I think my roommate sent me a link to it once, right after I'd moved to NYC in 2002. (I wasn't able to get an account of my own till 2005.) I remember working an internship at a publishing house and showing something on MetaFilter to a co-worker. A couple years later, I found out that guy had been Divine_Wino. WHOOPS, I bet he thought I was dumb.
Hermitosis's Brushes With Death, Real and Imaginary
So much of my social life, my professional life, and my creative inspiration has come from MetaFilter that I can't really imagine what my life (or my brain) would be like now without it.
I had been a MeFi reader and very-tentative participant for some time, but it wasn't until I posted this question -- asking whether I should contact the surviving relatives of a man whose death I'd witnessed some years before -- that I felt connected to the community in a meaningful way. People seemed to reach out emotionally in their responses in a way I'd never really encountered firsthand online before.
It was made extra memorable when I was able to update the thread with very odd details from my conversation with the man's widow.
And of course, later on I got emotional responses of another kind -- angry, frustrated ones -- when I refused to call 311 over a creepy smell in my building that I sort of half-way imagined MIGHT be a dead body. In fact, I lied about calling in my follow-up just so people would let it rest... by then I was really, really sure that I had been mistaken, but people couldn't seem to accept that, so I lied. SORRY.
To many people I will probably always be that asshat who swore he'd disable his account if a certain comment garnered 500 favorites. When it finally happened, I laid low with another account for what seemed like an appropriate period before sneaking back into my old persona.
