Ask Me Anything

August 30, 2009 6:19 AM

I was shot in the head two years ago. I was in prison for six years. I live in a Taliban hub. I need to be an amputee. I'm four. I'm six. I'm eight. I have a micropenis. I've had sex both with and without a foreskin. My sister and I are in love. I'm in love with my mother. I married and had a daughter with my first cousin. I love my dog. I have killed someone while driving drunk. I have superpowers from chemotherapy. I was in a cult for seven years. I own a woman. I used to be asexual (I am still asexual). I was in porn (and I'm still in porn). I took a boy's virginity. I am killing myself in a few months.

I started the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I started Reddit.

I have a "state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions". I have Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I believe free will doesn't exist.

I was driven gay. I am gay in a straight marriage. I was born a woman, became a man, and as a man, I'm gay.

I'm a pawnbroker, mortician, spammer, multimillionaire, working TV/film comedy writer, Freemason, actor's assistant, beekeeper, drug dealer, Catholic priest, kleptomaniac, nudist, prosecutor, suicide hotline volunteer.

I'm a pathological liar. I might be making all this up.

Ask me anything.

posted by WCityMike (125 comments total)

I think I read something about this topic on reddit the other day.
posted by Dumsnill at 6:23 AM on August 30 [3 favorites]

All this is really one of the best parts of that site.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 6:30 AM on August 30

I was fine leaving this on reddit (I am still fine leaving this on reddit).
posted by allen.spaulding at 6:30 AM on August 30 [10 favorites]

Can I ask you about that Dumsmill?
posted by srboisvert at 6:31 AM on August 30

Good lord, these ask me threads are amazing to read. Too bad I don't have anything cool to offer the Reddit community. (I can't say Reddit and community in the same sentence with a straight face)
posted by Michael Leung at 6:36 AM on August 30

There is also the Ask / Tell forum on SA
posted by thylacine at 6:37 AM on August 30 [4 favorites]

I am sort of a double.
posted by escabeche at 6:53 AM on August 30 [5 favorites]

I still don't understand Reddit. Seems like a Metafilter, without content. (Does have a nice professional white background, though.)
posted by jbickers at 7:20 AM on August 30 [4 favorites]

Reddit like the teenager continues unabated.
posted by humannaire at 7:21 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

Here's a Reddit user who still doesn't understand MetaFilter.

"Anyways, at first glance it seems sort of archaic without an upvote/downvote system. In addition, the commenting system avoids replies. But I sort of thought, perhaps this is both the cause of success and failure in these community websites. It seems to be a good idea to allow the community to control the content to the extreme that upvoting and downvoting allow, but at the same time it really does filter out some interesting stuff. The differences in the comment system also seemed to have a large effect. Posts actually involved some sort of input, but because each comment was isolated by itself it was difficult to filter through it. Specifically, without upvotes and downvotes you can’t really FIND the good posts (though they do rank comments by popularity, it is really ineffectual to the same extent that Reddit and Digg currently function)–no one really verifies information and such. I probably won’t be going back there to be honest, but it seems decent if you spend several hours a day reading online."
posted by escabeche at 7:22 AM on August 30 [12 favorites]

All this is really one of the best parts of that site.

This is the interesting part of having a site that is only modded by community voting. Reddit is made to share links — but if you have a post with no links that gets enough votes, that is just fine. De facto fine, at least, since there is no one to say it's not.

The bad side of this is when you polls like "Vote this up if you feel outraged about whatever!"
posted by smackfu at 7:26 AM on August 30

This is the interesting part of having a site that is only modded by community voting. Reddit is made to share links — but if you have a post with no links that gets enough votes, that is just fine. De facto fine, at least, since there is no one to say it's not.

Yeah, there's some things about reddit that eat shit.

The IamA subreddit ain't one of them.
posted by tylerfulltilt at 7:39 AM on August 30

I thought Reddit was like a less-popular Digg.
posted by Evilspork at 7:40 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]

I think it's interesting how sites like this end up having their own community attitudes and values. Ie: on Metafilter we're pretty much entirely a politically liberal bunch now. I can't figure out what the Reddit community is, but it always feels uncomfortable to me. Too much Ron Paul?
posted by Nelson at 7:42 AM on August 30

I have problems with self-policed sites in general, mostly because they tend to devolve into shit storms. It may depend on the demographic the site attracts, or what sort of self-policing features are available, but I've yet to see a userbase-moderated wed forum that doesn't end up being a constant wave after wave of trolls trolling trolls. Reddit might be an exception. I don't know, but reading the comments sort of gives me a headache. And I think the "I will commit suicide" one might be a prank - mostly because of this:

I thank you all for your advice, but my mind is made up. The thing is, I want questions about my decision, not ways around it. If I wanted help, I would seek it, I know that much. But I simply wish to die. That's that:)

"I want to die and that's that, smiley face." Yeah. Having a hard time believing this isn't a /b/tard.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 7:47 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

That shot in the head story is pretty gripping. The guy doesn't want his name mentioned so I won't, but it's not too hard to Google and it does seem to check out. Wow, what a thing to happen to you. If he'd be willing to cooperate on a documentary about his ordeal, I'd pay to see it.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:55 AM on August 30

Dear reddit, will this appear on metafilter in a day or so?

>Yes
>Shut the fuck up
>Who?
>Knock knock
>who's there
[800 or so similar comments later]
>Glen Beck who?
posted by mattoxic at 7:55 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]

There is also the Ask / Tell forum on SA

I love how they have this rule: Do not post "Ask me" threads about working in the food industry or basic retail (Best Buy, Costco, Gamestop, etc.).
posted by smackfu at 8:04 AM on August 30 [3 favorites]

Regarding cancer treatment and superpowers: I have the super-smell thing post-treatment too (radiation, not chemo). I think it's because the treatment kills a lot of your tastebuds, so for a while after during/after treatment you smell and taste almost nothing. Then your tastebuds grow back, and everything smells SUPER STRONG. I don't know if it's the fact that the tastebuds are new or it's just the comparison to smelling nothing, but now I can smell the difference when a new person walks on the bus. I wonder if this feeling of heightened senses decreases over time.
posted by Hildegarde at 8:04 AM on August 30

Geeze, people, insecure much? There's nothing wrong with reddit. Obviously, we like MeFi better, but it's not like the place is a threat, and they do get some pretty good content over there.

