Why Refi?

Why Refi? Why review Metafilter? To what purpose? &c.

It's been something like seven years since Metafilter came into being, and the site has grown from tiny experimental community weblog to a bustling fixture of blogdom. In that time, the userbase has grown and changed, the threads have gotten longer, the traffic has gotten heavier. Folks talk about the good old days; other folks talk about how there weren't any good old days. Assertions get tossed around—this has changed, that has stayed the same—

But why not test some of that? Why not take a look back through the history of Metafilter, and see what there is to actually see?

Why not indeed!

So here's the plan: sample mefi history, talk about what's there, who's there, and what the hell everybody is talking about and how. Maybe some armchair discourse analysis thrown in. Maybe even directed graphs of conversational branching.