My name's Zach Kaufmann -- I'm the associate editor at Splice Today and the one responsible for all the Metafilter content that has been posted. Ah, where to start: first, I should say, I'm sorry, you're right, there are days when I no doubt rely too heavily on Metafilter, and provide absolutely no credit for having found the link on Metafilter.posted by Rhaomi at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2010
A little bit of broader context: Splice is a very, very small operation (in house staff includes myself, the main editor, and the girl who manages all of the billing and what not). As associate editor, I am solely responsible for what gets posted in the feed and multimedia: about 5 or 6 posts in each, every day. Not that many I guess. I generally check out Metafilter as well as Digg and Reddit and a couple of other aggregator sites on www.theweblist.net.
I usually go to Metafilter first because, well, you guys are the best. You're the easiest to navigate, you find pretty interesting things, you generally just do it better than most of the others. I freakin' love Metafilter is what I'm saying, so I'm sorry if I've upset the community.
Now, all that being said, here's why I don't think what I do is any kind of problem 90%+ of the time: most of the links that get posted (as some of your own users pointed out in the discussion) are not-exactly flying under the radar: The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, various other very well known newspapers, magazines, blogs etc etc. I could no doubt find almost all of the stuff that gets posted on Metafilter on Reddit, Digg, and so on. There's only so much credit any site can take for "finding" a NY Times article. In cases like the blog about the guy eating the really hot chili (one of the specific examples in your message to Russ), should I have included some kind of "via Metafilter"? Probably. If it helps, I'll start doing that, and I could even go back and add that in on older posts. But let's be honest, most of the stuff I've found on Metafilter and then used on Splice is not this kind of obscure blog stuff. It is, like I said, from pretty heavily trafficked and well known sites, and the fact that it gets posted on Metafilter (or any other aggregate site) doesn't really mean a whole lot.
Please feel free to share this email with the Metafilter community, if you're so inclined. Also, if you want to talk further, my email is zkauf1@gmail.com
Best,
-Zach Kaufmann
posted by Think_Long at 4:29 PM on March 16, 2010