After sixteen years of membership, I just closed my Metafilter account. End of an era: it was the last piece of the old Web, the one I was excited about and emotionally invested in, the one that felt like a community – or a community of communities, really. No more; Metafilter’s culture has been growing steadily crankier over the years, less fun and more nitpicky, and has finally sunk below the “never read the comments” threshold.

The web is over; it’s basically just television, now, with a few exceptions. Reddit is still fun, though it’s more of a playground than a community. Blogs are over, message boards all seem to have gotten swallowed up by Facebook, and Facebook itself doesn’t have very much going on anymore.

I’m not sure what comes next, but I’m looking forward to finding out about it.