What are the goals of Metafilter? What do you intend with it? Is there a cause behind the project? An ideology?

Matthew: There isn't really any grand plan. It started simple as a weblog about cool stuff found on the web and has pretty much continued to do that at its core. My continued goal is to have an interesting, engaging website I enjoy reading and it's living up to that for me. There's no cause or ideology behind it. It's got a simple beginning and that's about all there is to it.

Why did you choose to use a collaborative platform on Metafilter? Why is important multi-users?

Matthew: At the time I started working on MetaFilter, there weren't any group weblogs or weblog communities. There was slashdot, which wasn't considered a weblog, and I patterned MetaFilter after them because I used to enjoy slashdot. I thought I could do a similar site better than them by making it easier to use and having a broader scope than just computer news.

My design from the start was to focus on multiple authors of posts, but I totally overlooked and underestimated the importance of the comment area. The community within the comments section quickly blossomed and became a major draw for the site and focus for users.

As I see in your website you have a high level of participation, great number of threads and comments. What do you attribute to that? How to you attract collaboration? Do you thing that the press Metafilter got can be an explanation for that?

Matthew: I think the high level of participation is mostly due to the age of the community. The site is over six years old, which in internet term (and especially weblog terms) is practically ancient, Four years ago, an average post probably got 10-15 comments, today that's probably 50-60 average. I think the press certainly helps with sudden upsurges of activities, but most of the growth is word of mouth, over time.

For the last year, I've even required a $5 donation before anyone can sign up, so that definitely helped slow user growth a bit but the site remains popular so the content is also a huge draw for readers and members.

Are you happy with the level of participation in Metafilter? Did you expect more or less? Is that effective in your opinion? Are you achieving your goals?

Matthew: Yeah, I'm pretty happy with it. MetaFilter is a vibrant community and I find dozens of interesting threads to read each day. I never intended to have much participation so it's way beyond my expectations. Ask MetaFilter has totally blown away my expectations and provides a terrific way to get information and offer advice to other members.

For how long do you plan to have Metafilter on the net? Is there a fixed time for its duration or not? I say that in a way because an active website is time consuming, so do you plan to be involved with the project forever? Project lifetime is something that matters for you? How do you see the future of Metafilter?

Matthew: Well, I never knew what the future would hold for metafilter, and it's true it takes a lot of time and energy to run. Up until a couple years ago, I was always toying with the idea of shutting it down, giving it away, or doing something similar so that I could move on to other things. However, once I started my own ad service on the site and started taking ads from Google and others, the site began to finally pay for itself a bit and I could cover hosting and pay for new servers. The site has since become enough of a revenue source that I recently quit my job to work on it full time.

So as far as I can tell, I'll keep MetaFilter going for as long as I can, as long as it can support me and let me continue to run it full time.