You will not get cooties from reading a reddit link. Honest.
posted by Malor at 8:07 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]

escabeche: "Here's a Reddit user who still doesn't understand MetaFilter."

God, this is hilarious. It all boils down to, "You mean you have to read everything? That's like a baby's toy!"

But no, seriously, empirically voting everything up or down is clearly the appropriate way to have a discussion.
posted by TypographicalError at 8:15 AM on August 30 [17 favorites]

I really can't read their threading.
posted by Artw at 8:31 AM on August 30 [11 favorites]

Still, not as bad as Slashdot.
posted by Artw at 8:35 AM on August 30

Stupid Shelbyville (shakes fist).
posted by monkey!knife!fight! at 8:35 AM on August 30 [50 favorites]

That's interesting, Hildegarde. I had a pretty bad head injury (2 skull fractures) from a climbing accident when I was 19, and after I had recovered I had the same problem of hypersensitivity to taste and smell, especially to certain flavours like peppermint. It went away, mostly, over time (but I'm sure that the way I smell/taste woodsmoke has changed permanently).
I had always thought this was evidence of some sort of brain damage, but I much prefer the idea that it was merely tongue-related!
posted by Flashman at 8:41 AM on August 30

Seems like in some of these, the other posters are reading "I'm an X, ask me anything" as "I'm an X and you should come argue with me about it."

Which is too bad, because I really wanted to know more, f'rinstance, about what life is like for the "driven gay" guy. Instead the thread was taken over by people telling him he's wrong, he's lying, he's "really" been gay all along, he's "really" straight, blah blah blah.

I guess the internet gives us lots of opportunities to become good debaters, and relatively few to become good interviewers, and here it's showing.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:57 AM on August 30 [8 favorites]

I really can't read their threading. (Artw)

I've got some difficulty with it too, Artw. This helps marginally.
posted by WCityMike at 8:59 AM on August 30

Geeze, people, insecure much?

Maybe a little, or maybe some don't understand the hype, or fear the power of mob rule. Left up to the masses, very active small groups can re-shape the entire community. Of course, giving god-like powers of deletion to an even smaller group does the same thing, if they get power hungry. Luckily Metafilter is blessed by benevolent god-kings. *shakes his bag of burnt offerings in the wind*

I guess the internet gives us lots of opportunities to become good debaters

Eh, I'd say there's a lot of disagreement, not a whole lot of debate. People don't outline why they think something, and cut to the result of their thoughts: "No, you're wrong, I'm right." Flamewars are not debates. Driving someone out of a flamewar might mean you won the war, but it doesn't mean your point of view is more correct or better.

A comment from I've killed someone (when I drove drunk):

Agreed, I think the IAMA subreddit should emphasize a more non-judgmental tone for posts like this. I think the range of experiences in IAMA is incredibly powerful and will only become more-so if we create a truely safe and non-judgmental environment for people to share.

tl;dr: I don't care if you're a fetus farmer and you blend fetus' for fun and profit; I want to hear from those kinds of people because they tend to provide the most unique IAMA's.

Kudos to the first half, but do Reddit readers have such short attention spans that 2 long sentences are overwhelming yet 2 short ones are OK?
posted by filthy light thief at 9:18 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

Eh, I'd say there's a lot of disagreement, not a whole lot of debate. People don't outline why they think something, and cut to the result of their thoughts: "No, you're wrong, I'm right." Flamewars are not debates. Driving someone out of a flamewar might mean you won the war, but it doesn't mean your point of view is more correct or better.

I think we've been pretty spoiled around here, in that for the most part we expect each other to be able to make a coherent, logical point that cites sources if necessary, to write clearly, saying what you mean, where people are generally respectful, trolling is discouraged, and where you will sometimes see that rarest of rare birds, "I was wrong, thanks for the correction."
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 9:27 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]

I read both MeFi and reddit and have posted a bit to both, with much more here. There is certainly a sense in which MeFi has a less cutting-edge system for organizing content than reddit, but I would hesitate to ascribe the difference in communities to age, as I've seen some do elsewhere. (MeFi are codgers, reddit are punkkids on my lawn blah blah blah) Reddit certainly has a wilder feel though, for better and for worse. The humor among members makes MeFi look pretty tame and I was witness to a community effort over there that helped sink a particularly annoying robocaller scam. At the same time, the community can be petty and vicious in juvenile ways. I know people who have more or less quit reading it simply because they were tired of the sexism (sometimes violent in tone) and sifting through that to get to any worthwhile comments.

The thing that strikes me about reddit is its web 2.0 faith in the mob. The upvote/downvote system is taken by the faithful as an indisputably better system for oragnization - as not simply sorting, but adding good information to the discussion. The thing is - and this goes far beyond reddit to include a lot of more shallow "wisdom of crowds" analysis - the information it adds is only as good as the mob that creates it. Communities with shared interests and relatively open practices and attitudes do get those kinds of advantages, and communities that cull certain views and insulate a subset of their members or their members' interests really do turn into mobs in the pejorative sense. No community is perfect in the former sense and communities don't often go off the deep end in the latter, but there's a spectrum there along which any community will fall on an issue at a time.

Prophets of Web 2.0 often insist that just by leaving a matter open to those community members, the dynamic system of interactions will sort it all out in the long run. (Bonus points if they use the terms "state space" or "non-linear dynamics" and clearly have no idea what the hell they're talking about.) But if I may pinch a bit of Keynes, in the long run, we'll all be dead. Communities have prevailing characteristics, and sometimes those characteristics are conducive to truth and insight, and sometimes they're not. And each of those will be true on different issues for the same community. So, for instance, when I would things up on the philosophy reddits over there, I would often see things upvoted that were clearly upvoted for reflecting the prevailing opinions of the group (e.g. determinism about free will, reductionism about the mid) even when they were shoddy content that didn't add anything. There were occasions where (1) I would make a comment, (2) someone would come along and make an idiotic response to it, (3) see the response get upvoted because it was angrier in tone (even though I wasn't diverging from the prevailing opinion, and neither was the commenter), (4) point out the fallacy in the response in friendly non-threatening terms, (5) get the same response, slightly rearranged but with fallacy intact, and (6) see the restated fallacy get upvoted.

