MetaFilter

So I'm saying that "does this make me look fat?" is a question that only has one acceptable answer, and is just kinda silly for a q&a site.

And I think what I'm saying is that she wasn't asking that question. People have all sorts of anxieties and concerns and getting a wide range of answers is useful. However, that question was fairly narrow, and answerable. We don't ask for much in terms of recommendation questions, but we do need a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:00 PM on June 24, 2011

But apparently FishingForReasurranceFilter is still alive and kicking.

Correct, it's not against the rules. Chatfilter, however, is.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:32 PM on June 24, 2011

I think we went with shorter to let fighty or controversial actually die after a day or two instead of being on the front page forever and having to rehash things out. MetaTalk threads work ideally over short periods of time, the longer they go, the more likely they are to get people nitpicking with one another.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:23 PM on June 23, 2011

Take a look at the number of mefites who have left in the last two years, and ask yourself why they left.

Recently, it's been banned spammers, people upset about spoilers [pro and con], people needing time off because of new jobs, people upset because other people are being assholes, people who feel that they don't fit in here, people who need a break. There are a number of reasons and maybe 50% of people who leave leave some sort of indicator when... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:25 PM on June 20, 2011

What I don't see is any posts actually dedicated to those things. Where are we discussing current TV that spoilers are an issue?

Mostly in threads that happen to be about the media property in question, and to which people interested in that property flock and end up discussing it.

That's part of the weird tension of some of the recent spoilers-related discussion: we don't really do the "Open Thread About X" thing... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:28 AM on June 21, 2011

Please read previous threads in MetaTalk about spoilers. MetaFilter is not a spoiler-free zone and the mods do not actively police spoilers. The site does not have a spoiler tag and is not getting one. About the most we will do is tuck a spoiler behind the fold of a longish post or add a spoiler indicator to a comment if the original poster requests it. While there are many current event threads on MeFi, it's not MeFi's main purpose and so people who discuss current media events do so at their... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:30 AM on June 21, 2011

Are you guys still reading that thread? Because it doesn't seem like it.

The questions you were badgering us about are ones we have already answered and the answers stay the same. None of us see the point in answering the questions yet again. I know you don't like the answers, but that's a different thing from there not being answers.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:02 AM on June 21, 2011

You guys are usually very supportive of making this a kinder place.

The FAQ, as we've said earlier, is not a place where we generally suggest behavior to users. If we put something like "you should act like this" in the FAQ here, there is the strong implication that we'll do something to enforce that. We won't. We have said this. You may disagree with us that putting something in the FAQ carries that implication, but that's the premise that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:04 AM on June 21, 2011

Had some fun at your expense

Which totally sucks, honestly and completely. We're used to it, but couching things you sincerely care about in jabs to us and how we do our jobs is less likely to achieve the results you desire. I can't tell when you are being serious and when you are being a serious asshole some of the time. It may be significant;y less clear than you think.

I consider you a friend, personally, and I consider... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:33 PM on June 21, 2011

Maybe it's just too much for you to keep up with, or it really is that confusing what we users have been saying, but there were several times when folks felt like they weren't being heard or listened to (only talking about folks who were speaking rationally).

The problem is that when someone says "this is what I think should happen" and we say "I hear you, but we disagree and we're not going to do that", that's not not-hearing,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:18 PM on June 21, 2011

(Wow, that was downright easy!)

I feel like the core of this is that you have this impression that our job is to specifically and in detail attend to whatever you personally have to say in Metatalk. That it's not enough for us to talk about community stuff in aggregate and try to cover what's come up in a discussion, we have to lay down a specific tailored response just for you in precisely the form you dictate or tacitly expect, or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:59 AM on June 21, 2011

What does it actually mean to have your comments tied to your "real" name? The only effect I can see is that you have no ability to compartmentalise your interactions. It forces you to bow to the blandest common denominator of your associations. I don't like to swear in front of some people, but I don't want every sentence I say to be bounded by that.

I think mefi is a fantastic example of how to do this well. With a persistent profile, you're aware that each... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lucidium at 6:52 PM on June 20, 2011

Full disclosure - I absolutely, unwaveringly support anonymity online - And to a degree, I would extend that to the "real" world.

