MetaFilter

This may seem kind of elaborate

Yes, it does. It's a Rube Goldberg device for chasing off theoretical wraiths of bad action, making some of the bones of the metatalk queue half-visible without offering anyone who felt truly aggrieved or silenced an actual platform. It's show transparency, a spectacle as a consolation prize for the actual thing some people are wishing would be available instead.

Transparency is a means, not an... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:30 AM on May 31, 2014

It's a print of this Calder lithograph.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 5:35 PM on May 28, 2014 marked best answer

Honestly, trying to guess what I am doing wrong to anger Google is really the closest thing we have to modern day cargo cults. Not to downplay the ideas, but half a dozen people have given me serious considered SEO advice and it's funny when everything people say is different and/or conflicting. No one outside (and few inside) of Google knows exactly what the algorithms are doing at any one point and time. I just try to do the very basics and make sure MeFi is being a good internet citizen and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:46 AM on May 22, 2014

A wonderful bookend to the tenure of the greatest community moderator the Internet has yet known.
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 8:52 AM on May 20, 2014

Sad to see you go Jessamyn. You've taught this stereotypical introverted computer nerd a lot about people. And I appreciate how hard you worked to make sure this abstract space with words on a page has a sense of humanity to it. MetaFilter won't be completely the same without you, but your DNA is mixed up with MeFi DNA in a way that can't be undone. Best of luck at the Internet Archive, your work with libraries, and generally making information available to everyone. We'll miss you.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:32 AM on May 20, 2014

I will miss my nearly-daily bullshit-and-lulz sessions with cortex, my internet brother.

I don't get farklempt easy or often but really this is the thing, more than anything, that has my heart in my throat right now. All the logistical questions, all the moderation tweaks and schedule stretching and stuff we'll be doing with a smaller staff is stuff I can deal with objectively like a self-assured grown-up, can know it'll be fine and the site'll keep... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:12 AM on May 20, 2014

Also, LobsterMitten's on the road right now with spotty-at-best internet access, so she asked me to post this in here this morning:

I'm traveling this week, so have asked Josh to post this for me. Naturally I'm bummed that this is happening, but I want to say that I'm so glad and feel so lucky to have had a chance to work here. It has meant a very great deal to me this year for various reasons.

To Matt, thank you for this really wonderful... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:30 AM on May 19, 2014

Needless to say, it's been a really weird and stressful last few months, with this as something that we've been really hoping we could find some way around and then not finding that route.

I have a lot of thoughts about all the different pieces of this, not least about how valuable I have found LobsterMitten's and goodnewsfortheinsane's and especially and almost inexpressibly Jessamyn's presence as coworkers.

For the moment I just want to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:15 AM on May 19, 2014

Will she still be around?

Absolutely. I'll write up a longer personal thing a bit later but this is literally just "I am moving on in my professional life." MetaFilter remains my online home.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:14 AM on May 19, 2014

Thanks for the suggestion—we'll give this some thought.

I think this would be a fairly big shift for Jobs so it's something we'll need to consider carefully. There's currently no expectation of conversation at Jobs. And what you're asking for ins't a conversation space necessarily, but it would turn into one. That's how comments work everywhere else. And people would inevitably post things that the OP wasn't happy with. People would add things the OP wouldn't want... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 4:21 PM on April 14, 2014

Would MeFi consider developing this?

No, there's a few different parts of this that are each basically unworkable as something we'd be in a position to support.

- I would like it if MeFi could establish a private site that is accessible only to those members whose answers have been well rated.

That's basically at total odds with the general ethos of the site as a place where folks are... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:18 PM on March 17, 2014

I have often wondered, where do they go when they leave here? So where do they go? Is there any data on this?

Nope, no data. They tend to break down into a few groups

- banned spammers pretty much don't come back
- many users disable/reenable their account on a pretty regular basis and leave us a note when they do. If you have a specific question about a user, we may have more info, feel free to email the Contact... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:27 AM on January 28, 2014

I have only seen it referenced once, in a self-defence thread on the blue...

