That's a NO from me

One of the more useful things that came out of Metafilter for me was this MeTa where I sincerely asked for feedback on what I was doing wrong and to some degree got it. 

Unfortunately, some mefites in chat used it as justification for being ugly to me and trying to pretend they were just being helpful and giving me feedback because I so loved that. One was a deaf guy whose handle I don't recall but could probably find if I really cared to. 

I spent a lot of time in the MeFi chat room which was live chat. I'm a people person. I was homeless. I wanted people to talk with and past experience was that people tend to find me likable and sometimes volunteer help if they get to know me. 

In fact, that's how I was gifted a membership to Metafilter to begin with: Someone on Hacker News was acquainted with me and wanted to help.

Over time, it became clear to me most people in chat were not nice people and were doing things like intentionally bragging about being well off when I was in chat to rub my nose in the fact that they could help me financially but absolutely weren't. It was done with plausible deniability such that I would have looked like the problem if I had ever complained about it.

Eyebrows McGee would make a point of talking about buying gold jewelry when I was in chat. She is also most likely the mod who banned me, the hatchet man Josh Millard hired for that purpose.

Someone I remember as Dotgirl (possibly not exactly correct) routinely was just straight up a bitch in every way imaginable. This bit from a remark of mine elsewhere is about her:
I knew a woman going through a divorce who was feeling old and ugly etc. I casually joked that the cure for that was a younger lover. My real point was "Oh, don't let your ex make you feel that way. His opinions no longer count." But the next thing I knew, she had a younger boyfriend.

We weren't even friends. We were casual acquaintances and she treated me terribly every step of the way, which just added to the WTF?? factor.

During her divorce, she posted a piece about wanting help with deciding what couch to buy and I felt like most likely she was doing that at least in part to make sure I knew she had plenty of money to spare and wasn't helping me. When she dumped the younger man in question, she did a MeTa post with a question to the effect of "What's something you decided after just thinking about posting a question on AskMe and realizing you didn't need to?"

My read on it was that it was an intentionally sick burn on the guy with plausible deniability so he couldn't complain. I messaged the mods and told them my opinion about that but I was homeless and they blew me off.

KathrynT went out of her way to regularly talk about her lavish life while in no way helping me. Some Jewish woman in Canada in banking made sure to talk about flying to Africa for vacation in front of me.

Once when an actual mod was hanging out in chat, something they didn't typically do, some lawyer named Ben I believe suddenly volunteered to file my bankruptcy pro bono.

I never knew if she said something to him privately or if he just felt embarrassed or what, but I always felt her presence somehow is why he spontaneously offered that without me asking.

It ended up being a super negative experience where I felt I made an ass of myself and I never did get my act together enough to get it filed. But it was sort of the MeFi equivalent of the night I told my husband "If you told me your dick fell off today, I would call that a convenient excuse." (for turning me down for sex) because it helped make it crystal clear these people could help me if they wanted to and could help me in ways other than straight up giving me money and they simply had no desire whatsoever to do so.

They did all this abusive shit to me while spending all their time bragging about making the world a better place and how everyone on Metafilter was so high-minded and idealistic and ethical and it was the "Best of the web" because all the people there were the cream of the crop.

Metafilter was filled with stories about mefites doing amazing wonderful things for people, often other mefites, sometimes mefites they didn't really know. One story was about a mefite going to find a head injured mefite they didn't know and get them the medical intervention they desperately needed. I remember the line "I'm here from the Internet." being associated with that story.

But not a single person there was doing anything for me. Shortly after I began getting resume work through Metafilter, I was banned.

I have no desire to ever return to Metafilter. I have ZERO desire to ever again talk with Dotgirl and KathrynT and Ben and others whom I feel certain were intentionally cruel to me while I was homeless. A lot of these people are longtime "core" members who are highly unlikely to ever leave voluntarily or be banned.

Whatever my opinion of them, Metafilter is likely to keep them. And that means I don't ever want to go back.

Popular Posts