Theory and Practice
In theory, theory and practice are the same.In practice, they aren't.
I came in late, so I don't REALLY know the history. It's generally an intellectual space so there are probably some cis het white males on Metafilter who aren't actually closeted gays or something like that, but my guess is there's a rather high correlation between "No, not really cis het white male" and being an active participant on Metafilter.
I was unjustly banned and I suspect it's largely because I'm a recovered victim of incest and a generally nice person who isn't a giant ball of unresolved personal doodoo.
Josh, the man who took it over after Matt decided he didn't want to do this anymore, and his wife were nominally a happy, modern two career couple with no kids. She was also a Good Christian who was a bitch to a homeless woman -- me -- because her HUSBAND was squeeing at said homeless woman in front of our ten thousand closest friends, much to my personal annoyance in part because, good Lord, man, have some sense, your WIFE hangs here and partly because he's something like fourteen or sixteen years younger than me and I'm definitely NOT a Cougar.
I don't necessarily turn down ALL younger men who hit on me, but I absolutely do NOT chase younger men. That's a NO from me and most younger men aren't my idea of serious relationship material.
I am reasonably confident something bad happened in their marriage before I ever joined. I have no idea what. I know because I'm always looking for role models, had an initial good impression of Josh and was a homeless unwell loser with time on my hands and frequently too sick to work, so one week I went through his public photo album and at some point the adoring photos of the wife stopped.
Maybe the quote "Good Christian" unquote little wifey thought he was hitting on me. Maybe JOSH thought he had the hots for me.
Most likely, he was someone with more skeletons in his upper class walk-in closet than fit there, was having enormous difficulty doing the Calvin and Hobbs schtick of STUFFING everything into the over packed closet and somehow forcing the door closed to LOOK like he had cleaned his room and imagined I could somehow FIX his shit.
So "I'm in lurv" was his personal lie to himself for telling himself he was daydreaming of making an ugly, old, fat homeless woman feel attractive again and in exchange he would get a metric fuckton of free therapy of higher quality than most paid therapists can provide.
Yeah, no. I've had "good friends" who thusly used me. It's inevitably an extremely one sided relationship AND they don't remain "friends" with me after I've lovingly helped them sort all their shit for free.
So I have exactly ZERO god-damned plans to hook up with a much younger man basically looking for a MOMMY to raise him right while fucking me. Please get EVEN more therapy for THAT essentially incestuous fantasy that having sex with me somehow makes wanting me to be your mommy in your thirties acceptable. Ewww.
Jessamyn comes from a psych job family. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother was, from what I gather, literally The Devil. She had a lot of issues and while superficially a successful career woman, she was deeply miserable and angry and I believe she hated me for having been a full-time wife and mom who had two kids, among other things.
By the time I was there, Matt wasn't participating much. I never really got to know much about him. He's a nerd who apparently had kind of a hobby he figured out how to monetize and then quit his job and supported himself that way.
Years ago, I was "hired" (at zero pay) by Valorie King to be lead moderator of tagfam because it was founded at a time when you needed hefty tech skills to have an email list. She had the tech skills. She didn't really have the social skills and she occasionally said things like she had been burned in effigy in the process of trying to figure out how to run a set of email lists.
As best I can GUESS as someone late to the party who didn't WITNESS the way the forum was born, Matt is just a tech guy without much social savvy and Jessamyn was his first moderator and SHE largely shaped it into what it is. Maybe the social climate there says little about Matt other than "socially clueless, I just do tech".
I don't know. I don't claim to know. This is a BLOG post, not written testimony for a court case nor a PhD thesis. So I don't need to actually PROVE fuck all because this is just my opinion, man.
I think Matt created something that paid his bills and then kind of coasted. Life was easy.
Until it wasn't.
I guess when things got too painful, he did therapy, I don't really know why, and one outcome of therapy was he realized he didn't really want to be a business man. He handed off Metafilter to Josh and went and got a job again.
Because the world had changed and it was no longer easy peasy to make money by owning Metafilter and Metafilter had changed and he had changed. So he walked.
But I long ago became suspicious that anyone "prominent" on Metafilter should be given the side eye and you should wonder what skeletons are in their closet that they like spending time there. Because it's a CESSPIT.
I'm not more bitter because to some degree I consciously and intentionally USED Metafilter to sort out what works and what doesn't in "public life" and I've got an entire blog -- Feminine Character Works -- devoted to my hypothesis that women get raised with blindspots about that.
I'm not apologizing for that. I got what I wanted.
No, I was NOT intentionally a giant abusive asshole every step of the way. I mostly tried to use AskMe in good faith to ask useful questions and people there were routinely simply AWFUL to me.
Metafilter is populated by some seriously seriously fucked up hypocritical jackasses who brag that Metafilter is the best of the web and gloat about how they are all high minded idealistic do-gooder people while the moderating staff had a POLICY of ACTIVELY encouraging members to bully some people, including me, a homeless woman at the time.
Some of the most enthusiastic bullies thrilled to have staff approval of their intentionally malicious behavior included an ER doctor with mommy issues and an EXTREMELY privileged American pursuing his PhD in Europe who nonetheless never lacked time to intentionally add to my problems.
I take responsibility for MY piece of that, that to some degree I tried shit and tested boundaries like a toddler.
I did it there, not on Hacker News, because I never respected the hypocrites on Metafilter like I respected Hacker News.
I took 18 months off from Hacker News to try shit on Metafilter while homeless and very ill so I had plausible deniability and a good excuse and unlike you evil shitbags I did that for a good reason, not "I can get away with shitting all over people because EXCUSES and I like shitting all over people" but because "I don't know what the hell went wrong, but SOMETHING is amiss in what I'm doing and I need to intentionally fuck up socially and get told explicitly what in the hell I'm doing wrong".
Because I'm generally physically attractive, personable, charming etc and I suspect that as a toddler when I did "outrageous" stuff, people laughed rather than get after me and I spent years going "why don't you find me funny?" instead of getting the memo "you're hurting people, stupid."
So I'm not apologizing. And I'm not sorry. And I stand by my highly critical opinions of what a cesspit Metafilter is.
But I also don't expect to be invited back because I do realize these utterly fucked up psych jobs do have legitimate reasons to not want me there. And some aren't "My skeletons need to stay hidden and that bitch sees through closet doors." Some are genuinely "Well, she just won't shut up about my poorly hidden skeletons that I imagine are a well kept secret because MOST people have the good sense to PRETEND they have no idea, unlike Doreen."
And I don't really want to try again to be some lone voice of reason everyone wants to bleed and abuse and openly hate on and expect FREE wonderfulness from in exchange for their abusive hateful shit.
In theory, Metafilter seems superficially to be "a nice community" where people openly discuss things I'm interested in and write about.
In practice, participating there was an EXTREMELY negative experience, worse than being molested for two and a half years as a child by someone who had previously been my favorite relative.
I spent some years hoping they would get over their shit and maybe someday someone there would post my writing and etc.
I no longer feel that way.