MetaFilter

Early comments, and early deletions, affect the way threads develop

This is actually exactly why we do this, both in AskMe and with early threadhsitting type comments in MeFi. We'd like people to have a chance to have a discussion or to get answers to their question without people turning it into what they want to talk about at the expense of the question. I get where people are coming from completely and understand that this sort of question sets... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:58 AM on October 19, 2011

Early comments, and early deletions, affect the way threads develop

True, but in the 12 years I've run the site I've found that early comments are much more important to how a thread will go than later ones, and an early off-topic derail will kill almost any useful conversation that might have followed, so we have a higher bar for first comments.

I'd still delete this derail if it was comment #30, but starting off a question... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:50 AM on October 19, 2011

Oh, a MeTa about deletions. How refreshing.
posted to MetaTalk by absalom at 10:27 AM on October 19, 2011

Eh?

All of us on the mod team are social media users as well, and while our jurisdiction as action-packed Metafilter moderators pretty much stops at the borders of this website our ability to be like "hey, that sucks, please don't do that shit" in a more conversational people-as-people capacity isn't quite so fettered.

So someone being a dick about metafilter stuff off elsewhere on the net isn't off in some... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:13 AM on October 18, 2011

We would rather people didn't link to extra-mefi content for the purposes of furthering drama or bad feelings or weird gotcha-type shit, is the short version.

It's not really new territory, this goes for twitter and personal blogs and arguments from other sites mefi-related or not. There's nothing particular to Google+ here. Just a general expectation that folks will show the modicum of restraint about cross-pollenating this stuff such that they don't turn one bit of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:47 PM on October 17, 2011

I'd like to see the policy written down for all to see, whatever it is.

Do Not Do That, is policy. It's basically in line with all the other "don't bring outside shit and petty squabbles from other places over here" along with not outing people's not-shared presence on other sites. It's pretty clear and at this point I'd like this particular thing to drop.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:06 AM on October 18, 2011

Start writing every day. Period. Write every day. I started on 100words.com which is on the honor system, write 100 words every day and only one "miss" day per month ie only one day per month where you forgot to write your hundred that day. You only get your month put up at the end of the month, after completing each days hundred; it's a nice motivator. And -- you try to write something, and really *say* something, in 100 words, do that and you'll learn to edit, cut! cut! cut!... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by dancestoblue at 3:14 PM on October 17, 2011 marked best answer

Thanks, Jessamyn. I think the phrase that tipped me over the edge was 'reading the room' because a person who is having difficulty reading the room is unlikely to realize they are having difficulty reading the room unless it is pointed out for them, whether by name or by more specific guidelines.

But it's a game of balancing either way, because if the only way we can try to rerail a thread is by having a conversation in the middle of the thread with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:53 PM on October 16, 2011

The whole point is to not call people out by name and try to re-rail the conversation in the direction it needs to go. No, we weren't talking to you. A bunch of people showed up later in the thread who either hadn't read the previous comments in the thread (including ours) or read them and disregarded them and made more "Sorry, but someone has to say it..." Keeping it Real types of comments which, at that point in an obit thread, basically seem like assholism or trolling.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:04 PM on October 16, 2011

Yeah, I agree on both counts. This is one of those things where longtime members might overlook that in order to see a comment you have to click a tiny timestamp and we're used to that after years of conditioning but it's not intuitive to first-timers.

Adding a [more...] link on the comments is a no-brainer and we should do that. On the posts side, making the titles look more like links is probably the way to go. We could either simply make them yellow like links and/or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:28 AM on October 14, 2011

I sort of feel like you get the answers you deserve at some level. We've been solowly adding more and more "please do this" stuff to the AskMe pages [the regular one and especially the anon one] and people sort of do what they want anyhow. We have a few auto checks on the site [like you have to add tags] and sometimes just get people griefing and typing "some tags" into the boxes. I'm with you, I get frustrated when people don't include information that is clearly necessary... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:05 PM on October 13, 2011

Jobs is the least visited subsite, unless you count the Podcast page as a subsite. According to Google Analytics, Jobs had 4,491 visits between Sep 9 and Oct 9. And there were 8,144 pageviews. Our internal stats say that 684 members visited in the last seven days, and 2,641 members visited in the last 30 days.