I quit going there because I wouldn't have the spare time to go through that if I were immortal. And this was the philosophy subreddits; I can hardly imagine the simian scat-slinging bacchanalia that the political and atheism subreddits must be. The upvote/downvote does bury the sort of "U DOODZ R PHAGGGGZ!!!1!!!!!" detritus any site attracts, but I tend to skip over that anyway. I would imagine that for some subreddits, the reverse is true, and useful interaction is driven by the upvote/downvote system. But at the same time, the upvote/downvote compounded the features of bad discussions. (Maybe its virtue in that sense was letting me know not to bother with those discussions.) It never really became worth my time to interact with folks there in the way it has here, given the things I wanted to follow. MeFi wouldn't be hurt by some tech additions (at least the chance to delete dumb things we say), but I stick around here for the community and the genial but critical approach it takes. I doubt upvotes/downvotes will add to that.
posted by el_lupino at 9:27 AM on August 30 [11 favorites]

do Reddit readers have such short attention spans that 2 long sentences are overwhelming yet 2 short ones are OK?

Surely you can see that "tl;dr" is a joking way of saying "in summary?"
posted by grouse at 9:37 AM on August 30

I guess the internet gives us lots of opportunities to become good debaters

Eh, I'd say there's a lot of disagreement, not a whole lot of debate.

I agree with both of you in some regards. I've found most "community" sites, including Reddit, to be full of "gotcha" type debates, which are pointless, i.e. more of a "slam" contest ("your mamma's so fat that ...") than a "debate" ("this is why your momma is so fat ...").

I *know* the obvious arguments. I want someone to post something I didn't think of. That's why I read and write in MetaFilter.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:45 AM on August 30

The problem is that no matter what, it's still Reddit and it's still on a Reddit level of discourse.
posted by dunkadunc at 9:47 AM on August 30

Admit it -- you posted this for the sake of the tags, didn't you?
posted by decagon at 9:51 AM on August 30

Surely you can see that "tl;dr" is a joking way of saying "in summary?"

I'm not sure it's that clearcut. Certainly it was probably self-aware, and trying to condemn the reddit userbase on the basis of that person's usage is pretty silly. But I don't think it's transparent at all that the writer there was being wholly facetious, either. Just how jokingly they were using it is up for question.

This usage—"tl;dr" as not a dismissal (or joking "dismissal") of a wordy passage but a prefix for a summary/restatement of content being identified as wordy—really fascinates me in general. I was struck the first time I saw it in action on mefi (which is the first time I saw it in action in general, though I'm sure it didn't start there or then) and laughed out loud, because it's a wonderful specialization of the phrase.

One thing I think is interesting about the bit we're discussing from above is the distinction between someone offering a summary/restatement of their own content vs. of someone else's content in that fashion. There's a couple things going on—in either case, there's an implicit (possibly humorous, possibly not) connotation of a kind of fault with the original passage (it's too dang long) coupled with a critique of the fellow readers (this is too long for you), and how much of the one or the other is in play varies from instance to instance.

So "tl;dr [restatement]" can be
1. an insult toward the author of the original passage,
2. an insult to the readers of the passage, and
3. an insult toward the person choosing to link/quote the original author's passage in the case where author and presenter are not the same("you have shown poor judgement about the length of the things you are sharing").

But in the case where the person offering the tl;dr restatement is doing so in response or as an addendum to their own words, you see both (1) and (3) invert into potential self-criticism. Though in a medium where including that criticism in the same post as the content being criticized means coming to the conclusion that such criticism is apt before the writer ever hitting the submit button, such stuff only ever sees the light of day presumably as a rhetorical flourish (or a symptom of very, very poor self-control).

It's neat. Surprisingly complicated for what presumably started as arch dry throwaway humor.
posted by cortex at 10:01 AM on August 30 [16 favorites]

tl;dr version: "Hi, I'm cortex and I could overthink a plate of beans."

Just kidding, I love those comments.
posted by grouse at 10:15 AM on August 30 [4 favorites]

I thought Reddit was like a less-popular Digg.

Whatever you do, DO NOT say that there.
posted by brundlefly at 10:15 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]

The pics subreddit is great. By going there once a day, I can pinpoint the exact moment when something becomes overexposed. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy a three-wolf shirt from Ikea.
posted by Area Control at 10:27 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

monkey!knife!fight!: Stupid Shelbyville (shakes fist).

Yes, clearly there is never any good way of doing things, because all ways of doing things are equally the same, and questioning whether our way of doing things is better or worse than another group's way of doing things is like been a silly person on a cartoon show!
posted by koeselitz at 10:32 AM on August 30

Too indented; did not read
posted by Artw at 10:34 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

The sexism there is off the meter. I wonder if it started as a joke and then just got horribly out of hand. Post something about a woman and half the comments are talking about why she isn't in the kitchen making a sandwich (going back to that yahoo question).

But it is too prevalent to be funny anymore. It leaped past some recent joke or meme and now that mess is just sick, and it makes guys look like complete assholes. I love MeFi because through one method or another, that insanity is not welcome here.
posted by cashman at 10:39 AM on August 30 [11 favorites]

tl;dr version: "Hi, I'm cortex and I could overthink a plate of beans."

No, you know what's funny? You can start reading cortex' comment, and it only really starts getting boring for the attention defecit right about here, a natural break:

This usage—"tl;dr" as not a dismissal (or joking "dismissal") of a wordy passage but a prefix for a summary/restatement of content being identified as wordy—

and so they skip to the end, where he tl;dr's without actually signifying the act with a 'tl;dr'. Long story, short:

It's neat. Surprisingly complicated for what presumably started as arch dry throwaway humor.

You could probably even argue for intentionality by noting that cortex signalled his readers to skip to the end with the simple initial mention of the phrase 'tl;dr'.

Devious.
posted by carsonb at 10:49 AM on August 30

el_lupino: The thing that strikes me about reddit is its web 2.0 faith in the mob. The upvote/downvote system is taken by the faithful as an indisputably better system for oragnization - as not simply sorting, but adding good information to the discussion. The thing is - and this goes far beyond reddit to include a lot of more shallow "wisdom of crowds" analysis - the information it adds is only as good as the mob that creates it.

