MetaFilter Chat for All

In fairness, we only talk about that like 10% of the time.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 8:27 PM on May 21, 2013

Was my comment deleted?

In short: what is the MeFi policy or guideline that I overstepped here? Is it not permissible to express negative opinions of religion on MetaFilter?

People express negative sentiment all the time about religion here.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:56 PM on May 16, 2013

I don't think the comment in question was particularly worth saving, but I think a line is being crossed when comments critical of religion and religious belief are deleted from threads dealing with religion merely because they are critical.

The comment was basically the religious equivalent of "Your favorite band sucks."
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:22 AM on May 17, 2013

And apparently God was banned from metafilter.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:42 AM on May 17, 2013

For those playing along at home.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 6:11 AM on May 17, 2013

Also, it seems unfair that "Conservative Bias" takes up such a prime spot in MetaTalk Bingo.

One of these days, I'll get around to writing a script to randomize them.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 6:48 AM on May 18, 2013

Myths are absolutely valuable, and nonsense might be even more so, and while there are many nonsensical myths that are very useful for this day and age (I enjoy Bill Nye myself) there is a whole lot of extraordinarily valuable thought contained within Christianity that has no parallels, except for the equally extraordinary thought contained within other ancient religious traditions

Greek philosophy was around for hundreds of years before Christianity,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 12:41 PM on May 18, 2013

I'd agree with that, too. People need to be able to argue about foundational beliefs. Now, I don't know if metafilter is ever the right place for it. But we'll never move forward as a society unless we do it.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:04 PM on May 18, 2013

The Greeks were not quite as reasonable a people as it's fun to believe. They got up to a lot of nasty shit, often in the names of their gods.

I didn't say that. I said that Greek philosophy included every good thing that Jesus said. He wasn't a particularly innovative a thinker.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:24 PM on May 18, 2013

There wasn't just one school of philosophy in Greece. And once again, I didn't say they were perfect, only that Jesus didnt do anything that they hadn't already done. They sometimes used reason, sometimes mysticism, sometimes revelation. The point I was arguing against was that there was anything good in Christianity that had no parallels. Everything worth saving that Christ said was already said by at least one Greek philosopher before Christianity existed.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 3:33 PM on May 18, 2013

However, seeing as you are an Atheist I don't think it unreasonable for me to assume you believe in a primordial soup followed by lots of natural selection.

Because you're on metafilter, I can assume you believe the same thing, atheist or not.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 8:09 AM on May 19, 2013

Veering off from the philosophical to the demographic, I'm not sure how good an assumption that actually is. Certainly primordial soup is well represented, but I'm not sure it's an overwhelming majority.

Given that mefites aren't shy about expressing their opinions and I can't recall a single creationism vs evolution argument, I think it has to be.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:21 AM on May 20, 2013

I'm betting you haven't done any research beyond participating here, and I gotta point out that this claim is almost a perfect example of how sampling bias leads to observations that can be very far from the truth — you haven't heard from the people who are shy about expressing their opinions.

Well, yes. But if a significant percentage of mefites actually believed in creationism, some percentage of them would talk about it. I'm sure there are a few,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 8:30 PM on May 20, 2013

Price of Metafilter

Askmetafilter would probably be worth many multiples more than the rest of the site put together. The problem is how to integrate with another site without losing the user base.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 7:09 AM on May 20, 2013

I was into MeTa before and after it was cool

It's not just that people say "don't hate on hipsters". It's that lots of people on this site say "Hipsters, as a distinct subculture, don't exist" WHILE DISPLAYING MANY OF THE TRAITS OF HIPSTERS AND BEING ABLE TO IDENTIFY THEM. That's what annoys me. They exist, they can be marked, they can be seen. It's like seeing a dude in a mohawk and a leather jacket with badges and a Clash shirt and saying you can't call him a punk, or wearing jeans made of safety pins and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 8:22 PM on May 14, 2013

Part of what's proto-hipsterish about record collecting culture is the exclusivity - the whole, widely steretyped, "i was into it before it was cool" mindset.