For comparison without giving away too many details, in the last 30 days Ask had many millions of visits, MeFi had millions of visits, MetaTalk had a couple... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 4:37 PM on October 10, 2011

I've been wondering about this. Are we meant to post only about things we personally like?

No, but I think whenever someone is making a post about something that makes them unhappy there needs to be a serious bit of extra consideration about why they're posting and how they're posting. There have been loads of posts about complicated or ugly or contentious things that have worked okay, but also loads that have not, and a common theme separating the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:47 AM on October 11, 2011

we should never really post something we think is uncool, or news we are upset about.

And to be clear, there are sometimes "this is a bad thing that happened" posts that are well-received ans that go well and that spark good discussion, but there are just as many that go poorly that didn't have to turn into bad posts just on the topic alone. "This is a thing that is upsetting me" is a difficult position to build a good post from... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:35 AM on October 11, 2011

If someone wants to make a better post on this important topic, please feel free. That post seemed to first off be about an impending vote which seemed a lot more like "important thing MAY happen" filter than anything. The below-the-fold part of the post seemed to be more interesting, but was going to be lost in a "fuck the south" type of thread. If you think the topic is important, please make a better post about it. Nothing personal FunkyHelix.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:09 AM on October 11, 2011

It has always been my understanding that mods do not delete posts because they do not like them. They delete posts because they get flagged. Their personal opinions of the topic do not generally play into the deletion decision.

When I looked at the post, I did not see a discussion. I saw a bunch of snarky one-liners. I think it is possible to discuss laws before they are made, certainly. In this instance, the post was flamebait and not conducive to a meaningful conversation.
posted to MetaTalk by That's Numberwang! at 7:39 AM on October 11, 2011

Is this a good reason to delete a fpp

Yes. Pointless outragefilter about something that hasn't even happened yet is pointless outragefilter about something that hasn't even happened yet.

Surely we can discuss laws before they are actually made?

Surely we can. But not productively if the starting point for the discussion is pointless outragefilter consisting of not much more than... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by dersins at 7:35 AM on October 11, 2011

I guess offensive and racist stuff is ok for metafilter.

No, it's not. There are levels of "okay for MetaFilter" that depend significantly on the part of the site where people are posting and the context in which they are posting. In this case, this was posted to MetaTalk where we almost never delete anything. It was a question by a person who basically was using a phrase that's racially charged,, inadvertently [as we later found out] and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:49 PM on October 11, 2011

And to be super clear. No "you can make money" doing this and no "Go do this thing" and the post will go much better. The general rule is if you think this is something that people would like to know about, great. If you think it's about something they should DO, less great. There's always a balance.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:31 AM on October 11, 2011

"This story is trending" is not a good reason to make a post. If you have a good post to make about something, it doesn't matter if it's a trending story or a cold case or what: solid post justifies itself by its content, not its context. Newsworthiness is at best a tertiary consideration in what makes a good Metafilter post.

That entirely aside, framing something as advocacy, however well-meaning, is a pretty surefire way to get a post nixed. That's messy... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:03 AM on October 11, 2011

I think this thread has run its course, I'm going to close it up before it gets any more insane.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:39 PM on October 11, 2011

Folks, this is absolutely not where you come to talk about killing other users. Take a walk or we'll send you for a walk. Not okay, period.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:21 PM on October 11, 2011

we used to have time-outs/cooling-off periods

We still do.

Which I would argue are far more effective at discouraging bad behavior

As a mod, it is even more work to explain in painstaking detail to people why their account was temporarily banned. Removing a single "fuck you man!" comment is much easier, as most people don't ask us why their comment was deleted (I would... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:37 PM on October 11, 2011

This is absolutely false.