This is to me a perfect encapsulation of everything that's bad about not only reddit but unfortunately most of the internet; the cultivation of contemplative distance, of a space in which to stand back and say 'hmm...' is almost always lacking, whilst everyone and anyone is invited to launch themselves into the breach and give their rating of stuff they only just realized existed five minutes before. On reddit, the people that say 'hmm...' aren't (in my experience, anyway) the ones that get points; it's the people who say 'well I know it's this way!' that get voted off the charts. You can be dismissive or glowing (people like to think they're open-minded, so they'll vote for you either way) and as long as you write coherently and throw in some passion and, most importantly, you're decisive, people will vote for you no matter what.

I guess what I'm saying is, reddit is bad, and no one should ever use it.
posted by koeselitz at 10:52 AM on August 30 [5 favorites]

Reading a few of those, apparently there's one for some idiot who works for a radically anti-atheist organization.

That scares me.
posted by kldickson at 10:55 AM on August 30

But no, seriously, empirically voting everything up or down is clearly the appropriate way to have a discussion.

I favorited the above comment.
posted by rokusan at 10:55 AM on August 30 [3 favorites]

Y'know one interesting thing that I've noticed about Metafilter, by the way, that's almost diametrically opposed to the case on every other site on the internet? People are highly likely to favorite very long comments here, to the point that if a comment extends past a page, it's odd if it doesn't get favorited. I would put cortex through the unmitigated pain and suffering that combing for something like that in the data would cause (I can only imagine) but I think the experience of others will bear me out. Weird, eh?
posted by koeselitz at 10:55 AM on August 30

I think it's interesting how sites like this end up having their own community attitudes and values. Ie: on Metafilter we're pretty much entirely a politically liberal bunch now...

Hey, hey, hey, buddy...
posted by Faze at 11:01 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

Is there any way to get reddit to display all of the comments, not just the upvoted ones? I find the way they lay out comments pretty confusing. I tried setting it to display "old" (rather than "hot") but it still doesn't show all. I tried setting it "all" instead of "200" but it still omits ones with "comment score below threshold"...

Anyway these are very interesting even if their user interface is frustrating.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:10 AM on August 30

People are highly likely to favorite very long comments here

It's like an A for effort.
posted by smackfu at 11:10 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]

People are highly likely to favorite very long comments here...

Yeah, sorry. That was the coffee talking up above. Not the frontal lobes.
posted by el_lupino at 11:26 AM on August 30

The upvote/downvote system is, quite frankly, terrible. Occasionally one will submit a link and it gets a single downvote and that will be the end of it. This may be the result of bots, malicious people, or maybe someone didn't like the link. There is a lot of repeat content, since there are multiple subsites to visit.

It was a neat little site, before it got popular.

Recently the site managers had to remove a link to the Sears website because someone had figured out a neat little url hack to change the page's content. They removed it because lawyers got involved, but the community interpreted this as censorship and they got very angry at Sears for no real reason.

Reddit also has a "top subreddits" bar, compiled of the top subsites based on activity. There was a bug in the system causing the atheism subreddit to be more popular than it actually was (via mass downvotes, or something) so it would appear in the top 10 of all subreddits. The thing is, the atheism subreddit is notorious for being a massive 'circle jerk' for the godless, a majority of the atheists I know through the site (via IRC) are borderline disgusted by it. Well, the site managers decided to remove the atheism link from the top bar manually, and even after posting a long and detailed explination the community came to the conclusion that they were being censored and repressed and reddit was up to no good. Again, there was the wailing and grinding of teeth.

It's very hard to find a good discussion on that website. At least one that doesn't descend into vapid memes or something. Eventually it reaches a youtube-esque level of discourse.

And, don't get me started on AskReddit. Guess who decides what's the "best answer" ? The mob does.
posted by hellojed at 11:32 AM on August 30

Wow.

I've read both sites for a long time now, though MeFi much longer, and I've read MeFi less as of late...

I had no idea MeFi so hated Reddit!

I guess I just sort of take things for what they are. I know the mob comes in many forms - ranging from insightful to idiotic - so I don't marry my opinions to the quantity of up/down votes a story gets...

I get a lot out of Reddit because I subscribe to a few dozen "subreddits" that are of direct interest to me.

I'm also surprised people hate threaded comments so much. In an unthreaded system I get annoyed wasting time figuring out who someone is responding to (when they don't give context, etc) 20 posts up the page.... I've always preferred threaded comments because they're just "automatic" to me in terms of following the conversation... I didn't realize that most people felt way differently. Interesting.
posted by twiggy at 11:49 AM on August 30

Y'know one interesting thing that I've noticed about Metafilter

I think if you read Metafilter daily, and you (try to) keep an objective distance, you notice certain tendencies. Yeah, yeah, I know that's easily labeled a confirmation bias, but I'm kind of curious on how that question/allegation could be sussed out data-wise. Also I think it's kind of interesting how we could say "this is how Reddit works", but how many times does favorites come up in Meta and it seems that we can't find trends in how they work here?
posted by P.o.B. at 11:50 AM on August 30

I had no idea MeFi so hated Reddit!

Mefi is not one person/thing, the comments in this thread are unlikely to be a representative sample, etc.
posted by kathrineg at 11:51 AM on August 30

Recently the site managers had to remove a link to the Sears website because someone had figured out a neat little url hack to change the page's content. They removed it because lawyers got involved, but the community interpreted this as censorship and they got very angry at Sears for no real reason.

The hilarious thing about this was that when this happened the Reddit frontpage (and almost all of the recent internal pages) were almost completely spammed to death by people hating on Sears. Then people hating on the people hating on Sears whose posts were displacing other non-Sears topics joined in. Then people who had programmed special lines of code to remove the Sears posts and the people complaining about them started flooding in. As a result Reddit spammed itself into being useless.

In short, Reddit had some minor lulz after finding a minor exploit in the Sears site -- and then totally fucked itself for about a day and a half because of the inherent flaws in their whole upvoting system for filtering content.
posted by tastydonuts at 11:51 AM on August 30

I would put cortex through the unmitigated pain and suffering that combing for something like that in the data would cause (I can only imagine) but I think the experience of others will bear me out. Weird, eh?