That said, I find it somewhat interesting how various sites have gone about banning "anonymous" comments. They almost all have the same pathological failure to grasp the situation - They require "logging in" - Some with accounts made local to their own site, and some via the likes of OpenID or Disqus.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pla at 6:24 PM on June 20, 2011

Think of yourself as a curator. You are framing and placing pieces in a room.
posted to MetaTalk by TwelveTwo at 12:18 PM on June 19, 2011

I think if we're talking about gross-out stuff in general (and maybe documentary gore in particular) it comes down to the question of why it's worth posting. Gross for gross' sake is not a good idea; on the other hand, if there's a darned good reason for it and there's content to the post beyond just WOW GROSS and you frame it carefully with due warning, it may be a workable post.

The amount of care and consideration required needs to scale up with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:26 PM on June 17, 2011

Please don't post it. I can't imagine a good reason why someone would want to post a graphic video of dead mutilated bodies. Does it tie into a massacre or story of some sort? Even then, I'd rather get the all-text version of the story without the maimed humans pictured and videoed.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:24 PM on June 17, 2011

Any level you want. It's so great.

Any member can make an "I'm leaving" MeTa post when they are leaving, you don't have to be some special someone. That is what is great. I'm sure CPB will come back when he feels ready to and I wish him well in the meantime.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:41 PM on June 15, 2011

I thought these kind of threads were traditionally closed up fairly quickly.

We close up "Fuck you I'm out of here" threads. This is not one of those.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:41 PM on June 15, 2011

Any speculations (or insider knowledge)

This was sort of what Matt talked about at his SXSW talk this year. I mean, obviously the mods and what we do is only a part of why things go well here. But it's worth understanding a bit about what we have to work with. The whole site is homegrown which means that the tools we use aren't just out of the box "oh and here are some comment deleting tools" they're really catered to how this site works,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:25 AM on June 16, 2011

Hello enthusiastic muffin! I'm glad you're here and happy. I'm not sure if you did this or someone else did but there is a metafilterhistory tag that is attached to some particularly notable [though not always awesome] MeFi threads. Here are the ones for metatalk, askme and mefi. I'm one of the mods here, along with cortex and restless_nomad and mathowie. pb does a lot of the magic coding and vacapinta sometimes sneaks in under the dead of [US] night and helps keep the place tidy.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:20 AM on June 16, 2011

It may make someone an asshole, but what about when past posting history makes it clear someone is trolling, spamming, or lying?

There's no clean threshold here where it goes from being kind of problematic (which is what it is most of the time) to being totally okiedokey, is the thing. Aside from some very very hyperspecific What If?, the general answer is that making a public thing of it is dicey and doesn't always make a situation better so much as... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:33 AM on June 14, 2011

It's one of those things that's used so much more often for grinding axes than actually helping solve problems that our rule of thumb is "please don't do it" That said, people sometimes bring up a poster's commenting history, specifically if they're the subject of a MetaTalk or if there's some difference of opinion. This is okay in limited amounts but generally speaking we'd prefer if people spoke in generalities and didn't link to and quote at length from old comments.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:03 AM on June 14, 2011

I've given up on arguing Metafilters "Spoilers are mandatory and you're an asshole for expecting otherwise" policy.

There are at least two major problems with that characterization of the site policy on spoilers, but I'm at least as tired as you are of the argument so I'm fine with us just sort of leaving it alone this time and sufficing to make faces at each other from across the room until the next comic book thread has us hugging again.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:13 PM on June 14, 2011

^ This is how I imagine the user flagging notice to look in the admin interface.

Show and tell time it is! This is the current state of the mod flagging interface, in two screenshots. We have a couple other less-used tools for flag wrangling, but these are the two bits that make up most of the interactions we have with flags or flagging data.

For the record, it turns out that every flag has to be manually cleared by... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:36 AM on June 14, 2011

So, as on the end of this month, I will no longer work at MySpace. It's been over five and a half years. It's definitely wrong to say it was waning already when newscorp acquired it, because that was shortly before I started and traffic sharply increased for a couple of years after that - I know very well, because I wrote most of the middle tier systems that supported it. (And I made the effort to open source most of that. The documentation is... lacking..., and I don't want to link it here for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flaterik at 4:16 PM on June 12, 2011

I always sort of felt the person who starts a thread should have flags with more weight. Sometimes I'll have an AskMe thread and someone will post something that in no way answers my question, so I'll flag it. I always hope it sets off some sort of special alarm at ModHQ, but I know better.

