MetaFilter

Another thing that is a little odd here is that you can talk directly to the programmer. I used to work at Speakeasy doing support way back in the day and one of our jobs as phone/email support was to make sure the people who had root never ever talked to a customer. I mean, not exactly, but they were the people who built the stuff and they were busy building it. We talked to customers and that's what we did. And we managed any sort of communication that needed to go up the chain ourselves and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:50 PM on January 6, 2011

Here's the story of where I learned to love customer service.

It was 2004 and I was going to SXSW. Having recently moved to Oregon, there were no direct flights from Portland to Austin, but I found various choices of cities to stopover in. I picked out SF knowing the chances were very high that I would know half a dozen people on the flight if I passed through there compared to say, Denver or Houston.

My first leg was uneventful and as soon as I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:40 PM on January 6, 2011

As a post-text to that, I would say that the situations in which the work we do feels most like that faceless-customer-service dynamic is when dealing with people who haven't really come to metafilter with any clear idea of what the place is like. They're more likely to be annoyed in an unforgiving way about the things they dislike or misunderstand, they're less likely to have patience with the practical guidelines of the community. Which is not surprising, even if it's a little vexatious to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:29 AM on January 6, 2011

As ND¢ says, customer service or in this case moderation can drive you crazy. You never get the call that says, "Hey your systems worked well today, thank you." Is is always, "Your systems suck. You suck. In fact you are one load your mother should have sucked."

Like Jessamyn said, this fortunately is not so much the case for us as moderators on mefi. There's plenty of critical stuff, certainly, but there's plenty of folks who are super thankful for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:24 AM on January 6, 2011

We have no way of knowing the reasoning behind why someone had or used a sock puppet.

Thanks for that Jessamyn. My sock puppet account was created specifically to protect and separate certain questions and comments from my real account which has a bunch of IRL info in it. I'm glad you folks respect that.
posted to MetaTalk by 0BloodyHell at 12:00 PM on January 6, 2011

You never get the call that says, "Hey your systems worked well today, thank you."

You'd be surprised. I get random emails and chats saying thanks pretty much daily. Some random MeFite sent me a $50 in a holiday card. I don't have to pay for my own beer at meetups unless I want to. Questions get marked resolved in AskMe every single day in a way that is super-gratifying. In my local job, I'm often teaching people how to double-click, over... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:56 AM on January 6, 2011

I've worked in a customer service medium, in that I worked in customer service for several years post-college pre-law school, and hearing moderation analogized to customer service just made me feel even more sympathetic to our humble mods. Working in customer service made me hate people and by the end of my tenure my entire day was spent just waiting for the right customer who I could sense was on the verge of a freak out so that I could fuck with them in such a way as to drive them insane with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by ND¢ at 7:42 AM on January 6, 2011

And is just me, or does humanity come off looking pretty sad after reading that article?

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to be important and special. I like that on MetaFilter I can say/favorite anything that I want and help shape discussions in ways that'll interest me. It's a lot better than being completely unspecial anyway.

The issue is more that not many designers spend their time asking... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rory Marinich at 7:37 AM on January 6, 2011

As far as I can tell, yeah. Paypal record was a dead giveaway.

I feel like I am not sufficiently hip for this assignment, but there you go.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:02 AM on January 5, 2011

And, in case it's helpful, MeFi is not supposed to be textually safe for work in a general sense. If there could be problems with people reading words on your screen in your workplace, that is an issue between you and your workplace. Not specifically directed towards empath, but just a restatement of our general NSFW policy which is in the FAQ.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:59 AM on January 4, 2011

Yeah, I'm of the opinion that there are only a few contexts in which putting the word on the front page is a straightforwardly defensible choice, but this seems to be one of those rare cases.

I just want the word off the front page so I can read metafilter today without worrying about people walking behind me and reading my screen.

Difficulty of the question of the specific word being there aside, this is not really in the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:00 AM on January 4, 2011

The main reasons people who are a pain in the ass on the site seem to get "a free pass", as far as I can tell:

1. We generally don't ban people just for being a pain in the ass, and failure to ban someone is perceived by some folks as a free pass.
2. When we talk to people about their behavior in public, other people don't necessarily see it, and their failure to see it is perceived as a free pass.
3. When we talk to people about their... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:43 PM on January 3, 2011

Yeah, they tried that nonsense with games like Chess and Go, and who the hell plays that shit any more?

