MetaFilter

One of the things that comes up a lot when I talk about this but is rarely mentioned (and I'm guilty of this as well) is that since our whole site is homegrown, we have a truly sophisticated set of tools that are built to help us do our job better including....

- ways to have comments or flagging on the back end for users so the mods can share information
- straggling comments view to see if people are spamming old threads
- sparklines for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:40 AM on March 7, 2011

On MeFi, curbing politically incorrect expression of opinion is moderation. On publicly funded NPR, it is censorship.

No, it actually isn't. You're allowed to set the terms of discourse and apply them equally to everyone without regard to the popularity of opinions. You can be the federal government and still say it's okay to not call the president racist slurs on the White House blog. NPR is not a branch of the government and is only partially... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:55 AM on March 7, 2011

Someone else who does a really good job with comments is Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic.
posted to MetaTalk by ghharr at 10:33 AM on March 7, 2011

Pretty sure Matt is "mefi's own" but don't know his username off the top of my head or whether he wants everyone to know it. We talked for a good chunk of time about the stuff we do and the stuff we see other people doing and not doing. It's a tricky topic because obviously news sites comments are very different from the sort of thing we deal with on MeFi. To a very large extent people's desire to be part of a community here means that they're motivated differently from people who... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:08 AM on March 7, 2011

It never even occurred to me that some people might read FPPs but not comments, or that one might view reading a post as an investment of one's time with a definite goal to be attained. Guess there really are a lot of different levels of involvement out there.
posted to MetaTalk by Kevin Street at 8:59 PM on March 5, 2011

It's rare but not totally unheard of to have someone post something crackpot-ish to the blue. This one didn't seem to be "hey let's laugh at the crazy person" and it sort of turned into an interesting discussion or had by the time I saw it. We don't usually delete stuff for being wrong, though there's a lot of case by case stuff going on there. This post didn't have a ton of flags [it had some but definitely not an insta-delete] and by the time I saw girl scientist's comment that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:29 PM on March 5, 2011

yeah, we'll give this some thought. (or should that be somethought?)

Of course tags don't have to be written as single words without spaces—people can tag however they want. But it helps if you're somewhat familiar with tagging conventions before you tag so that your post can be grouped with other posts that are similar. Putting two words together without a space is a tagging convention. (Not just here at MetaFilter, it's a convention across many sites that started... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 5:14 PM on March 5, 2011

We don't have any reliable split of MeFites by gender and probably this isn't a road we're likely to go down.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:35 PM on March 3, 2011

(Wishing I hadn't made a stupid ironical-sexist joke, hoping there aren't too many more)

The only way to win is not to play.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:03 PM on March 3, 2011

Qwiki is so fucking stupid. I heard about it last year when it won some startup awards, and when someone gave me a beta invite I tried it out and was totally underwhelmed. It's just wikipedia + crappy robot voice. I've never used it after logging in once and can't find any reason to try it again except for lulzy entries that sound funny in the robot voice.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:38 PM on March 3, 2011

grouse, without you being able to self-categorize your own favorites, it'd be to the whims of whatever someone tagged their post. Here's a classic example: some people tag posts about moving pictures with "film" while I prefer "movies". If I looked up every "movies" post I favorited, it would miss those tagged "film".

I'd rather tag them myself, which would also mean I could tag comments I favorite as well.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:16 PM on March 2, 2011

[comment removed - the next person to make a threesome joke gets a week off.]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 7:56 PM on February 28, 2011

Yeah, Alex invited me to lunch a few months ago. I thought he wanted to talk about community dynamics at his new banksimple job, but he told me about HN and how he wanted to carve out a niche community that strived to be a better place for him and others like him to hang out. I told him it was a pretty intense amount of effort and time doing moderation and would take a lot of energy to get off the ground and keep it going.

Given that he's the tech lead behind a huge... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:27 PM on February 27, 2011

I hope HE gets turned into french fries with with that ultrasonic, nuclear whatever-the-fuck it is. And fed to poor people.