If you click on the book in Labs you'll see every mention of the book from 2013. You might go through those mentions and click to see the original comment in context. That might give you a better sense of why people are recommending it.

...where do they go when they leave here?

We don't have any way to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 7:05 AM on January 28, 2014

It's not entitled to point out that many (though not all) megaposts are functionally self-links and belong instead on your own blog or in projects.

And, as has been said above, they tend to lack the curatorial aspect that makes for a good FPP.

There's a guideline on Wikipedia about "no original research" which means that you're welcome to make a page about anything fitting the guidelines but you can't really introduce your... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:47 AM on January 24, 2014

One of the most important things I learned from doing domestic abuse counseling is to know your limitations. It was drilled into our heads that we couldn't stop abuse or change the world. People could walk about the door and continue to make bad decisions and there was nothing we could do about it. It's all the more so in a community like this.

We need to remember there's no way to know what's actually going on. She could be changing facts to protect her identity or to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by vincele at 7:58 AM on January 24, 2014

I'd like to give a nod to scose for rewording an FPP of mine in November the way it should have been done, thus causing me to walk around for a week cursing myself. That's some powerful commenting!
posted to MetaTalk by mannequito at 5:22 PM on January 8, 2014

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.

I've also found that while membership has gone up, favorite distribution to the majority of users has remained stagnant. More and more favorites are flowing to fewer and fewer, with the top 1% garning the lions share of favorites.

I wouldn't say I'm in favor of redistribution, but the majority of us are getting... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ad hominem at 5:17 PM on April 22, 2013

It's not just high res pics of stars, though. The key thing that Gaia will do is astrometry, where they measure the positions of a billion (many millions) of stars. And that stupidly simple-sounding thing turns out to be pretty profound...

When someone talks about the position of any astronomical object, the first thing you have to ask is, "with respect to what?" Or equivalently, in what coordinate system? The right answer for distant objects,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RedOrGreen at 5:47 PM on October 29, 2013

I call them community-building grabassery but there might be a more technical term.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:57 PM on August 8, 2013

benito.strauss: dozen is dizaine, from douze, the standard French word for twelve

No. In French, une dizaine is ten, from dix. A dozen is simply une douzaine from douze, twelve.

Google Translate give the translation for trentaine as "about thirty", and I guess it has a sense of giving an approximation too.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by zadcat at 4:38 PM on June 17, 2013

it quickly becomes apparent we have no secret sauce technology that they could exploit,

Yeah "All you have to do is pay a few people living wages and give them benefits and make sure they're mostly respected by the community and try to always do what you say and have consistency of approach that lasts over a decade and a community of interesting, intelligent people who support you" doesn't scale. Thank jehu.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:02 PM on May 19, 2013

Can a slashfiction tumblr about my addictions be far behind?

man why do you even says thing like that around me
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:57 PM on May 19, 2013

I think I've mentioned before I've talked to people at large companies before that do these sorts of things and talks never went very far because it quickly becomes apparent we have no secret sauce technology that they could exploit, our numbers are small potatoes compared to most big social services, and this site would suck if we tried to grow it 10x or 100x in size overnight.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:46 PM on May 19, 2013

Am I the only person on the Interwebz who actually likes Flickr?
posted to MetaFilter by Wordshore at 11:58 AM on May 19, 2013

Unless they had hate speech or spam, comments would almost never be deleted until a few years ago. My guess is that the MeFi industrial-moderation complex was constructed in 2010.

Not trying to be fighty about this, but this is not the case. There are a few things that have been happening.

- We got more mods, so the site has been moderated by more than just Matt since about 2005. This became much more noticeable when we had... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:55 PM on April 9, 2013

Unless they had hate speech or spam, comments would almost never be deleted until a few years ago.

