Their conundrum seems to have an obvious solution given the nature of the site, just charge an annual fee for continued commenting privileges.
Everyone there already paid a small amount of money to register, so there's no reason to expect they will all bail if a similarly small annual fee is introduced.
Full disclosure: I used to run the site. This is, at this point, just my personal take; I handed it off to other folks in the community whose work I believe in entirely and I am glad they are working on this now.
So, MetaFilter already had and has an enormously higher than normal rate of voluntary contribution per capita; when the first call for community support went out in 2014 on the tail of the great web ad market fuckification, something like 20% of the userbase stepped up with contributions, which is an unheard of number.
It's obvious to say "just charge everyone" but it's unreflective of both the buy-in the community already has from folks willing to support the site, and of the degree to which slamming a door on a historically open community flies in the face of the ethos the site has tried to be increasingly inclusive and increasingly aware of the need to build a community out of not just folks with idle subscription cash sitting around.
A paywall is great if your goal is to use it as a stick against non-paying folks. If you want a community to include folks who want to be there vs. just folks inclined to pay to be there, it's a poor solution. And if you build a good place, people will pay even if you don't make them. That MeFi still exists at all post-2014 is proof of that.
> A paywall is great if your goal is to use it as a stick against non-paying folks
It wouldn't count as a stick since it's not punishment for some behaviour. There's obviously an ongoing cost to running a website, and not just a one-time cost at the beginning, so I think it would be widely accepted for an annual contribution to be mandatory.
(Excluding deranged folks demanding free services, or those who can't comprehend that ongoing costs exist. Which should only be a tiny segment of the community)
Plenty of people can't afford an annual contribution, or aren't part of the site on an ongoing basis and wouldn't consider it worth it - but the site still wants their involvement, and specifically doesn't want to push the demographics of contributors further towards "people who can and will pay regular amounts".
For those who don’t know, this financial trouble goes back to ranking changes made by Google 2012-2014, and since then, Google and Facebook drying up the ad market for blogs and competing social networks.
Recently, Jessamyn West, a longtime community member, moderator, and Internet Archive alum bought the site and has brought on a committee of community members to run Metafilter with broader membership input.
Metafilter isn’t perfect, but it’s old growth Internet that respects readers and members and respects RSS and semantic web principles.
We really need Internet homes and watering holes like Metafilter to not just stay alive, but become healthier. Apparently that takes several thousand dollars a month. As a longtime reader, I’m contributing and hope others also will.
It seems dire, but I'm also hopeful in the recent organizational shift. I'm not aware of many other sites moving to a community-run model, & if they can build out enough runway I'm excited to see what it might look like.
Everyone there already paid a small amount of money to register, so there's no reason to expect they will all bail if a similarly small annual fee is introduced.