Insofar as it's much better for the asker (or poster on the blue) to flag annoying stuff than get in an in-thread confrontation about it, I totally get you, and I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:08 AM on June 14, 2011

'Dude are you a moron or something you don't need to flag everything in the world ever.'

What I actually said:

Hiya -- once you've flagged a few comments in a thread you can rest assured we'll check it out, promise. Having nine flags on...

actually I just went and checked that thread, what a fucking mess.

You are deputized to help it not get worse. But in the future, we only... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:42 AM on June 14, 2011

The post was thin and probably deleteworthy IMO, but after 60-odd comments seems a little late to pull the delete trigger.

We have deleted posts with far more comments on identical grounds. Brewing conversation can be an influencing factor sometimes, but it's no guarantee that a not-great post will stick around and as precedents go 60 comments is nothing at all. Weekends have slow reaction times, Jess and Matt are both traveling and I was throwing a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:39 PM on June 12, 2011

Daddy-O, was there one in particular you remember offhand? The feedback is definitely helpful but specifics are more so - a quick scan of my activity since the beginning of May shows that I've deleted ten posts including this one, six of which were doubles, so there's not a whole lot of data for me to figure out a pattern from.
posted to MetaTalk by restless_nomad at 6:20 PM on June 12, 2011

I'm sort of shruggo on the deletion personally but it was one of those situations where there were a bunch of people who flagged it and may have been feeling like I felt about it: absent any context in the post at all it was just a link to a thread on another Q & A site. Not sure why the OP thought it was interesting or useful and so a few people made decent guesses and the discussion was okay. That said, it was a sort of weird "I'm not really sure what you're going for here" post... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:13 PM on June 12, 2011

In such cases, admins should maybe "delete-hold" the post, asking the poster to contemplate the derail-in-progress, and repost 24 hours later.

With respect, that is exactly what deletion is. People are welcome to repost their content, fixing whatever issue they had that made it deleteworthy [sometimes they are not fixable, often they are] and post it again the next day. In fact sometimes we actually suggest that in the deletion reason.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:57 PM on June 10, 2011

For what it's worth, cortex, I think almost all jabs at you mods, including Crabby's, including mine, only end up burnishing your reputations with virtually everyone else.

I realize that doesn't obviate the obligation you feel to make a reasoned response in most cases, and I would find that a heavy burden, personally, though I have appreciated its results many times, but I think you have every right to be a lot more dismissive than you have been so far.
posted to MetaTalk by jamjam at 1:38 PM on June 10, 2011

I get that Crabby Appleton doesn't really have much benefit of the doubt around here, but I'm not sure it helps if we're (and I do mean we, I do this too) poised to pounce on any comment he makes, especially a two-word response to a throwaway one-liner, and wrangle out how it must be the same shit he always says.

I hear you, I'm for less pouncing in general and like I said I've been trying to just scroll on my with my day if there's something that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:09 PM on June 10, 2011

Call me all the names you want, but you can't deny I made a good point. Too bad the mods are so lax when it comes to cleanup and keeping threads understandable.

seanyboy, you haven't commented previously in either this thread or the one linked in the post here, and no one has mentioned you by name in either. Is something up somewhere else? Is there something specific you're referring to? I am lost.

Crabby Appleton... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:04 PM on June 10, 2011

No, the post is a quote - it is in fact the title the author gave to the original article. That's not the same as editorializing.

I'm right there with cortex in that we'd love to see a whole lot less of the "editorializing quote from article used to avoid claims of FPP editorializing by the OP" situations happening.

There are a few people who employ this strategy a lot, it tends to set posts off on the wrong foot... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:59 AM on June 10, 2011

I'm sure that even cortex would acknowledge that he's a past master of modly rhetoric, and his skill and fluidity is reminiscent of Neo's in the "bullet time" shots in The Matrix.

Yes. My rhetorical muscles have rhetorical muscles. Bill Clinton took lessons from me. I tell Yakov Smirnoff jokes so well that by the time I'm done with them they turn back into common sense observations about American culture with the words in the expected... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:50 AM on June 10, 2011

Jesus, Crabby, do you comment in any other place aside from MeTa threads where you can decry the community and the mods' practices? Cortex gave you a clean, concise answer to your charge of editorializing against the OP and now you're accusing him of rhetorically dodging bullets?