It's worth noting that even in the purest of pure abstract shape-based games we find trappings of setting or scenario to contextualize the pieces and the actions. Chess pieces are not Tallest One, Diagonal One, L-Move One, and so on, they're nominal functionaries in a royal entourage; in Checkers, a piece advanced to the far rank isn't Powerful... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:54 AM on January 3, 2011

The wiki points here where Matt says she'd been helping out for a couple weeks as of 1/25/05.

I became a regular "paid by the company like an official employee" employee on 1/1/06 though I'd been helping out on and off for the year previously. mathowie was all like "You should get a sabbatical" and I said "How about a gold star instead?" and here we are.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:51 AM on January 3, 2011

I actually got paid to do this.

For three years (from 1996 to 1999) I worked as a Public Information and Consultation Advisor for the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office in British Columbia. It was essentially my job to talk to angry and racist non-native people about the land claims settlements we, the federal government, were negotiating with First Nations.

One thing that helped me do this job was a story I heard Utah Phillips tell at the 1997... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by salishsea at 11:04 PM on March 15, 2010 marked best answer

There can be personal value, perhaps, in being discriminating and discerning. You can make better choices for yourself, you can use extra data to assess risk, make plans, set goals. However, being a constantly judgey person makes you tiresome to be around and often creates barriers in making connections with other people. It is a rare person who can live a completely fulfilled life without making real connections with another person. If you are not the rare unique self-actualized hermit, being... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 3:09 PM on January 2, 2011

I'm not a neckbeard (*sigh*, if only, all the girls think they're just dreamy), but my main problem is Amazon's unselling of the books. I had a book and then *bink* there's a rustle in a cardboard box as some other books settle onto a couple of singles which have replaced the place where the book was.

This is why I won't be getting a Kindle. I simply want a transaction which is finite in duration. Here is some... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adipocere at 11:29 AM on December 30, 2010

Just to get our terms correct, Amazon is not "banning" books. They are refusing to sell them. A private corporation can sell what they choose. Only a government may ban books.

If you want to see Amazon sell these books, write them and then offer to buy some. They will sell them to you if the market outweighs the number of people pissed off by them being sold.
posted to MetaFilter by Ironmouth at 11:14 AM on December 30, 2010

The reduction of things that people take really seriously to dumb and not very funny one-liners just gets old.

I blame the holidays for everyone's lack of humor including myself. There are just some topics and some times of year when it's harder to say something off the cuff without a ton of qualifications [if you're trying to be polite] or a veneer of sneer [if you've just about had it].

MetaFilter is not reactionary to any... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:01 PM on December 29, 2010

But, okay: the problem here is that there's a disconnect between the desire to not see "special snowflake" in question text and the efficacy of any given response motivated by that desire.

Broaching the subject of its overuse in metatalk is okay, and may have an incremental effect on usage since a healthy chunk of people who use askme also read the grey.

Specefically telling people that e.g. their problems are not special is not the best way to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:01 PM on December 25, 2010

I enjoy looking at this problem as if I was a Martian, watching a nature program about humans (narrated by Bleep-Bleep Attenborough).

Here we see a young male of the species, asking members of his pack for help with a problem, using various in-jokes and well-worn phrases that are specific to his pack. This is a common ritual. We theorize that the use of such phrases signals membership in the pack. Often, other pack animals engage with the questioner in a sort of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by grumblebee at 4:24 PM on December 25, 2010

The problem is that the discussion is essentially over when a couple of loudmouths have decided to filibuster it with recipes or peace treaties or other nonsequiturs, regardless of whether others wish to continue.

We've pretty much shut this down, for what it's worth. Our feeling as mods is that if there's still active discussion going on about the main topic, we'll tell people who want to get their lulz on to wait it out. Older threads where... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:01 PM on December 21, 2010

Might be worth thinking about.