This is not correct, either on the "almost never be deleted" point or the "until a few years ago" one. Comment deletions are nearly as old as the site, and were part of how Matt strove to help this place be a little bit better than a lot of what else was out there as it grew. I appreciate that there are folks who wish there was less... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:49 PM on April 9, 2013

cortex can be all nonchalant like that because he was smart from the very beginning.

It's my vanity that will be my undoing, when after the investigation has all but closed I feel compelled to show the detective my fashionable cane and he realizes the handle is not marbled ivory but a polished amalgam of human teeth.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:13 PM on April 8, 2013

Why are these kinds of obituary posts even allowed or tolerated? They don't seem to meet the guidelines of the site at all.

The same general criticism holds for news posts in general. And honestly I have never been a big fan of news posts on the site, though now and then there's some pretty interesting discussion or site-cultural stuff that ends up hanging in them. But the guidelines you're mentioning are aspirational, not iron-clad, and people make... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:46 AM on April 8, 2013

This is maybe time to revisit the "." discussion, then? Because they are of no substance, make nothing better, and yet they stand.

And are a unique oddity of mefi obit tradition, the holding up of which against comments in general doesn't actually have much use, much as I appreciate and sympathize with the weird logical friction of the thing. We also let someone make a CAPS LOCK DAY and a cat-scan post every year on the front page even... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:02 AM on April 8, 2013

please help yourselves moderate more effectively by displaying some honest communication.

Comments that tell a woman that they resemble men are a particularly nasty form of gendered insult and you should stop making them. If you insulted other users as continually and crappily as you insult the mods you'd be banned by now. Please consider stopping.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:29 AM on April 8, 2013

Here's a permalink if you want one to work after April 1st.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:08 PM on March 31, 2013

Hey! I know half those people and I should probably meet the other half. Thanks for the shoutout.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:02 PM on March 27, 2013

leaked transcript of Mod discussion with admins.

<@spladug > deleting things that link to bad links is not sustainable. what if it were in a wikipedia article, should we ban that whole domain?

Wow, those poor admins. Having a bunch of people really pressuring you on IRC to do various numbers of things, that is a super unenviable position. And it's really interesting how many of them seem to be saying "Shut down... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 9:27 PM on October 12, 2012

I just wanted to post an update since most everyone that applied has dropped a comment here. Also, it's hard to dig up every email so far and email everyone back with a "Sit tight y'all!" response so there's this instead.

We got a bunch of applications so far. Tons of awesome longtime members we had no idea had time available, lots of lurkers we didn't otherwise know, and quite a number of serious contenders. I should mention just for the sake of taz's sanity,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:56 PM on September 19, 2012

I am a cranky bitch who would likely banhammer just for the hell of it. Unless you were a cool bird.

As we envision it, someone in this sort of position would start with a Junior Mod set of tools so there wouldn't really be any banhammering available but you could maybe give someone the night off. We have enough applications/options that anyone who goofs with this wouldn't get to goof with it again.

Some of the suggestions... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:52 PM on September 18, 2012

There isn't a place to practice, but you are always welcome to use the contact form to send us drafts and ask for mod feedback. Some days I wish more people did that.

One good resource is the Why was my post deleted? FAQ entry. It covers the broad categories of problematic posts (although one that we should perhaps add is "thin" - something that just doesn't really stand on its own as a discussion topic.) There is also a deleted posts feed somewhere - I don't... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by restless_nomad at 3:44 PM on September 14, 2012

Perhaps the meta's about those posts should be immediately closed as well.

You know, it's a real quandary. Opening a MeTa post because your deleteworthy FPP didn't get the eyeballs you wanted, as opposed to just because you had a legitimate question about a deletion, is sort of problematic. On the other hand, it's really important to us that community members have an interference-free way to use the site to talk to other members of the site about the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:53 AM on September 11, 2012

9-5 NEVER FORGET It's Jessamyn's birthday

Happy Birthday!!!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:28 PM on September 4, 2012

Yeah, my feeling is there's basically never a serious time element to a Metafilter post that Has To Be Made Now; if it can't wait for a week or a month or two and still be a good post, maybe just don't make a post out of it. So my practical advice to folks asking for feedback on this has mostly been about point #2: let the funding period end and then it just doesn't matter and your post in unimpeachable.