There's no way to analyze this directly with just the content of the infodump, but I might try running a quick experiment myself there, just doing rough word count on a random sampling of comments in the db and graph that against fave count and see if there's a trend. That could also be done by an intrepid infodumper with a little bit of scraping, I suppose.

My gut says there would be some kind of measurable effect, but I won't guess about how pronounced it is.

The "why" question is the more interesting one, regardless:

- are long comments generally of relatively higher quality than short ones? (Open giant can of worms re: spectrum of qualitative factors in play here.)
- does the visibility of a long comment give it a better chance of being noticed in general by the aggregate reader, thus upping it's chances for consideration-for-favoriting in the first place?
- do people feel compelled to "reward" long comments (the smackfu "A for effort" principle)?
- do long comments tend to have a greater total number of ideas represented within them, presenting more individual potential motives for favoriting to the reader? (Here we assume that a reader will willingly favorite a comment for one subcomponent of it despite feeling neutral or possibly even negative toward the remaining content.)
- do long comments correlate with a user's overall visibility on the site, and does overall visibility itself correlate to a higher chance of favoriting regardless of comment length?

There's probably more, but those are what come to mind off the top of my head.
posted by cortex at 12:01 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

There's lots of B.S. and trolling and inanity on IAMA, but that being said....

for me it encapsulates one of the greatest uses of the internet I've ever seen. I'll go so far to say that, like askmefi, IAMA is one of the web's current wonders. I'm not sure how accessible complete strangers (albeit English speaking) have ever been to one another in the history of the world.

*wipes tear and continues to web surf*
posted by thisperon at 12:01 PM on August 30 [2 favorites]

Oh and one more thing, thanks for making mefi a shade of blue, it's easier to read for longer periods of time.
posted by hellojed at 12:03 PM on August 30

This is sorta MeTa, but I am amazed every day that MeFi works. Stuff is posted immediately on the front page with no filter and no ranking, and there's a manageable number of posts per day? That can be made to work?
posted by effugas at 12:09 PM on August 30

I found the "I am a prosecutor" one especially fascinating, it challenged several of my preconceptions. Several of the askers did have one-track-minds, especially concerning drug laws. It reminded me of the recent debate we had about pharmacists not filling plan B prescriptions.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 12:11 PM on August 30

el_lupino: Yeah, sorry. That was the coffee talking up above. Not the frontal lobes.

Seriously, no... I liked your input. That comment was a propos of nothing, not a response.
posted by koeselitz at 12:13 PM on August 30

Difference between mefi and reddit, encapsulated:

Mefi users who hate reddit will often post a long diatribe or nitpicky critique of reddit's inferior qualities.

Reddit users who hate mefi will post this.
posted by thisperon at 12:16 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

I get a lot out of Reddit because I subscribe to a few dozen "subreddits" that are of direct interest to me.

Me too, to an extent. When you use it that way, it can be a useful source of content. The comments, on the other hand, are mostly worthless.
posted by brundlefly at 12:16 PM on August 30

twiggy: In an unthreaded system I get annoyed wasting time figuring out who someone is responding to...

The painful consequence of a system which requires reading.
posted by koeselitz at 12:17 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

I read through a bunch of these when this was first posted, and one of the most interesting I found was the I have hooked up with a trannsexual girl (Yes it was a surprise!) thread, which was a surprisingly open, honest and non-homophobic discussion of somebody's true-life Crying Game experience. Not to be missed.
posted by KatlaDragon at 12:20 PM on August 30 [2 favorites]

thisperon: Reddit users who hate mefi will post this.

Ooh, I've got one, too:

Reddit users who hate Metafilter will just be people fed up with pretentiousness, whereas Metafilter users who hate Reddit will sometimes be total assholes brimming with the kind of pretentiousness that everybody in their right mind should hate.
posted by koeselitz at 12:27 PM on August 30

The Church of the FSM one is just strange. This is an actual organization now instead of piss-take on Intelligent Design in schools? Talk about missing the point.

I guess people just like to bandwagon.

There is also the Ask / Tell forum on SA

I love how they have this rule: Do not post "Ask me" threads about working in the food industry or basic retail (Best Buy, Costco, Gamestop, etc.).

Is that actual love or facetious love? Before they had this rule the threads were non-stop bickering about tipping etiquette, annoying customers/cashiers, etc. There's usually a retail megathread in GBS which is full of venting. One thread is enough.
posted by ODiV at 12:28 PM on August 30

Reddit users who hate mefi will post this.

Reddit users who were banned from mefi a couple years ago after years of shitting around on the site will sometimes post that too. Huh.
posted by cortex at 12:31 PM on August 30 [5 favorites]

I don't know what it is with me and Something Awful. Some of the funniest shit I've ever read is from SA, but the format just makes me not want to go there. Also it feels way more cloistered than either mefi or reddit.

Maybe I just like my forums text heavy and image free.
posted by thisperon at 12:32 PM on August 30

I'll agree that the default threading on Reddit is really hard to follow. Whenever I'm linked there, when I try read top to bottom, I'll come across comments that refer to others presumably somewhere else on the page. It can be confusing (get off my lawn?).
posted by ODiV at 12:36 PM on August 30

thisperson: Adblock Plus is your friend. I've got Something Awful set up so I hardly see any images.

The SA Forums and Metafilter are my two most visited "Internet communities" by a long shot. In both cases I believe the entrance fee and the moderation play integral parts in keeping them that way.
posted by ODiV at 12:40 PM on August 30

One other theory about popular long comments;

Writing a long coherent comment takes a lot of effort (thinking, writing, editing) on the part of the writer and someone's only going to do it if he really has something valuable to impart to the community, or to the thread.

I would argue that snappy one-liners are more likely to be faved by people with high visibility (and high visibility could be correlated with wit or intelligence or writing style or whatever).

To sum, no one trolls metafilter by writing a 900 word screed.
posted by stratastar at 12:44 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

erm snappy one-liners written by people with high visibility
posted by stratastar at 12:45 PM on August 30

Metafilter: seems decent if you spend several hours a day reading online.
posted by delmoi at 1:11 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

You know, that gives me an idea. On the one hand, we see a lot of short, snappy, jokey comments getting heavily favorited, right? And on the other hand, you've got these long, heavily favorited comments — which, from what I've seen, tend to be either stories (You know, something like this happened to me once, and lemme tell you...) or lessons (See, I work with the technology in this FPP, and what you've gotta understand is...)

