-access pictures of smeary cats.

A virtual "auction"/contest of would probably go over well. Keep it to goofy categories like "most likely to eat what Mefi says should be eaten", "Best Introvert", "Top Bean eater". People would see in photos of their cats for a small fee, winners split the fee with Mefi.

Don't laugh, I'm just spitballing with my afternoon mimosas.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:55 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

MERCH PONY REQUEST: Baseball T-Shirts with or without your user number on them. (You know, like Songdog and languagehat have. From way long ago.)
posted by not_on_display at 4:42 PM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Secondary merch request: ringer t-shirts (with the neck band and ends of the sleeves a different color: MeFi blue collar and sleeve ends, white t shirt, metafilter logo, with a very small “professional background, classic” underneath the logo, for the two or three of us still using it.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:56 PM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ooh, here's a thing. My son, who is 21, is right into vintage computers which doesn't appear to be all that rare amongst the younger set who are into that kind of thing.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could make Metafilter go viral through our sheer longevity and then, once hooked on the nostalgic looking back to conversations about world shattering things As They Happened In Real Time, these whippersnappers could then get hooked on current conversations in the multitude of spaces this place has to offer and, indeed, feel like they could add to them whilst realising how wonderful it would be to subscribe to this amazing place, therefore bringing in lots of money?

Just a thought.
posted by h00py at 4:19 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

That's a very good thought, h00py! I feel like the excesses of social media and corporate influence are causing people to slowly coming back around to considering older means of working with the internet. Not just blogs but Usenet, IRC, and other things like that.

The forward-thinking open source space has been colonized, it seems, by crypto-loonies. These days it feels like your main choices are the Facebook & Google monoliths (when Google can be arsed to keep a service alive for more than a few years dammit, still bitter about Reader) or NFT guys who by the way want you consider if the nazis were really good. I think that Metafilter can serve as something of an alternative to both.
posted by JHarris at 11:07 AM on October 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thank you so much for your valuable, professional perspective, anastasiav. Personally, I would like to see a pilot revenue generation project based on a cookbook that is a PDF or an ebook just to test the waters (and if folks wanted to pay for a print-on-demand hard copy, sure).

Such a project is not exactly straightforward. I think each poster here owns our own words, so we would need to get permission from the MeFite authors and this has probably been tried before and so it would be good to learn whatever institutional memory there is about this topic.

But basically, a bunch of short, focused ebooks to help various audiences, including folks like me who struggle to care for ourselves. You know, 25 easy no-cook recipes, yadda yadda.

MetaFilter, and not just the blue, is filled with truly helpful advice. Some folks will want to obtain that advice if it is easily available and appropriately marketed. I don't know shit about marketing but I have been an editor for virtually my entire adult life. This place has helped me deal with many issues I struggle with. I truly believe offering that advice to people who are not already here would be a service to those in need; a way to promote MetaFilter the community; and potentially generate some modest revenue.

Happy to volunteer for this type or similar project as a contributor should the Steering Committee approve such a project.

Welcome back, Bemused Recluse, so glad you are here again! Many thanks to all the peeps who have been working so hard in all the ways. A special shoutout to lazaruslong for the excellent report. A good writeup of this kind of shit is hard but you made it look easy. Thank you.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:27 AM on October 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm grateful to the Steering Committee for doing this. I don't have any comments on fundraising or marketing, except to say there is already a cookbook, see here.
posted by paduasoy at 1:42 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

…are willing to donate a cool piece of art…

I have made a total of three cholla and resin bowls to date (though there will likely be more coming, as I harvested nearly five cubic feet of cholla wood this summer). If there is interest, I could donate #2 to the cause (my sweetie is keeping #1). Some people think they are very cool.