Mayor Curley, your schtick is getting old. See: threadshitting thread from a few days ago.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:09 PM on February 25, 2011

[sing it with me: ♬ we do not call each other assholes here ♬ xo ☃]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 11:40 AM on February 24, 2011

It's definitely something we've thought about. Sort of a mod-lite if you will of people who can just keep an eye on [preferably by already being interested in and participating in them] certain megathreads and ... watch out for truly terrible behavior. Not sure how easy it would be to implement, but it might be a good allocation of resouces.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:49 AM on February 21, 2011

Yeah the "open thread" thing is something that this site isn't really built for. I totally get that people enjoy this sort of thing. I often enjoy this sort of thing. But we'd need to have a differently working site for an open thread sort of model to be functional in the way the rest of the site is basically functional. So, right now the way these things happen, rarely and sort of spontaneously, seems to work but I think having anything more general as a practice wouldn't scale so... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:02 AM on February 21, 2011

I don't know how much we've talked about it explicitly on the site (I can't recall any recent metatalk thread specifically proposing such things, at least) but our general feeling is that this isn't something we want to make an official Metafilter Thing.

Livebloggy threads can be fun to watch and to participate in, but they also are unusually difficult to moderate because they're so big and fast-moving, and when they go south it's a huge pain in the ass to try and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:57 AM on February 21, 2011

I deleted the first five or six lulzy threadshitting comments. They were flagged a few times and yes: unproductive.

That said, giving us more than 20 minutes on a [US] holiday morning to deal with this sort of thing would be a nice thing to do. We do handle this stuff when we see it, promise.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:45 AM on February 21, 2011

My earlier response was needlessly glib, I apologize for that. The sentiment behind it is genuine: about the worst sort of way to put a pony request on the map is to present it in terms of "help me do this not-great thing more easily", and regardless of what I have to guess is totally harmless intent on your part, artof.mulata, anything that encourages folks to swarm into threads is already starting out with negative points.

The Recent Comments tab that Kattullus... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:53 PM on February 19, 2011

I am in favor of this idea, though I'd be more in favor of calling it "The Eve Without a MetaTalk"
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:33 PM on February 18, 2011

So I don't send a whole lot of invites like that because I don't want to be That Guy who might seem like he's mostly saying "hey come join my website".

I don't mind being "that guy" and I hand out free accounts to people if they want them. Usually I'll just ask "Hey, people are talking about your thing, want a free account so you can join the conversation?" and leave at at that.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2011

Does MetaFilter still comp accounts for people who are the subject of a post?

If we've got an email address for them, know they don't have an account already, and think they'd be likely to want to drop by, yeah, one of us will sometimes just fire off a gift account.

It's a little tricky because just because someone has a web presence and is being talked about on mefi doesn't mean they're necessarily (a) really aware of what... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:51 PM on February 18, 2011

If my after-the-fact snarky post in MetaTalk is the excuse you were waiting for

I didn't delete it. But seriously, a domestic violence joke? Spending a bunch of time watching a thread on an Important Topic waiting for people to make predictable jokes and then deciding whether we'd like to leave them and risk MeTa threads or delete them and feel bad about having a negative view of the community's ability to deal with difficult issues, that feels like... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:57 PM on February 15, 2011

So we've had SLYT PSA posts that cover aggressiveness toward public service employees and women honking their boobs, neither deleted.

The former was a much more detached "here is a thing we did and how did it" thing than the PSA in question—more a video about a PSA, rather than a slap-in-the-face disturbing PSA in its own right. The latter was an extremely silly boob-honking thing, any comparison of which to this one in terms of the deletion reason... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:46 PM on February 15, 2011

Cortex and I talked about this some. This is why we think this sort of post is problematic.

- It's clearly an issue post. No big deal -- I mean who is in favor of domestic violence? -- but then it just seems like you're posting a PSA to... post a PSA. Like a PSA where someone says "eat your vegetables" is there something about it that makes it head and shoulders above other PSAs? I think we're supposed to sort of get why this PSA about this... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:38 PM on February 15, 2011

Yeah we have some people who really push the limit that we have as it is, asking a question JUST at seven days or asking an anon question when they don't have a spare question to ask. The week is easy to remember, easy for us to keep track of and works for most people. There are other MeFite spinoff sites that are sometimes good for the "just wondering" sorts of questions and there's always Quora or the #bunnies IRC channel [and a bunch more] that are good for more idle banter sorts of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:54 PM on February 13, 2011

Nope. We've found the 7-day wait works well as an overall compromise, and having a straightforward, ironclad, no-exceptions rule very much simplifies the process of making it clear to folks how this place works.

