[joshmillard]

Or to take it from another angle, Reddit couldn't be as large.

Which is sort of at the heart of what Matt was talking about with scaling community -- it's not that large is bad or that profit is bad, per se, but if your goal is to have a sense community ethos and some degree of coherence to the spirit of what being a site member means, you have to say no to some of the things that make big userbases and ever-upwards biz growth doable.

MetaFilter's major revenue growth up through 2012 was despite a lack of, not because of, any attempt to chase down big userbase growth. It was a ride on the AdSense wagon during a very big period of growth on that end, while the site maintained a reasonable slow increase of users. Likewise the AdSense crash (and the double whammy we got for the punitive misclassification) wasn't the result of shutting down or reversing user-growth measure. The site strategy of maintaining a community that doesn't grow or change too fast was consistent throughout that long stretch of years, and it's something that means we didn't explode by orders of magnitude but also that, even after a rough period, we also haven't collapsed under the weight of too much growth-chasing overleveraging our resources and debts and so on.

Reddit is a big, complicated topic about which I have lots of thoughts but no real interest in digging in on here or now. But there are some very complicated differences in the implications of what community, userbase, and moderation mean as words and ideas for a site like MetaFilter and a site like Reddit that make casual straight-across comparisons using those words essentially useless. The difference between volunteer and paid moderation is a very good, very big example of that.