After seeing the latest comments from Metafilter vs. YouTube users side by side, the Freakonomics blog asks if the $5 membership fee on Metafilter is the reason behind the obvious difference in quality. The comments to that question clarify things. The pair is rather odd — it would be more instructive to see similar, competing entities such as newspaper websites side by side – but it’s anyway clear that the entrance fee itself can’t be decisive. As Brandon Blatcher says:
Metafilter’ls success and generally better comments are probably due to a number of factors, and the $5 admission fee is just one. There’ls also the presence of the mods, how they’lre moderating, how many people are posting links, how many people of are posting comments and more importantly, the quality of the those two things (a crappy post of a controversial subject tends explode), timing (if a crappy post of a controversial subject happens when the mods are off somewhere, the explosion tends to last longer, sparking other explosions), the state of the world in general and the United States in particular (most Mefi members are American and with the elections going on, there’ls a tug of war about whether to post political links) and just sheer luck. All of these things and more are at play in particular moment, so Mefi’ls light moderation touch tends to work well. There’ls also a certain X-factor that comes from the mods, in that they actually seem to care about the site and it’ls goals and the sum of those parts make it more than a job, which tends to shine through in the site’ls darker moments. $5 ain’lt got nothin’ on that.
MetaFilter vs. Youtube comments? Maybe not quite apples and oranges, but not apples and apples either… There are many differences, the most important being that MeFi has a sense of community that YouTube cannot match. The tone and quality on MetaFilter is shaped by a set of recognisable regulars, and by its unwritten rule: Don’t submit a post or a comment if it doesn’t add something of insight, amazement or wit. Violate this, and see any hopes of gaining a reputation there fade as your every word is dissected by a rather sarcastic army of clever, but self-absorbed wordsmiths.
Where MetaFilter is a social space, a YouTube comment field feels more like an antisocial one, at least the ones the majority of the vile and/or insignificant (Kilroy was here-style) comments are culled from. Agreeable and enjoyable conversations – or comments (actual evolving conversations are somewhat rare) – do take place on YouTube as well, perhaps not in the faceless inner city brutality of the 100.000+ views virals that people come to just because everyone else does, but out in the longer tails where smaller groups of people gather around objects they actually have (thus share) a passion for. You don’t see hateful comments around say, an old Cocteau Twins video. The larger and uglier threads though, are so inhospitable and uncontrollable that any attempt to fix them is futile. In there, nobody knows, nevermind cares, you’re a dog. Nor do they care much about keeping the conversation healthy. Broken window theory applies to web spaces just like any other environment.