It's not actually. We have numbers. cortex is at a conference today so they're not handy but the proportion of deleted comments is, if I recall correctly, about the same since AskMe started [since AskMe has a higher percentage of stuff deleted about 1.4% of comments and MeFi is way less than that]. FishBike or cortex could split it out more accurately than my hand-wavey half remembrances, but that was what I recall.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:18 PM on October 11, 2011

Yeah and there's definitely some adjustment periods having a new mod and trying to make sure everyone's more or less on the same page. We trust taz. She had good judgment and also a good heart. At the same time, she's new here and so there may be some things she does (new mods have almost instant autonomy in some ways, especially with her out there in another time zone) that aren't exactly how we all used to do things for the past few years and with her and restless_nomad both being less than... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:47 PM on October 11, 2011

the mods appear to be a little shorter of temper or more abrupt from the start than I remember them being in years past.

Well it's a little tricky. The big flare-ups that tend to happen, especially on MetaFilter usually happen in a few fairly predictable [to us] ways, but mostly it's

- the same old people having the same old fights
- new people who don't know the culture who start... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:28 PM on October 11, 2011

Sorry, DU, deleted comments ain't going to happen. I've never seen it improve any other site. We have mods here, we have a culture here, and we picked the rules we picked for good reasons, and there are plenty of other communities anyone is free to use that do different stuff.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:32 AM on October 11, 2011

Deleted comments are in the database. If someone wants to talk about something that was deleted, we can do that; this has happened often in Metatalk and over private correspondence, and will continue to happen, and it's a compromise that keeps this stuff available without putting it on public display by default. That may or may not be sufficiently like "open government" for different people's tastes, but it's our best attempt at keeping this stuff pretty transparent without throwing... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:32 AM on October 11, 2011

Hide it similar to the way Slashdot (gasp!) does

Aaaannd at that point you've given a permanent home to the ugliest of speech. A permanent place to show off "fuck you!" and "no, fuck you!". We've argued this back and forth hundreds of times and we're not going to keep deleted comments around and visible because it encourages bad behavior in the long run.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:24 AM on October 11, 2011

I wasn't involved in that thread, but I just now went over to take a look at it. It looks like the comment that spawned the troubles wrapped up with "Go fuck yourself, racist piece of shit." which is solidly in "we delete this" territory. Unfortunately, there were a few follow up comments to that one and then a bunch of people being all "Why did you delete that??" and so we directed people here. There were eight comments removed from that thread. The "go fuck... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:06 AM on October 11, 2011

Yeah I think surfacing any sort of flagging is really changing what the flagging system is for. We've had the flags, I think, longer than we've had favorites, but the favorites pages are pointing to more or less the same stuff as the fantastic flags. We seem to have a small but dedicated group of people who use the fantastic flag, but a much larger group of favoriters. And while I'm aware that the two reporting mechanisms don't really do the same thing, I don't think making the non-public one... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:07 PM on October 11, 2011

I saw this sign today that I thought was pretty great.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:55 PM on October 10, 2011

I got frustrated when I first used askme because no one ever marked my answer as best. I never got one. Ever. I am one that can take a hint, so I was going to realize giving advice wasn't my life's calling. I even complained about never getting one to my girlfriend who was going to ask a question so I'd answer it just so she could give me the pity best answer.

I even showed her how I had great answers that weren't marked "best,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cjorgensen at 7:43 PM on October 8, 2011

How is it more complicated to just have one more button than to have to go learn HTML if you want to quote somebody?

You don't need a <blockquote> tag to quote someone. I just quoted you using copy/paste, and I wrote out the tags. You really don't need to know any HTML here to participate. Fancy formatting isn't a requirement.

I know it's frustrating to see so many discussions end with "no". Despite... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:31 PM on October 8, 2011

Yeah, and know that moderation follows flagging very often, so when you say something like the mods are trying to push some sort of agenda or drown out one side of the debate, know that the majority popular opinion stated via flags is often how we spot the problematic comments.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:27 PM on October 7, 2011

It's after midnight for Matt and pb, so I suspect they'll shout back in a few hours.
posted to MetaTalk by taz at 12:19 AM on October 7, 2011

Your co-workers are jerks. You can decide, honestly you can decide, how you want to respond to them. You are not Dante, you are a guy who works for a music website and your co-workers are letting you know that the way you are approaching the content is not their way. At this juncture, you have choices to make. You are too young to be getting into Get Off My Lawn Mode.

