Xenoblogs

February 21, 2000 7:44 AM

Xenoblogs I got a bit tired of the Amerikanski domination of Weblogging (not that I don't love you all!), so I've started a compendium of blogs maintained outside the USA, which I've given the snappy name Xenoblogs. The current list is based, with permission, on a well-known geographical map of worldwide blogs. Additions welcome.
posted by joeclark (1 comment total)

A nice empty vanity post.

I find it mildly disturbing that my usernumber ended up being a self blog, that's just so rude. Mind you, it was nice and early in this glorious site's history, and well before self blogs were banned, so there's no real problem.

Interesting coincidence: the poster who posted this is from very near to me, geographically speaking.

MetaFilter used to kick so much ass, and here is where I shall post my diatribe.

There was, once upon a time, a place where you could go to find shit that wasn't talked about elsewhere, that nobody else had discovered and that place was MetaFilter.

Sure, by the time things got noticed and posted on MeFi there were many others who had already seen them, but when many is still under 100, you're automatically one of those early-adopter types.

The community was much more close-knit. You could visit every user's web page at least once and before lashing out and making idiotic personal attacks you could see what they had to say.

Maybe they have a second tongue that they permantently store in their cheek and you can't see that in their post, but a quick flip through other stuff they've written reveals their hidden humerous side immediately.

The regulars of the site, no matter how much we disagreed with each other's arguments, view points and crazy stuff like that, we respected each other as intelligent beings on the other side of the monitor.

But now the vast majority of the posts, an estimate I won't even bother to make since I'd probably end up being low anyway, they're current events and celebrity worship and politics. They aren't cool new web toys, and diatribes about technology and it's effects on society, or new research in some field or another, they're the same shit you see on the front page of daily newspapers, the same pablum presented by the talking heads on national news broadcasts.

There's still merit in MetaFilter. I wouldn't come here every day if there wasn't. And there are still people who love MetaFilter and show up occasionally in the threads that, to one degree or another, hearken back to the Good Old Days of MeFi's past.

What's interesting to note is that a year ago members with lower numbers than myself were complaining about the MeFi that existed before I got here.

I distinctly remember a metalk conversation with Cam of Camworld wherein I pretty much told him that the MeFi he loved is gone, and the MeFi that I loved is what was left, and if he wanted to change it then all he had to do was tell me what I was doing wrong.

Now it seems that even though I want to change it, there's no way I can explain to the throng of new people that there's merit in the old ways. I can see now the apparently impenetrable wall that Cam faced way back when, and I am frustrated that we seem as unable to explain to new users what MeFi used to be and should still be as he was to explain it to me.

There's an answer buried in here somewhere, to a problem that's plagued digital communities for as long as I've been around them. Even way back when I was BBSing you could see communities change as more people joined.

Eventually people who didn't care about a community's history were bound to join, and those with no respect for the community are able to change that community drastically, quickly, almost over night.

People who respect a community don't want to be part of drastic, sweeping changes, even to rectify the problem they see, because by the time they're able to properly express what's bothering them about the community, the drastic changes brought in by a new guard have already been taken up by the newest members, and they don't know how the community used to be and they don't care.

When someone figures out how to keep a digital community fresh and growing and yet able to remember and stick to the goals the community was created with, that person will deserve celebration.
posted by cCranium at 10:42 AM on September 5, 2001