Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people.

Two weeks ago Daniel Drucker went to Metafilter with a request. "My father passed away this morning," he wrote. "I'm going through his file, and I came across JOKES.TXT ... which contains only the ...

Anyone who searches for information on the web will land on MetaFilter eventually, probably without realising what it is. Nowadays, the web is designer driven, and priority is given to bold headlines, ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Matt Haughey talks about why Facebook is like AOL in the ‘90s, and the best and worst developments in online ...

In 15 minutes, Metafilter cracked a family secret that had gone unsolved since the '90s On Monday, Metafilter user JannaK asked for the Internet’s help in solving a decades-old family mystery. In 1996 ...

Granted, this is a pretty goofy chart, with tongue firmly in cheek. But back up: Behind the jokes, there’s serious information in there about who uses each service and how the users see themselves — ...