MetaTalk has actually gotten a lot more moderated in the past few years in both specific [deleting truly shitty/hateful comments] and general [telling people to cool it] ways. I'm sure it lags behind the rest of the site in this way, but there's a general tension there and while MeTa remains the least moderated part of the site, it is in no way unmoderated.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:37 PM on December 21, 2010

No, this is not something that we are going to implement. If people feel the need to hide comments that they don't want to read again, they are welcome to use some sort of greasemonkey solution. We see too many downsides to a downvoting system and no real upsides to the site as a whole. Some people might like it, many would not, and it's our poinion that any sort of voting system dilutes everyone's responsibility to be a decent community member.

Flagging doesn't always... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:36 AM on December 21, 2010

And, hilariously, the extra effort Cindyrella apparently decided to go to this time around in filling out profile stuff led me to a sketchy facebook page that had a url that seemed familiar featured prominently. Took me a couple of minutes to figure out that that was because we banned the same dude-with-a-Russian-name-that-isn't-Cindy a few days ago for self-linking.

This becomes not a wait-and-see thing so much as a ban-and-refund-and-don't-come-back thing in this case.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:55 PM on December 20, 2010

Love it, thsmchne.

Here's mine, running with the image nomadicink linked.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:17 PM on December 20, 2010

Consider this my extremely humble apology for calling someone out in public. My bad guys. Enjoy the Mod-mobile.
posted to MetaTalk by thsmchnekllsfascists at 1:57 PM on December 20, 2010

I just wasn't sure about the protocol for this sort of thing.

Generally best to just hit us up on the contact form. Less public spectacle, less risk of any weird unfriendly dynamic in the case that it turns out to be someone who is legit but coming off weird.

It's one of those things that's still probably good to talk about in Metatalk now and then anyway so people know where we are on this, so no great big deal, but, yeah:... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:55 AM on December 20, 2010

Are these existing site members or just people googling their own names?

People Googling their own names. We've even had people join to say "hey I'm the person that other person said was terrible and I'm not terrible" in normal-type ways, but it's still sort of a problematic situation since they don't know the person saying they're no good.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:27 PM on December 20, 2010

carsonb is the worst commenter in this thread
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:12 PM on December 20, 2010

Yeah we'd deleted it before this MeTa. We just had a long back and forth with another medical professional this week about a negative comment from a while ago. If people are looking for recommendations we'd usually like the thread to stick to "hey go to this person, they're good" and not "I hated this person" with no extra information.

Since people are allowed to be as anonymous as they feel like here on MeFi, it turns into a bit of a problem when we... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:01 PM on December 20, 2010

I think there needs to be a policy, and it needs to be based on the determinations of mat and jess and cortex and pb and vacapinta

cortex and I have been talking about this today and we're both feeling the same general way. We think people should err on the side of not using the names of rape victims. However there's not a bright line we feel comfortable using about either deleting any post which uses a rape victim's name [newspaper pullquote? people... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:51 AM on December 20, 2010

I think we ought to have a policy regarding the publication of the names of alleged rape victims. Many newspapers have such a policy in place.

We are not a newspaper, and we generally do not have specific hardline policies for stuff like this so much as general guidelines about what people should or should not do on the site.

That said, I think the idea of not willfully injecting the names of folks involved in rape allegations... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:34 AM on December 20, 2010

Shared birthdays are go! Click on a birthday month/day in a profile to see other users with that birthday. And you can fiddle with the URL to see a specific day.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:28 PM on December 14, 2010

[comment removed - do not be jerks about Santa.]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 11:57 AM on December 17, 2010 marked best answer

Delicious is still a fantastic service that I use regularly. I think this is a blow to the idea that you should store your data in the cloud. If a company with the resources of Yahoo can't keep the lights on, who can?
posted to MetaFilter by pb at 1:00 PM on December 16, 2010

You guys are all electrohipsters. "HEY EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME IVE BEEN ON INTERNETMESSAGEBOARD FOR BASICALLY EVER AND YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME SAY THAT FACEBOOK ISNT A BIG DEAL BECAUSE I WAS HERE FIRST." Please. I heard your complaints on vinyl.

You're also way blowing WikiLeaks' status out of proportion. Assange will be in the running for 2011; as it happens now we're right in the middle of the saga, and haven't seen the full extent of WL's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rory Marinich at 10:01 AM on December 15, 2010

Yeah, the notes we have are mostly "this is why we banned this spammer", with occasional bits of "hey this person works for NASA!" or "this person posted FUCK YOU ALL in seven askme threads last night, gave them a week off" making up the balance.