You realize that every 20 year old who has ever lived has been like that, yes?
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 12:21 AM on May 15, 2013

CiS why are you such an asshole in every single EDM-related thread? If you don't like the genre, don't know anything about it and don't care about it WHY DO YOU POST SO FUCKING MUCH ABOUT IT?
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:27 AM on May 15, 2013

Or you're a pompous windbag that hates fun. Take your pick.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 2:21 AM on May 15, 2013

I hate that word

You hate everything.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 5:41 PM on May 15, 2013

Birds do it, bees do it, even couples on AskMe do it...

If she has a mefi account, she'll know how you find all those interesting sites you post on Facebook, and soon she won't need you at all.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 11:13 AM on May 10, 2013

Do comments here on Metafilter get "disappeared"?

If my post was deleted (and not just lost) I should at least be told why, instead of just being "gaslighted" into silence.

I understand how Metafilter is supposed to work, but I was inquiring as to how it actually is run. I saw a discrepancy, and this seems to be the way to handle asking about it.

I'm not trying to stir up anything, if my comments are going to be deleted, I'll just go elsewhere and save everyone the grief.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:35 PM on May 9, 2013

If a question gets asked hundreds of times, and the answer is 'that's just how the site works', then maybe change how the site works?

What do you think would change if people were notified every time one of their comments got deleted? Do you think we would have fewer metatalk threads about comments being deleted? I kinda don't think we would.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 11:32 PM on May 9, 2013

I'm pretty sure I have a bingo.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:10 AM on May 10, 2013

It saddens me to see broken behavior (silently deleting things) is something that the moderators have come to rely on as a crutch to help control the scope and nature of discussion here.

Alternatively, they use it to keep the site from descending into the tornado of shitcockery that is the rest of the internet.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 4:59 AM on May 10, 2013

While I might have stated it differently, I do agree with the sentiment. I won't even call it moderation anymore--it's straight-out editing, shaping discussion, guiding what we talk about, controlling the tone.

Otherwise known as moderating.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:28 AM on May 10, 2013

MetaFilter localization?

No doubt it would be muy embarazado.

When I was in Guatemala, we told one of the guys that I was travelling with for a while that "Yo soy embarazado" means "I'm full.", which was hilarious the next time we had dinner and he leaned back, patted his belly and told the waitress that he was pregnant.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:14 AM on May 8, 2013

Close this thread up.

And one question about/for the apple polishers ... Instead of urging that it be closed up, why don't you just stop reading that thread? Why are YOU (who are not a mod, not tasked with helping the mods, since the mods are perfectly capable of deciding these things themselves) even using your energy to suggest that a thread be closed? It seems comparable to an ordinary person arriving at a car accident and shooing along other rubberneckers, saying "move along folks, nothing to see... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 4:43 AM on May 3, 2013

Informative answer deleted

And this is why lawyers and doctors should never read askme.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:32 AM on April 26, 2013

Oh goody. Another one of these threads.

if we're voting, i think it was a good deletion.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 1:04 AM on April 25, 2013

Favorites begetting favorites

How many hits on overage will a FPP link cause for a target site?

I linked to a mix on soundcloud the other day and I think it's only gone up by about 500 plays since then, so... probably not as much as you'd think. Really depends on the site...
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 8:06 PM on April 22, 2013

The favorite inequality is really mind blowing. You have people holding on to 100k favs while the rest of us scrape by with barely 15k.

What percentage of the favorites do the top 1% have? The top 10%?

Serious question.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:14 PM on April 22, 2013

I really doubt it. Smaller community, no real benefit to having a lot of favorites -- it's not like Digg or Reddit where the front page or top comments are determined by the amount of favorites.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 12:24 AM on April 23, 2013

Mine's 64.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:56 PM on April 24, 2013

Reposting from chat.metafilter.com?

Right, I'm not saying that mods need to really do anything about it or there needs to be a 'what's said in chat stays in chat' hard and fast rule. Just that be aware that if people wanted to post something on mefi, they would have, and that not everything that people say in chat was meant for public consumption. At least ask before you repost something.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 5:50 AM on April 19, 2013

I asked the mods to delete it. sorry again.