There's a lot of cool stuff on the internet, right now; we aren't... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:39 AM on September 4, 2012

It's our general feeling that there is enough cool stuff on the internet so that avoiding linking to Kickstarter is not problematically limiting what you can and can't link to on MetaFilter.

The general rule is: no linking to open Kickstarter projects whether or not they have been fully funded and no making a post about a thing that is on Kickstarter as a sideways way of getting people interested or involved in their Kickstarter. This is tricky for us because it's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:20 AM on September 4, 2012

I thought the video was hilarious and very much mefiworthy.

I'm usually the one needing a humor infusion and we all sort of looked at it and felt it was not funny enough to get over the "seems to maybe be making fun of crazy people" hurdle which we've all been a bit more sensitized to lately. It's clearly the sort of thing about which reasonable people disagree.

I'm actually curious if any formal training... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:26 PM on September 3, 2012

but do we really need special interest groups for "Latinos who like to knit" or "Croatian racquetball players?"

Yes, we really need them. When the standard examples of these events and situations are seen as hostile to a subset of the people attending them, when they are supposedly for "everyone" sometimes it's useful to actually have a place where you can be yourself, the person who you are, and not have to do it within... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 10:08 AM on August 31, 2012

it just can't wait

The point is, it can always wait. This is how we remind you. And eat ice cream
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:25 AM on August 31, 2012

why are ongoing non-disaster news threads considered harmful?

I think you misunderstood me. The "Thing happening LIVE RIGHT NOW" threads are problematic because this site isn't really built to deal with them. Our moderating system isn't built to be responsive to a situation where there are dozens of comments in a minute and it makes us unable to pay attention to the rest of the site as well. There are other sites built for this sort of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:01 PM on August 29, 2012

The parting shot about Ron Paul and weed is part of what makes it seem like sour grapes btw...

That was more an attempt at genre-savvy humor. I, too, have a reddit account. I do not consider us and them to be in competition in any sane sense of the word so much as to be very different sites that exist in similar territory. I don't know why you think we've got a thing going on there or whatever. We're websites, not rival gangs.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:54 PM on August 29, 2012

Hi -- I dropped you an email back but basically everyone here has it covered. To recap:

- You are welcome to have a secondary account for the purpose of occasionally making comments you don't want associated with your main account.
- We strongly prefer that people have one main account [i.e. don't start using the secondary account as if it were a separate person on the site, but you don't have to associate it with your main account though we will know on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:43 AM on August 23, 2012

I actually have the feeling that Metafilter is one of those few places where there is a rather large acceptance of mental illness being-a-thing-that-can-be-talked-about.

This is my feeling as well. If anything I've found Mefi to be a pretty usefully educational place about mental illness in terms of folks willingness to discuss their experiences and such.

It's a big, heterogeneous userbase so there's sometimes pretty... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:51 AM on August 22, 2012

I felt like a jew in Stormfront.org in the Scott thread.

With respect, this may say more about your own internal thought processes than how that thread in particular went. You're a very new user and really hot button topics like suicide and mental illness have a long history of discussion and discourse here on MetaFilter which many people may reference in shorthand ways. Obviously this is problematic for new users, but it's also a real thing about... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:44 AM on August 22, 2012

sometimes you need to use a nazi example to drive home the absurdity of a position

If I have learned one thing from these long years on the internet, it's that this is pretty much never actually the case outside of a discussion of actual historical Nazi Germany.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:07 PM on August 22, 2012

I don't understand the difference between this and a "safe zone."... if you do not want people banned for having bad opinions (which is what it would take to create a safe zone), what is it you want?

To me, the idea of a "safe zone" - particularly as applied to the web, our concern here - has a very specific connotation. And I think it largely comes out of academic environments, beginning in the world of women's studies, and has... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Miko at 7:49 AM on August 21, 2012