Most of the per-user record keeping we do is in our heads, and I think all of us prefer to keep that to a minimum as much as possible. Good recall is helpful when absolutely necessary, but a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:37 PM on December 14, 2010

Semi-seriously: not really. We have an admin-facing user page for each user which has such boring things as "send password reset email" and a few other little functions. We have a list of comments/posts that you've had deleted. We have your IP history. We know who has flagged you. We don't know who you have flagged [except by working backwards, or by seeing it at the time]. We can leave notes to each other but in practice we rarely do this. We'll leave a note if we banned/time-outed... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:47 PM on December 14, 2010

The special snowflake thing alludes to the fact that the asker believes their circumstances to be unique enough that they warrant special attention. Usually finding out that they are not such a special snowflake is a bit of a bringdown. It's really hard to draw a line between including relevant information and not drowning people in the details. I find that a mid-thread connection "Hey just to clarify, I actually can't use any other software, thanks to people for their answers but I'm sort... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:06 PM on December 14, 2010

I don't think we can get away from snarkery, and to some extent I think just the fact that it's a big ongoing topic means we've got some extra stuff in play that makes the dynamic weirder in a no-win way than normal:

- people who know we're trying to keep the posts to a dull roar are probably more likely to flag any given post or to comment about the fact that there are open posts
- people who are tired of the topic are more likely to beef a bit in threads or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:00 AM on December 14, 2010

So, I'm not sure exactly how this is going to play out as a feature [and I like the idea]

I think you'd just make the current text output of someone's birthdate on their profile into a link, and that would load something like metafilter.com/birthday/month/day/ as a page of everyone sharing that day (and make the URL easy to hack to see if people share yours, etc).
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:17 PM on December 13, 2010

I suppose I could do this with the infodump easily enough, now that I think of it

Yeah, we don't publish any profile info in the dump and it's unlikely we ever would. I may do one-off analyses of profile stuff if there's a specific and suitably anonymizable question worth looking at (like the gender field thing recently), but that's about as far as it goes.

So no help on the birthday thing there, sorry.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:40 PM on December 13, 2010

What percentage of said words was devoted to explaining that "deletion" is not the same as "censorship"?

Realistically? Most of them.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:36 PM on December 13, 2010

That's a cool idea.

pb! To the bit mines!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:12 PM on December 13, 2010

jessamyn: I am for some reason too lazy to sort the list myself at this time.

I have a huge project I have to finish no later than tomorrow on which I still have an immense amount of work to do. Procrastination empowers me to sort that list. Here you go!

computers & internet (31971)
media & arts (16339)
travel & transportation (12170)
work & money (11929)
health... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:30 PM on December 12, 2010

I know there was talk semi-recently about trying to rein in the feature, but I had no idea the rate of increase was so dramatic.

Since we had the big MeTa thread about them, we've been approving slightly fewer of them though not significantly. Our metric is usually

- why this is anonymous?
- is there a real question/problem to be solved?
- is this something that AskMe can actually help with that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:25 PM on December 12, 2010

I thought we were more intelligent than to psychoanalyze people we don't fucking know... And it kind of gets under my skin that Joe Beese feels like it's okay to just flat out imply that he feels that way and then even act as though he has every right to do so on the front page.

Noted without comment.

Shit like this, Joe! This is exactly the shit that so many of us are pissed off at you for!

Stop... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rory Marinich at 11:47 AM on December 12, 2010

You'll need a business plan

This advice is _always_ posted on these types of threads, and I think its countervaluable. The amount of time that will be sunk into developing a proper business plan could undoubtedly be better used somewhere else. Also, try to find successful web app that was built with a solid business plan.

Also, when you go raise money, the people who are going to invest in it _are not_ going to read your... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jeb at 11:28 AM on December 12, 2010 marked best answer

I participated in your post, Joe Beese, even though I thought it was bad, and flagged it. I figured if it wasn't going to be deleted (which I figured it would be), I wanted to help set the tone for the kind of post I wanted it to be, instead of the kind of post I suspected it would become.
posted to MetaTalk by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:24 PM on December 11, 2010