Group revival

Just because.

I'm in favor. Want to be an administrator of the group?

I'm in favour - I suspect there's a lot more LT mefites in the interval this group was last active!

I don't think there needs to be an admin, we just have to occasionally post things so the group does not go dormant.

*bump*

Okay, I'll bite: what would I expect to get from Metafilter, as an active LT member?

I know I could look it up, but I found this group, not Metafilter; and I'm also curious why there should be an LT group, rather than just interacting there.

I am all for this grope revival.

The question I want to know is—how do you think the sites compare and what should LT learn from MetaFilter?

Hooray for the upcoming GoodReads exodus, I guess?

That's a really interesting question, Tim. I think there are comparisons between mefites who prefer to stick to one section/area of the mefi community to people who use different areas of LT without necessarily going into the more community aspects of the sites.

I suppose, the question about what LT could learn from Metafilter is highly dependent on what LT wants to be? After all, I don't think "metafilter, with books" is the end game.

Things that I think make Mefi special in general would include:

1. Active moderators/moderating (I would suggest you guys do a great job of this already!)
2. Interesting and interested user base (again, with the numbers I think you guys are pretty solid on this)
3. Clean and simple design (given the sophistication of LT, I think the site does a commendable job here, too).
4. Not too aggressively commercial (LT is great at this, imho).

For me, I partake quite actively in the mefi community and much less so over here. I'm not sure why exactly that is. I suppose I came to LT as a way of managing my library first and foremost and the communitarian aspects were unexpected.

I guess also that books are much more subjective, and I find it harder to meet people who are interested in the books I am and have interesting things to say about them. Reading is by nature a solitary experience. Mefi is geared more around arguing or connecting. Comparing LT to Goodreads in this respect is revealing I think. Good Reads had a much larger, more active community (or felt that way to me), but the review quality was very so-so, there was much more tribalism, naked spammage and commercialism, etc. What made the community so popular also made it much less appealing to me. I also hated the layout but I know I'm in a minority there.

How does mefi deal with fragmentation? I think our fragmentation into groups has really hurt us.

> How does mefi deal with fragmentation?

We sort of deal with it by making everyone get together in one place if they want to discuss policy or have public discussions with the mods. So people are welcome to just hang out in MetaFilter Music or post to the front page, but if they want to get involved with the way the site works (or if they have gripes about it) they're directed to the MetaTalk back room. It's weird, we do have a few independent communities on the site which is always a little weird, some of the customs are different from place to place and some of the guidelines are a bit different, but the profiles and the linking and the meta-discussion and the "also on" stuff that we do all sort of comes back to a central core idea and value. It also helps that Matt had some really ice early founding visions but has been pretty hands off in terms of letting the place be what it wants.

There have been some book-oriented spinoffs from way back when--BookFilter type stuff, but they had a hard time achieving critical mass but there's definitely a subgroup of our users who would LOVE something like that, and certainly a lot of support for the ReadMe page on the wiki.

http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/ReadMe

So nice to see you, Jessamyn.