I know that can be frustrating now and then when you Really Want To Ask Something, but it's the boat everybody's in and ultimately it's the responsibility of every mefite to just try and consider that going in when they're pacing their questions.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:38 PM on February 13, 2011

It's really depressing how many people in this thread are willing to make arguments that obviously reduce to "I don't like his politics, so he shouldn't be welcome here."

Actually, specifics of this argument entirely aside because I don't really have any interest in wading into it, one of the things we more commonly hear folk saying to one or another vocal user—and this very much applies to Pope Guilty but not only to him—is a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:35 AM on February 13, 2011

People asked what the limits of dialogue were in the other paralell MetaTalk thread and it might be worth talking about that some. You're expected to treat other people in the community like you have something in common with them: this community. This means that going off on a tear about people who believe a certain thing should be killed, raped to death, have their families killed, get raped in prison, be assassinated, whatever, is generally out of bounds. There is literally no way you can say... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:48 AM on February 13, 2011

What is the proper place for tax questions in metafilter?

Ask Metafilter, if you feel like you have a question that is specifically well-suited to askme and you've made a point of searching the archives first as well as googling in general so as to avoid unnecessary duplication.

We get a big and unsurprising bump in taxfilter questions every year between February and April, just like we get spikes in Valentines questions first... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:56 AM on February 13, 2011

It was us. We broke MeFi. The domain was manually upgraded to Enterprise level service and we didn't flip a few switches in the database (i.e. "start serving DNS on this domain *now*)

MeFi should now be carried on 4 anycast constellations spread over 25 nameservers worldwide (used to be on 9).

easyDNS apologizes profusely for breaking metafilter.

- mark (easyDNS guy)
posted to MetaTalk by StuntPope at 3:21 PM on February 12, 2011

Ok, it turns out in the end there was an issue moving from a low end cheap account at EasyDNS over to their Enterprise service (MeFi was exceeding the monthly DNS lookup limit by 20million lookups). But in the switch over, they forgot to update the enterprise servers with the info on the lower end servers, so the domain was in limbo the past 24hrs or so. The company founder personally updated all the servers and sounds like they are changing their internal documentation so this doesn't happen... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:41 PM on February 12, 2011

My favorite part of the story is when the prospective date googles his name and sees his facebook account, and the fact that he lied about being married, lied about his age, and lied about his job, her first thought was "I know! I'll send all this stuff to Gawker!"

I mean the whole story is kind of awesome in a schadenfraude kind of way but the capper for me was that regular people are starting to automatically think Giant Scandal Details = Send It To Gawker.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 7:50 AM on February 10, 2011

And we maybe see one of these folks maybe every week? When people sign up we'll often flag them if they have a really ISPAMU sort of username or fishy PayPal or even sometimes geographical location [sorry Russia, many people from your country spam us]. This means we can sort of keep an eye on their contributions in a way that doesn't require any chitchat. This guy had already been marked as a potential spammer by cortex which means he would have likely been picked up during cortex's morning run... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:13 PM on February 9, 2011

There is always something weird going on.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:54 AM on February 8, 2011

Your entire comment was "Yeah, it's fucking bullshit, huh?" and it wasn't clear if you were offering a "You should say this" suggestion or just commenting on the nature of these sorts of interactions. Looks like cortex removed it after a few people have flagged it. In any question about religion there are always people who show up who bascially have a comment about religion but no real answer to the question and we tend to try to keep a pretty tight lid on that sort of thing... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:40 AM on February 8, 2011

I can see it if the OP merely wants the question not to be linked to their profile

Usually it's this. The OP knows their family member or whoever knows they are on AskMe and maybe knows enough to find their profile but doesn't regularly read the site and wouldn't read a below-the-fold explanation of some sort of situation if it belonged to a random person. So it's not totally obscuring the facts [though I've never seen one with the level of detail... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:09 AM on February 8, 2011

I've learned to model AskMe in my mind so that not only can I answer most of my own questions with my mental model, I can use it to answer other people's questions. It's made me a better librarian and a better person.