I think we can assume that those favoriting patterns represent what we value. Metafilter, it seems, values jokes, stories and lessons over other kinds of dialogue — over small talk, questions, arguments, speculation, supportive hey-I-think-you're-awesome talk. Even in a MeTa thread where the main point is to hash out an argument, say, or to tell a big name user that they're awesome, the most favorited comments tend to be jokes, stories and lessons. That seems natural to us, because we're used to it, but it's unlike a lot of other social sites.

My girlfriend, for instance, spends a lot of time on 43 Things. They have a favoriting system like ours, but they use their favorites — they call them "cheers" — for encouragement and not applause. You give cheers to egg someone on, to prop them up when they're feeling unsure of themself, or just to say "Hey, I think you're neat." The posts that attract lots of cheers, then, aren't stories or jokes, but little bits of speculation ("Hey, maybe I'll take up running...") and everyday ups and downs ("Dammit, my car broke down again...."). Their favoriting pattern seems really alien to me, and Metafilter's seems really alien to my girlfriend. And of course, other sites have still other patterns, many of which feel just as strange to me in their own way.

Here's what I think is going on. The forms of discourse we value are essentially public forms of speech, spoken-word performance stuff, set down as text. If a large group of people is participating in a single, fluid conversation, without squabbling or breaking up, they're probably swapping jokes or stories or listening to someone teach. One way or another, they're taking turns putting on little performances for each other. On the other hand, if a large group of people tries to make small talk, or have an argument, or egg each other on, or give each other emotional support, it almost always breaks off from one big conversation into a bunch of side threads. And...

...hey, wait a minute. Side threads? Metafilter doesn't have those.

Or, put it the other way around. Because we don't have comment threading, we're a good, natural venue for public oratory — stories, jokes and teaching — and a lousy venue for the other stuff. So we attract people who value public oratory, and who reward good public oratory with lots of favorites when they see it. And that (he says, dusting off his hands) is why the favorites here gravitate towards the short and snappy or the long and moving here, when they don't necessarily do that on other sites.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:16 PM on August 30 [36 favorites]

Seriously, no... I liked your input. That comment was a propos of nothing, not a response.

Seriously though, I went back and thought, "Jesus, I was really rambling."
posted by el_lupino at 1:40 PM on August 30

I guess people just like to bandwagon.

You have discovered the essence of Reddit. I read both, but Reddit would be large units better than it is without all the content-less me-toos, inane jokes, and meme continuations long past the point where the humor is gone.
posted by ctmf at 1:46 PM on August 30

Before they had this rule the threads were non-stop bickering about tipping etiquette, annoying customers/cashiers, etc.

Oh, actually I thought it was because, "You're not a special snowflake and no one cares about how you work at McDonald's." But the tipping stuff makes sense.

SA also has an "Ask a Police Officer" thread which goes horribly wrong every few pages until people get banned for trolling. (And that's one I can't imagine we would do any better at.)
posted by smackfu at 2:03 PM on August 30

The 'tl;dr' stuff got me thinking.

Every cliche was the LOLCAT of its day.

It's just happening so fast these days that if you're not plugged into the hivepulse, then by the time you're aware of a meme it's already out of date.

But the 'All your base's and the keyboard cats can now begin their second life, as cliche - which together make up the building blocks of culture.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:15 PM on August 30

They've caught onto us.
posted by kylej at 2:21 PM on August 30

CRAP! Everybody run!
posted by P.o.B. at 2:34 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

The theme in that new reddit thread of even-handed acceptance of the inevitable conflicting in-group biases toward preferred community practices in an inter-community dialectic is terrifying and we should burn them kind of a refreshing jaunt into the meta.

Hi, people in that new thread reading this thread about us reading your other threads! I like you too, basically.
posted by cortex at 2:50 PM on August 30

Hey Reddit people:

Thanks to this thread, I've read your content for the first time, and to be honest, you seem like an alright sort. I personally like being able to read all the comments in the thread (and for those confused as to how we reply to each other, there's the italicized quoting method) but to each their own. I thought the prison IAMA was neat. I thought the suicide one was probably a troll. How was your summer vacation? Mine was fine. I went to the beach and ate fried fish. Later, I went back home. Do you like dragons? I like Pani Poni Dash, but I thought Darker Than Black was way too serious.

Write soon!
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 3:02 PM on August 30 [6 favorites]

I kind of wish John Hughes was still alive to script this denouement. And hey, that's another thing we have in common, at least when certain celebrities die: lots of reposts!
posted by cortex at 3:04 PM on August 30

Does this mean we have to have a rap battle now?
posted by subbes at 3:07 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

To use one of Reddits favorite memes:

Step 1: Metafilter links to Reddit.
Step 2: Reddit links to Metafilter.
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: Profit.
posted by tastydonuts at 3:10 PM on August 30

On reflection, the distaste for reddit displayed here seems to be a very strong parallel to the way much of Western Europe felt about the US prior to the election of Obama, and is equally misguided.
posted by anatinus at 3:13 PM on August 30

Thanks for this post, which is totally serendipitous for me. Like some of the people above, I originally fell in love with Metafilter because of the thoughtfully composed posts, the equally thoughtful comments, and the habit of MeFites to link to looong articles (the longer the better, in my view!). Then somehow AskMe worked its way into my heart, becoming my chief time-suck of preference. A couple of weeks ago, when my powers of procrastination outpaced the AskMe updates, I recalled reading about Reddit in an AskMe about other similarly-natured websites. It's now my go-to when AskMe is moving slowly and I'm in need of entertainment.

I'm still figuring out how to navigate iAmA in order to find the interesting stuff (the search engine there obviously has some tricks that I haven't yet learned), so this post is very helpful. Also, I'm only a lurker on Reddit, and it definitely offers a different sort of conversation than that which initially drew me to MeFi. But I think there are certain similarities between the two sites, and I'm not surprised that they share some user overlap.
posted by artemisia at 3:17 PM on August 30

The first cousin one just reminds me of an old classmate, who, during a European History discussion of the genetic travails of the European monarchies, suddenly proclaimed: "Well, my parents were first cousins and so were my grandparents and I'm okay!"