Nothing to be sorry about, it's a new thing and there aren't really norms about that kind of thing here yet. It was just weird to see people discussing a comment I didn't post.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 7:35 AM on April 19, 2013

Yeah, I don't care if individual participants are archiving it. I just don't necessarily want people to google it.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:17 PM on April 23, 2013

CISPA Blackout?

I'd prefer that metafilter not do anything that affiliates it with anon.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 3:16 AM on April 22, 2013

bullshit

Removing that comment was the right call, not much else to talk about here. You could argue every industrial disaster ever recorded was a result of capitalism, and even if you were absolutely right, it still wouldn't add anything to that thread.

I don't like the idea that the only thing we can do in disaster threads is coo over how terrible it is and ask 'why does this keep happening to us' instead of trying to figure out how to actually stop it from happening again.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:33 PM on April 17, 2013

It'd be like arguing about weak airport security at 11am on September 11, 2001. Probably
best to wait until we know more about the story before we start casting blame.

Yeah, but here is the thing -- people with an agenda to push aren't going to wait. People in the white house were trying to figure out how to get us into war with Iraq a few hours after 9/11. The narrative gets set in the media before all the facts are out, and I don't... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 9:41 PM on April 17, 2013

I mean, look, everyone said "Now is not the time" after Newtown, while the NRA dove in headfirst staking out a hard-line position in the media. The New York Times and all the 'respectable people' tut-tutted about it while the NRA went to war. And they won. You can talk about not sinking down to their level all you want, but taking the high-ground doesn't change anything.

The time to start acting is while people are still upset and angry. The time to demand... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:22 PM on April 17, 2013

Why not post something on the blue that could start a separate discussion of the issues that you want to raise?

It would get deleted immediately.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:24 PM on April 17, 2013

It's not "the media".

Matt, you should know as well as anyone that we're all the media. There are facebook posts that get more views than CNN on a regular basis.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:30 PM on April 17, 2013

Yeah, I agree that bardic could have handled the meta better, but I have also noticed an increasing trend in news-y posts to delete opinionated comments of all kinds, which is a little bit frustrating. And to be clear, I've only had like a couple of comments of mine deleted recently that I know of, which didn't really bother me that much, so this isn't really about me. I'd just like there to be a little bit of loosening of the moderation to allow a greater range of conversational topics,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 10:52 PM on April 17, 2013

kmz, that was just bad phrasing:

read it as: 1) Lack of info and context, and 2) the possibility of personally affected mefites.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 11:05 PM on April 17, 2013

I know I said I wasn't going to say anything else, but I wanted to add that I'm mostly very happy with the moderation here. I'd just like a little bit more space for contentious conversation in news threads. I'm totally fine with mods stepping in and saying 'enough' after the topic is hashed out or if it turns into a one person vs metafilter thing. I just think mods are getting too active with deleting possibly problematic comments just because people flag them. I know... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 11:59 PM on April 17, 2013

And to all the people asking "If not now, when?" -- after you know anything about the cause.

It's pretty clear that the cause of all the death and destruction is building houses across the street from a fertilizer factory. It doesn't really matter why the thing blew up.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 4:48 AM on April 18, 2013

No Avoiding Google

Status.metafilter.com
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 2:55 AM on April 17, 2013

The Sword of Benny Andajetz

Now every one is trying to think about exes they were dicks to.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 2:38 AM on April 13, 2013

Tramp the Dirt Down

I don't think that people are arguing that there's no meaning to be taken from the dot, but that it's internally private, although publicly practiced and subject to variable meaning.

"Use your words" has been a central tenet of site communication for a long time now. I don't know why there is a sole exception for a dot, when any similarly contentless comment would be deleted from any other thread.
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 7:15 PM on April 9, 2013

A thousand times this. The dot conveys some meaning; this is basically what it conveys that you can be sure of. I posted this. / I was here. / I am here. / I participated in this. Peoples' presences are important.

So does "first post!"
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 3:41 PM on April 10, 2013