This week is MetaFilter‘s twelfth anniversary. To commemorate the event, Matt Haughey purchased the first domain ever linked to from MeFi and posted a stories of how members of community originally found the site and what it has meant to them.
Matt, recently featured on the cover of his local alternative newsweekly, was a member of the original blogging community. There are a few blogs still kicking that were born in 1999 (mine was technically born in 1998), and Matt was a member of that group. He was cleverer and more generous than most of us, though. Rather than creating a space to post his own thoughts, he built a site where anyone could post links and comment on them.
At the time, I thought it was a crazy idea. Someone created a mailing list that some of the early bloggers were using to discuss ideas for a blogging-related startup. It was the height of the dot com bubble and we felt we all ought to be able to capitalize on this great idea that we’d all latched onto. Little did we know at the time that Matt already had the great idea — empower the community and lovingly care for it.
Here’s to twelve more years.
July 15, 2011 at 1:57 am
Thanks, Rafe! Someday I swear, we’ll actually meet in person.