When you're in your first quarter of high school, that's a really good way to get an entire passel of potential dates to mentally write "avoid" next to your name. (In the guy's defense, he really was an OK guy, he wasn't bleeding out on the floor every time someone bumped him, etc. etc.)
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 3:23 PM on August 30

binary_search_tree
How much more "meta" can they get? "Here are some links we got from some other links to these here other links."

I find it a real chore - wading through their multi-hyperlinked topic descriptions. My eyes have to keep darting between each hyperlinked word and my browser's status bar to see where the hell it goes.

Meta-eyeball-ping-pong.

It must take a bit of effort to construct such complicated text. I think Metafilter is a site that Redditors graduate to once they get their PhDs in mental mastubation.

The topics themselves are, generally, real snoozers.

Additionally, it seems as if they're always thinking, "How would Mr. Rogers word this subject line, if he were on ludes?".

And they ain't got no alien mascot.

Real snoozers?! How dare you make up such an unfounded lie and exageration!
posted by P.o.B. at 3:37 PM on August 30 [2 favorites]

It's looks like that site is Metafilter without the filter (a big giant "P.C." filter).
posted by Zambrano at 3:39 PM on August 30

(a big giant "P.C." filter)

I totally "agree".
posted by ODiV at 3:47 PM on August 30 [3 favorites]

binary_search_tree

These all boil down to "reading hard!". Many of the other comments were far more charitable.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:09 PM on August 30

btw, I like reddit quite a bit, but for entirely different reasons than MeFi. I come here to see what intelligent people and experts have to say about an interesting situation. I go there to anticipate the kinds of arguments I will expect everyone else to say. And while that seems pejorative, it's important to note that reddit is fabulous for doing this extremely well. Whereas MetaFilter gets nuance well, reddit gets to the heart of the matter and anticipates broad swaths of society. If the world worked they way I wish it did, I would have no reason to read the threads there as opposed to here; it doesn't.
posted by allen.spaulding at 5:51 PM on August 30

Pretty much, I was like, "Huh, a penis." And she was like, "Cool?" And I was like, "I guess we'll find out..."

That whole discussion really threw me for a loop; I wouldn't have expected, based on the way I've seen religion, politics, and even technology threads to go, that Reddit would do that subject, set up in that way, with that degree of sensitivity and even class.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:54 PM on August 30

Ask reddit has a lot of really interesting "chat-filtery" that wouldn't last five minutes on a page here. AskMeFi does serious questions really well, but if you just have a fun, chatty question I'd go to ask reddit.
posted by kylej at 6:21 PM on August 30

That whole discussion really threw me for a loop; I wouldn't have expected, based on the way I've seen religion, politics, and even technology threads to go, that Reddit would do that subject, set up in that way, with that degree of sensitivity and even class.

What struck me was that nobody lost their temper. A few people said nasty things or needed misconceptions corrected — but when they got corrected, it seems like they all took it in stride.

Or maybe I'm just not good enough at following their threads? I suppose there could be a big ol' shitstorm with a lot of thumbs-downs hiding somewhere and I'm not clever enough to find it. Blah blah Shelbyville.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:29 PM on August 30

I can't figure out how to downmod this post here.
posted by twoleftfeet at 7:39 PM on August 30

NERDS

No idea which side is the nerds, I think both are, lets start a band.
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 7:45 PM on August 30

I've only seen this on 4chan. The result is often (surprisingly) a lot of earnest questions and answers.

I've always wanted to see it done more formally. Great post! Thank you!
posted by redteam at 8:03 PM on August 30

Step 1: Metafilter links to Reddit.
Step 2: Reddit links to Metafilter.
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: Profit.

Step 3: Overthink a plate of narwhals (FUCK YEAH!)
posted by armage at 8:06 PM on August 30

After trying to follow conversations on other sites, Reddit among them, I've gotta say how much I love Mefi's fixed flat oldest-to-newest commenting schema. Maybe you could get used to it but when a site gives you the choices of "Hot, New, Controversial, Top and Old", I really have no idea what to pick. Is "Top" better than "Hot"? I end up spending more time trying to figure out the right sorting scheme than I do bothering to read the comments.
posted by octothorpe at 8:12 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]

As far as I can tell, the top is a straight most points to least points sort, hot is a sort of "newcomers coming 'round the stretch" sort, new is new-to-old chron sort, and old is old-to-new chron sort. Mefi kinda does this too -- look at the fuzzy/precise/popular links on the favorited tab of your profile's activity.
posted by WCityMike at 10:42 PM on August 30

octothorpe: I've never sorted comments with those tabs.

I just scroll through the default threaded version. For whatever reason lots of people hate indented / threaded comments. I love it, as it makes it clear who's replying to who - especially because threads on reddit can get REALLY long. Vastly longer than lots of stuff on MeFi ever gets.
posted by twiggy at 10:42 PM on August 30

The only thing that annoys me about threaded schemes is I get lost on a single thread and then don't have much interest checking the latter ones if the topic feels played out. With a flat scheme, I sort of absorb multiple conversations at once, and it keeps my interest all the way through. I can see how this would annoy people trying to follow one conversation, especially if there's a big derail -- just a preference of mine.

I really hate when they started pruning longer threads into "load more comments". This was a response to ridiculous indentation levels when people start a back-and-forth, but I'd rather just see it "go flat" at a certain indentation level.

Oh, and I love markdown syntax. Wish Mefi would look into that instead of HTML. It's vastly superior.
posted by cj_ at 12:02 AM on August 31

Cortex, that should be easy enough to do. Presumably the comments are held in a database, with fields of AUTHOR,TIMESTAMP,COMMENT_TEXT, and stuff related to flagging and favoriting that among other things produces COUNT_FAVORITES for display.

So all you need is LENGTH(COMMENT) along one axis, COUNT_FAVORITES along another. Length in characters is good enough for this. There'll be some errors caused by various Stupid Unicode Tricks, and with those rare posts where the author's using text to depict something rather than as the English language.