Someone from the SC can MeMail me, as I don’t check in on MeTa very often. Glad to see there’s stuff [waves hands] happening, though.
posted by DaveP at 1:50 PM on October 7, 2022 [14 favorites]

Those are gorgeous, DaveP!
posted by Bella Donna at 3:27 PM on October 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Are we talking about putting the art up for sale, or auction? I'm asking because I am interested in buying that bowl, if possible.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:44 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Stunning! Wow!
posted by mochapickle at 5:11 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks, folks.

I don’t know how the cabal will want to do it, but its good to hear that there’s at least a little interest. Guess when I wrap up current projects, I need to make some more.
posted by DaveP at 10:17 AM on October 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

About the coding thing, is there interest in having people from the community volunteer for technical tasks like coding, bug fixes and maintenance? (I realize there are a lot of thorny issues involved, but there are also a lot of community members with backgrounds that could be helpful.)
posted by whir at 9:48 AM on October 11, 2022

Whir, there is interest in having people from the MeFi community volunteer for a whole range of tasks, not just technical or coding ones. If you'd like to put your name up for that, the Steering Committee has made a form you can fill out. Go check it out and thanks for your interest!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:40 PM on October 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

So, trying to get back into it here, so I’m not up to what’s going on, but are there any plans to add a blocking feature or should I just move on and stay gone?
posted by tilde at 7:05 AM on October 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Unsure what you'd like to block; could any of the scripts collected at the mefi wiki help?
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:31 AM on October 14, 2022

User side scripts don’t really work on mobile. They’re not a good solution for a changing picture of how people access the internet.
posted by Bottlecap at 6:04 PM on October 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can’t speak to the Android ecosystem with any degree of authority beyond being dimly aware that Android has a plethora of browsers with a lot of doodads available but the other plurality mobile platform, iOS, has a pretty okay user scripting plugin that works reasonably well with many user scripts. MeFi rightly filters out app store hrefs, so not linked here, but the one I use is named simply “Userscripts” and gives me very little trouble.

go viral through our sheer longevity

The gopher appears to be up. It pains me a little to think of that as being particularly “vintage” rather than a little old-fashioned, but yeah, we have a lot of the pieces and knowledge lying around this community to nostalgia-bait via the ever evolving vintage computing zeitgeist.

My only caution around that is that there is a little bit of stuff in our actual past, still lolling around on the disk and accessible on the network, that isn’t a good look through a current day lens. Important, for sure, but not always a good look.
posted by majick at 9:08 AM on October 15, 2022

Wait, App Store links are filtered? I'm searching and linking for the aforementioned Userscripts.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've been thinking of something else.

If a Metafilter app was developed that used the same colour palettes as Classic Metafilter (tm) but was fully updated for use on smart devices with all the buttons and wotnot that entails, a $5 a year subscription could be put on it to comment but free if you just want to browse.

And then plan a massive nostalgia thing on tiktok and glonk and schnerdlist and cause a global viral sensation!

metafilter.com remains the Mother Ship and all substantial changes can continue to be freaked out about.
posted by h00py at 11:58 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mute-a-Filter works for me! Really should be a site feature. I can dream. Improves things immensely by letting you note which comments come from people whose comments you've determined need to be skipped over, or read with a grain of salt. But leaves them in place in case you need context for the discussion.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:49 AM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oooh, I like the idea of Mute-a-filter
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:54 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wait, App Store links are filtered?

Well, the preview-o-izer got really mad at me for adding one so I assumed so. I was wrong, and that’s lovely! Maybe I just did a bad paste from vim.

In any case, I’m delighted by the Userscripts extension for iOS Safari and highly recommend it for almost everyone. I have, however, seen it work poorly on low-spec, older iOS machines. I had to disable it for my wife because merely loading the extension made her already beleaguered Safari too beleaguered to use.
posted by majick at 8:04 PM on October 17, 2022

Somehow I had "smart punctuation" turned on. Pasting in a link caused enough of a malformed HREF attribute that it made the preview-o-tron eat it. The mystery of my being totally wrong about excising app store links is solved!

Although it's not a terrible idea to actually do that as a baseline spam control.
posted by majick at 10:26 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]