Podcast #26: This Is Haughey Do It
Podcast #26: This Is Haughey Do It
The evolution of MetaFilter: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter, the collection of sites and communities that Paul describes as “one of the real success stories of the web.” The conversation covers Matt’s early career at Pyra Labs, the accessibility of digital technologies, his current job as a writer for Slack, and how if you spend enough time publishing online, you’ll inevitably attract the attention of two groups — trolls and lawyers.
Matt: You know, a thread would come up on MetaFilter about photography, and someone would be, like, “Hey, I’m looking for a new pocket camera.” And then like, photography nerds would drop all this knowledge, and I’d be like, man, there’s something here. We are all smart nerds with hobbies —
Paul: Who’d love to talk about it.
Matt: Yeah.
Rich: They were just looking for a forum, to just…say what they know.
Matt: All there was was Google Answers, which was that weird dollar-per-question thing, you know, with humans and like…
Paul: Oh, that was terrible.
Matt: It survived for two or three years and they got rid of it. So I was like —
Paul: It never made sense. You know, people misunderstood human motivation with that. They were like, we need to pay people to answer questions, and that’s not the internet. The internet is, I will come and answer the question before you ask.