How about it? :)
posted by aeschenkarnos at 12:30 AM on August 31

That was worth the price of admission just for the I am a 4-year-old-girl thread. Hilarious and adorable.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:12 AM on August 31

So all you need is LENGTH(COMMENT) along one axis, COUNT_FAVORITES along another.

May I suggest that this analysis be approached as a statistical model, that includes covariates such as total user comments, user sign-up date, number of people who link to user, etc. to help tease out some of possibilities cortex mentioned.

As for Metafilter, I still can't figure out how the hell it manages to work. Why, as the number of members increases, do we still maintain a reasonable number of posts each day? Why are people so in fear of other people's opinions of them that they behave themselves? This doesn't seem to stop people being jerks on other sites. And I don't think the $5 explains it either, because Metafilter's always been like this.

We are truly blessed. I can only assume it's because the staff...care...

As for why voting-based moderation systems suck ass - nebulawindphone points out that votes can mean different things on different sites. This is true. They can also mean different things on the same site.

What does a "Vote Up" on a site like Digg, or Reddit, or Youtube, or Slashdot mean? One of two things:
(1) That's a very interesting, informative, well-thought-out-comment
(2) I agree with you.

What does a "Vote Down" mean?
(1) That's an unintelligent, silly, trollish, immature comment.
(2) I disagree with you.

It's entirely possible for something you disagree with to be interesting and well-thought-out. It's possible to agree with something that's actually stupid rubbish. I'd go so far to say that on many of these sites, there's ten votes that mean "I agree with your position" for every one vote that means "That's an interesting comment" - and the end result is that the sites turn into boring war zones, where people pick sides and try to make sure their collective position gets the most airtime. Hell, Slashdot even set up "meta-moderation" to try to combat this - how did that turn out?
posted by Jimbob at 3:11 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]

> Why are people so in fear of other people's opinions of them that they behave themselves?

There is an established community here. When you relate to a group, being rejected is a personal blow. Reddit has a place for contrarians because everything revolves around the impersonal voting system, which many think is bullshit in the first place -- often, it's a mark of pride to risk getting "down-voted'. Everything on reddit revolves around your "score" far more than what you say.

I absolutely believe the $5 signup fee discourages people from joining. Why would you spend anything at all to join a website you don't care about? $5 isn't a lot, but it's >0, and also requires a credit card. I occasionally leave throwaway comments on sites that I would never bother with if I had to pay for it. Sometimes just having to register is enough to put me off.

Almost everything good about this site can be attributed to the active moderators. It's a fact that with no moderation of any kind, your "community" will be a cesspool of bigotry and trolls. The New Hotness™ for dealing with this problem is "crowd sourced" voting systems, but nothing beats a few good gatekeepers. Many moderated communities have failed because of a large disconnect between the moderators and the community, power struggles, internal politics, etc. This place has so much transparency, this is problem doesn't manifest.
posted by cj_ at 3:56 AM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Oh, and I love markdown syntax. Wish Mefi would look into that instead of HTML. It's vastly superior.

It's more popular on less technical/educated sites, sure. But putting any kind of training wheels on the comment boxes in MetaFilter would be insulting to a lot of us, I think. How hard are the real handful of tags we need to use here anyway?

Heck, we're still complaining about missing <image&gt tags.
posted by rokusan at 4:17 AM on August 31

Of course, maybe we wouldn't forget semicolons, then. :)
posted by rokusan at 4:17 AM on August 31

Heh. When worlds collide!

I'm a long time reader of reddit, but stopped contributing about a year ago. The POV of a 52 year old feminist is not overly appreciated. I still like the enormous content, however, and the sub-reddits are amazing. When Palin got the nod last year, for example, the political sub-reddit was a goldmine.

Metafilter is Boston: cultured, refined, filled with well-read, earnest people, sometimes stultifyingly dull; while reddit is Deadwood: raw, exciting, a bit dangerous, with little use for women except as whores.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:05 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]

Well shit. I got to that comment, still unconcerned that I can't read reddit's layout, but now I have to go try again.

Boston is full of squareheads.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:23 AM on August 31

Does this mean we have to have a rap battle now?

Nope. Dance-off. Votes will determine the style: America's Best Comment Crew, So You Think You Can Mod, or Pants Off Dance Off.
posted by catlet at 7:32 AM on August 31

MetaFilter: Some homeless guy making a tin can collection

I really actually like that tagline.
posted by kingbenny at 9:14 AM on August 31

Metafilter is Boston: cultured, refined, filled with well-read, earnest people, sometimes stultifyingly dull

Obsessed with the Red Sox?

We shut down at 8pm?
posted by kathrineg at 9:16 AM on August 31

We shut down at 8pm?

Well, that's 5pm on the west coast so that sounds about right.
posted by octothorpe at 9:54 AM on August 31

Metafilter is Boston: cultured, refined, filled with well-read, earnest people, sometimes stultifyingly dull

Full of beans.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:27 AM on August 31

Metafilter is Boston: cultured, refined, filled with well-read, earnest people, sometimes stultifyingly dull

…and incomprehensibly prone to panic about Aqua Teen Hunger Force?
posted by five fresh fish at 11:34 AM on August 31

Pants Off Dance Off

Well if it's Pants Off Commenting, I should definitely be on the Metafilter team.
posted by P.o.B. at 1:20 PM on August 31

holy shit FFFFFFFFFRRRRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYLLLOOOOOOOOCK!
posted by carsonb at 1:20 PM on August 31

I recently discovered reddit's subreddits and am enthralled by them. I've actually been spending more time on reddit than MeFi. I guess the community fits in better with some of my lowbrow sensibilities.

I don't see either as being superior. They're just different.
posted by reenum at 1:40 PM on August 31

I would be interested to see a comparison of the politics of online communities to politics of various governments.
posted by aniola at 2:01 PM on August 31

Secret Life of Gravy: Metafilter is Boston: cultured, refined, filled with well-read, earnest people, sometimes stultifyingly dull; while reddit is Deadwood: raw, exciting, a bit dangerous, with little use for women except as whores.

If you're going to go that way with it, I think you're better off saying that Metafilter is Cambridge and reddit is Southie.
posted by koeselitz at 4:29 PM on August 31

Wait a sec...I'm hanging with the Socs?

I"m outta here!

*puts leather jacket on, slicks back hair*
posted by P.o.B. at 7:47 PM on August 31