Some links

[charmian]

1. An interview with Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter, which, though it started out as a hobby, has enabled him to quit his day job and pay three employees.

The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.

2. In Praise of Online Obscurity

On how socializing doesn't scale.

"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

Comments

[elena]

(although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size)

And avoid trolling. IIRC, that's why they do the same at the Something Awful forums.

[princessofgeeks]

omg thanks for the Wired post. So true.

[morineko]

I'm basing this on the experience of the blogger, rather than the experience of the followers.

In my experience (the sports blogosphere, for the most part) Twitter is not the same at all as LJ/DW/Facebook sort of social network; it's usually used as the quick, more social adjunct to existing non-intimate blogging. Twitter, for sports people, has always been largely a broadcast model. Also, after 3000 followers (and not every follower will even try to @ you, especially if they're following for content and not interaction) I'd imagine that it gets to be just too much work catching up with the @replies.

In previous experience with LJ the monkeysphere definitely kicks in at about 100 followers. How many people with that many followers at LJ/DW have granular access lists? I'd imagine almost all of them. For me, anything with an audience of more than 10 is already broadcasting.

As for "revealing"--back in the stone age of online journaling, there weren't comments. unless the journaller tacked on a forum or guestbook, everything was email. There was no social community and people probably could reveal a lot more than they could today; obscurity because the WWW wasn't as popular as it is now, combined with inconvenient technology.