Every time you make a proclamation about how people SHOULD do anything, you are sort of creating a... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 2:45 PM on October 6, 2011 marked best answer

Is the only allowed answers the ones that say, "Poor, baby, hears how you escape responsibility and screw your students that did their best"?

No. However, people must answer the question. There is always a wide range of acceptable possible answers, even ones that are critical of the person asking the question. But comments must answer the question, they should be constructive and they need to not just go after the person asking the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:30 PM on October 6, 2011

It's so blatantly someone who is clumsily attempting to fuck with Metafilter that I'm uncertain as to why the account has been allowed to remain active.

Hope springs, if not eternal, at least fairly prodigiously in Modland. We were really hoping he'd just get it out of his system. No joy.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:43 AM on October 5, 2011

check my activity, and please don't characterise me as not giving a shit when you're just talking about a couple of threads.

We are trying very hard not to make this personal, but believe me when I say that we have checked your acitivity and we are saying this is a sitewide problem that centers around you [and yeah we dropped Horselover Phattie a note to chill out as well. He's a site member that has a much longer track record of mostly being okay... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:43 AM on October 5, 2011

If the two of you start any shit at this point I swear to Jehu I will find a way to make the hellban feature start working.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:04 AM on October 5, 2011

What jessamyn said.

fraac, you seem to want something out of Metafilter other than to figure out the site culture and actually make a go of being a good faith contributor here. Maybe there's some huge culture shock problem here for you, I don't know, but I haven't seen any effort from you even as we've tried to give you a heads-up on this stuff and work with you on it, and we need to not have you keep pulling this schtick. You need to either turn this around pronto,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:59 AM on October 5, 2011

This is one of those situations that we were hoping would resolve itself without us having to jump in and basically tell people to knock it off.

fraac, we'd given you some time off after telling you that your behavior here was a problem. We're not really seeing those problems going away. At this point you have to very specifically make sure your behavior is not appearing trollish, otherwise we will treat you as if you are a troll. The choice is 100% yours.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:58 AM on October 5, 2011

mathowie [staff] in yellow, to be clear.
posted to MetaTalk by mediareport at 4:12 PM on October 4, 2011

We tweaked this for a couple hours today and threw out a bunch of ideas with new colors introduced, and I think people can get used to it pretty quickly but if anyone wants to mock up any more subtle versions feel free to post ideas here and we'll think about changing to something if we see a better option. Remember, the goal is that it's clear and simple to understand for new users without being too distracting.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:55 PM on October 4, 2011

I appreciate the idea, but I liked the star. In my world all the mods would have that (only jessamyn's would be gold, naturally), and mousing over it would reveal the word [staff] for anyone confused.

Just purely from an aesthetic point of view, I think it would look better.
posted to MetaTalk by quin at 3:26 PM on October 4, 2011

If the text looks weird we could maybe give everyone a gold star in MeTa.....
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:06 PM on October 4, 2011

Favorites are like Likes, but Best Answers are like cupcakes in your favorite flavor.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:20 PM on October 3, 2011

I'll probably try a new acronym in my next FPP (with this comment linked in small script) and wait for the MeTa backlash.

With respect, can you maybe not do that? This community has evolved the patterns it has after years of gradual evolution. Doing something that you think will provoke that strong a reaction is maybe not the best way to go about it and I really wouldn't go "The lurkers support me in email!" route. Got an idea? Here's the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:08 PM on September 30, 2011

I was feeling dirty when I posted under my newer username because it was not intentional.

No big problem, but we need to be clear: we need you to basically have one username/persona on the site. People are more than welcome to have a secondary account that they use occasionally for AskMe stuff or other comments that they need a little personal distance from, but we generally expect one user:one account unless there's something extreme going on. No... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:16 PM on September 30, 2011