I've learned that it's never necessary to holler at people you disagree with [though you may be and itch you want to scratch like you were full of termites] and almost all the time a sincere [and sometimes backchannel] conversation can usually get you to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:51 PM on February 8, 2011

I've learned so much here over the years that it would be impossible to enumerate it. Metafilter has been my starting point for so many bits of topical exploration and creative inspiration and auto-didactic foolishness, even recognizing what things started with a thread here or an interesting comment there is unreasonable. It's too much, it's all a muddle.

I've developed a better understanding of and appreciation for the different ways folks live their lives and look... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:33 PM on February 8, 2011

Discuss.

Well it's interesting, right? If you believe in free speech then you have to sort of believe in both people's right to say offensive bullshit and also people's right to say "I am offended." If you just cut it off at people's right to say offensive shit and try to shame and badger people into not talking about the things they want to talk about in response, well, that's not real free-speecherly of you.

We... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 7:42 PM on February 2, 2011

It describes the perpetuation of an attitude which either deliberately or inadvertently helps condone (as the wikipedia entry describes) sexualized violence.

I think the difference between deliberate and inadvertent is really important here. You can convey to people who may have stumbled into this that you think they made a mistake and this is why. Treating everyone as equally culpable in a situation like this, from the people who made the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 12:53 PM on February 2, 2011

Man, every morning I get up and pre-ban people. Seriously. Go through the new signups from the last 24 hours, look for sketchy domains or business names or other red flags, do a little digging on the stuff that looks problematic, if it checks out as spammy-looking I put 'em on a watchlist that alerts us about posts and comments.

A lot of folks are here for only exactly as long as it takes for them to post the spam I already basically know they're gonna post. Then,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:37 PM on February 2, 2011

Anyone noticed the unnecessary, awful, and largely hated redesign over at i09?

Thanks for being so careful to balance the usability and potential impacts of new functionality here. The degree of community involvement in suggesting and debating changes here is truly appreciated.
posted to MetaTalk by Babblesort at 12:05 PM on February 2, 2011

Salt is a rock.

You don't actually have to comment in this thread, you know. You can just go do something else. That's allowed.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:05 AM on February 2, 2011

I think the biggest failing of Projects was going with the name "Projects" when I really wanted to call it "Announce" to make it clearer that it's for self-linking stuff when you're ready to launch them. We get a lot of kickstarter projects and 1/2 done ideas lately and I think it's because the name "Projects" makes you think of everything as still in-progress when that wasn't the aim.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:20 AM on January 31, 2011

There needs to be some there there when you post it. So if it's a blog or a game and it's mostly ready to go, feel free to post it. If you're still looking for people to debug it, maybe it's not ready yet. Without knowing what you've got there, it's hard to tell, but a few outlines

- mostly-empty blog that is soliciting content - no
- blog with 4-5 posts that is in process - sure
- community site with a small community - sure
-... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:30 AM on January 31, 2011

It doesn't seem redundant or vestigial to me, it's how we indicate from the front page that what you see isn't the whole post or the entire question, that there's much more inside.

Ideally, that link of "more inside" would jump to the top of the additional text, but I found many blogging engines did that behavior and I'd often forget a detail or two from the original front page text and I'd have to scroll up. I found myself doing it so often I figured it'd be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:12 PM on January 30, 2011

Initially there wasn't a space "inside" AskMe or any other place on the site so people would end their post with [more inside] and then add their additional information in the first comment. Once we added the more inside functionality, we did a little behind the scenes magic, moved the first comments to the more inside space we'd just created and, moving forward, people would just use that space. There are some people who still ask questions without using the more inside space, but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:00 PM on January 30, 2011

We've started speeding up again.

100k - 2011-01-28 - 323 days since 90k

 90k - 2010-03-11 - 361 days since 80k

 80k - 2009-03-15 - 362

 70k - 2008-03-18 - 349

 60k - 2007-04-04 - 387

 50k - 2006-03-13 - 379

 40k - 2005-02-27 - 451

 30k - 2003-12-04 - 446

 20k - 2002-09-14 - 369

 10k - 2001-09-10 (!!!)

posted to MetaTalk by Plutor at 10:52 AM on January 28, 2011