Is there any satisfying you? That's a genuine question. How would you have handled this situation differently if you were a mod? That's a genuine question too.
posted to MetaTalk by EatTheWeek at 7:43 AM on June 10, 2011

Do the mods have the ability to insert messages directly beneath (or above?!) the deleted (or re-instated) comment--interrupting the normal chronological flow of the text?

We don't have that ability, and while I totally get where you're coming from it's not something that I at least am personally interested in seeing change; it'd be moving a lot more toward a sort of active editorial role in threads in a way that I'm not really comfortable with and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:20 AM on June 10, 2011

This is one of those odd cases where it's hard to find any good solution. We don't want people to keep responding to the lazy snark; we also don't want to gut the entire thread because it has references to the lazy snark.

This one's enough of an "everybody directly responding" thing that I'm gonna experiment with resurrecting the original one-liner and leaving a note in the thread. I'm not entirely convinced that's even the best way to go, but for clarity's sake let's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:50 AM on June 10, 2011

Then it could be completely transparent and optional and those who want to adopt it can simply adopt it.

Not disagreeing here, but want to point out that if there is a reply feature that is completely transparent and optional, it doesn't actually solve the problem of figuring out when people are talking to you in a thread, it only gives you a subset of the people who use the reply feature and reply to you. So while there are definitely sites where... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:39 AM on June 8, 2011

If it's a longtime problem user you're welcome to drop us a note about it. If it's just someone who is excited or somewhat single-topic, the best bet is to totally ignore them or politely suggest they might want to start another thread about their pet topic because this one is mostly about something else.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:16 PM on June 8, 2011

Yeah, no. Our sympathies, but this is in the "never going to happen" bucket.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:40 PM on June 5, 2011

No, that's not something we're going to do. You have my sympathies if someone drives you crazy when you're using your phone to read the site, but like the main site that's kind of a figure-it-out-on-a-personal-level thing, not a site thing.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:36 PM on June 5, 2011

Here's a breakdown of subsite visits that I made a while back, which is pretty suggestive even if the numbers vary a bit over time. Some firm majority of the userbase apparently visits both the blue and the green, though there are also small but significant chunks who seem to visit only one or the other.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:23 PM on June 3, 2011

And to say "MetaTalk is the place to ask this question" just seems odd.

Metatalk is pretty much the only place on the site where "How do I approach thing x specifically related to Metafilter and it's community" would go. Like jessamyn said, I get that there's a degree of interpretation here but it's not hard to err on the side of generous reading and refrain from giving someone a hard time.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:55 AM on June 1, 2011

MetaTalk is the place to ask this question and people who imply otherwise are being slightly churlish I think. I get that we don't want people doing a lot of "buy my widget" self-promotion here or posts-as-MeTa threads, but honestly offering to do something nice for free for other MeFites is something that should be encouraged, not scorned. I like litleozy's idea of using this as a way to match up MeFites and photographers and making a little website about it, if that's something you'd... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:21 AM on June 1, 2011

Without getting too much into it, I was recently faced with a similar, though not quite as actute, problem. My father died shortly after his health started to decline, quite recently. My father was a wonderful man with a serious chronic drinking problem that he would not manage, deal with or acknowledge. My sister and I were two of the people he hadn't entirely driven away, but there were many people on the sidelines urging us to do more, help more, save him.

And it... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 5:48 PM on May 31, 2011

part of their attempt to pretend that there are no possible problems here is to be condescending as hell to anyone who doesn't buy in to their dream world version of how Metafilter work

This is not my perspective and I do not think it is the shared perspective of most of the people who have been involved in recent spoiler discussions. However, people who go on the aggressive "let's call people names who disagree with my personal perspective on... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:36 AM on May 30, 2011

I'm more concerned about the collisions of news stories, obituaries, etc. which result in races to post and make unsatisfactory FPPs and doubles.

We may just be head-in-the-sand about this sort of thing, but none of those are huge problems from our end. Occasionally there's a MeTa, sure, and occasionally there's some obit collision but this is a fairly unusual occuerrence for something that isn't really part of MeFi's main purpose anyhow.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:48 PM on May 24, 2011

Men are no more or less likely to be assholes than women are.

We have data, actually. The most flagged members from the last 90 days, 12 months, and all time. I'm sure there's an argument that can be made that being flagged doesn't necessarily make you an asshole, so just speaking in broad terms here.

90 days: M, M, F, M, ?, M, M, M, M, M, M, ?, M, M, M, M, F, M, M, M
All time: ?, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:18 PM on May 20, 2011