Happy Birthday, MetaFilter!

It's pretty incredible that MetaFilter turns 25 years old today. Barely anything on the internet sticks around for this long.

MetaFilter predates LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. It's older than Wikipedia and Blogger. Other similar sites sprang up after it like Digg, then reddit, then Quora, but I'm happy to know MetaFilter never attained household name status and only stayed as big as it needed to be, and keeps soldiering on today.

I have a lot of memories wrapped up into it, from the very beginning building a basic blog from scratch not knowing what it would ever become, to figuring out people really like the comments part so I should probably work on that, to when Ask MetaFilter launched and showed me how useful, helpful, and supportive the community could be with each other.

I never loved being at the top of it or the face of it and I tried not to slap my name all over it. Reporters love to put the people behind projects on a pedestal but early on I realized the community around it is bigger and more important than the person in charge. I'm happy to see it can endure changes in leaders and governance, and the fact that Jessamyn is at the helm today turning it into a nonprofit is the best possible outcome for the whole community.

These days I still read the front page of MeFi to find cool links to stuff and it fills a need that social media still doesn't do well! When you put a great bunch of nerdy cool folks together, all looking for interesting stuff and sharing what they find (and helping each other in Ask MetaFilter) you get a really amazing place to be.

Cheers to MetaFilter for 25 years of chugging along, here's to 25 more!