MetaFilter

We're talking about this; there are a few things that maybe don't totally line up. For now, just be decent and ignore the question if you can't be helpful.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:51 PM on August 11, 2010

When it's "same sort of thing" rather than "same link" the metric's a bit fuzzier; especially where it's not newsfiltery, not contentious, and not something that's been done a lot either lately or long-term, deletion is a bit less likely.

There's no real hard-and-fast rule we can lay out, it's pretty much always going to be case-by-case, but certainly stuff like this is less likely to present a problem than literal doubles or other... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:47 PM on August 11, 2010

So the sorts of people that go to Ask MetaFilter aren't people that are just looking for a Q/A site.

Well, we tested people coming from a Google search to Ask MetaFilter who had never ever before seen *.metafilter.com, and split those into the old design and a new design. So really, these were clueless wanderers that hadn't ever heard of the community looking at it for the first time (this accounts for something like 65% of all traffic to the server,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:05 AM on May 27, 2010

Just took a quick look at some very rough numbers for the last month. Facebook is just in the top 20 of referring sites. Of those visitors from Facebook, 80-90% are non-members. They visit 1.35 pages. Somehow. Looks like visits from Facebook are trending down somewhat looking at the month, but traffic from there looks steady overall.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:14 PM on August 9, 2010

And yet I have seen that it is, apparently, acceptable on MeFi to be intolerant of racists, Nazis, sexists and people who use the word "cunt". Is there, perhaps, a case for adding something to the FAQ which clearly delineates acceptable and unacceptable MeFi intolerance?

I'm pretty sure the official position is "don't be a jerk." Pretty basic.

Sexists - act like jerks. Racists - act like jerks. People who... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by grapefruitmoon at 3:27 PM on August 10, 2010

Jessamyn seems to think that I should be Gandhi here?

I'd prefer that both of you walked away from it, but right now only one of you has.

Look, I'm not psyched with zarq's participation either. He knows better. I'd prefer he didn't get into these sorts of fights. However he's a long term member and knows when to walk away. I'm sorry that's not real great in terms of closure for him having made some over the top and jerkish... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:25 PM on August 10, 2010

What is the proper response when the questioner is just such a turd that you can't avoid calling her out on it?

The OP has responded in the thread, right after the MeTa callout.

The response is: if you can't be constructive, go someplace else. I was cautious about approving that AskMe when both cortex and I were going to be around because I knew people would flip out. Many people have had people tell them things that were... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:52 AM on August 8, 2010

If a greasemonkey script is the way to go, then why is that not the way to go for youtube?

Sorry this seems inconsistent and unfair. Sometimes we try things here as an experiment and they stick. Sometimes we try things and they don't work. Just because one experiment succeeds, that doesn't mean that it sets a blanket rule for how things will work in the future. We go with our gut feeling on a lot of decisions. Right now it feels like this is more... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 12:56 PM on August 6, 2010

I think people who want to make political statements in writing should go ahead and make them explicitly, not sneak them in through their choice of pronouns.

In my opinion, saying "Well that's the way everyone does it, so I'm just going to do what everyone does" is a political statement as well. It's a more understandable one, but it's still saying "I side with the status quo" whether it's doing so intentionally or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:20 AM on August 4, 2010

I just want to see it thrive and be better in all respects.

Like everyone, I too am confused. That said, I think we're a lot of really good writers, on average. I think the things we could do better at are more like empathy, patience, respect and tolerance. I'm sure everyone has their own list of "I wish MeFi were more like this." That's mine.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:34 AM on August 4, 2010

why do I think 90% of you are guys

There are a lot of females on many other parts of the site, but for MetaTalk [the nerd thunderdome, if you will] it seems to be mostly dudes. cortex and I (a real female) work here, feel free to send questions or comments our way. Welcome to the club.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:49 PM on August 4, 2010

My social media strategy mostly involves banning people who have shitty social media strategies.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:07 PM on August 3, 2010

Is something like that possible?

My biggest hesitation is that if we change the question it's unclear who was answering before and who was answering after the change. It's much more clear, to everyone, if we just blockquote and inline the changes the way we do it now. We also have specific instructions on the AnonyMe page to include relevant details like location/gender/etc so I feel like we've taken some pretty proactive steps to get people to include this sort of thing.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:03 PM on August 2, 2010

The way that MeFi so reliably will pile on top of St. Alia and call for her banning, the way that they will make personal attacks about her whenever she goes against the grain here, the way that each "Brand New Day" isn't really because certain members take some degree of pride in exposing her new identities as if they are a kind of fraud rather than just trying to get a reprieve from how whatever she says is judged not usually on its merits, but by the fact that she is the source...... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Navelgazer at 5:19 PM on August 2, 2010

I think we may have made an edit like that once or twice when it was an exceptional case, but generally speaking it feels like a better plan to inline the updates in the thread where they occur so that the continuity of the responses is clear. Making a question a moving target by adding/changing the post content after the fact is not totally transparent for the reader.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:26 AM on August 2, 2010

Alibaba.com has all sorts of social networking features.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jeb at 1:03 PM on August 2, 2010 marked best answer

Now, since anything else I could possibly say would only result in more work for mods, I'm done with this thread.

Frankly, I'm not sure why you came into the thread at all if it was with the comment you chose to make. It's both personalized and non-responsive in exactly the way that drives a lot of people up the wall about your style of participation here, and as a response it certainly didn't make any less work for us. Just electing to say nothing... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:11 PM on August 1, 2010

I guess I'm sorry I fed the derail in that thread, but I'm not sure what we're supposed to do instead. Should we just give her a pass to say whatever she wants without critique?

Take a look at what she said; take a look at the thread after that. Has someone offered a critique or otherwise addressed already what you feel needs addressing? Then move on. If not? Respond if you feel you need to, but take the time to preview after you're done writing it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:10 AM on August 1, 2010

I'm going to go ahead and say it: this feature already exists, and it's called "Going to Meetups."

I have almost exclusively fond feelings for the mefites I know in real life, and I have helped a number of them get or seek jobs in varying capacities. Furthermore, I have benefited from their job-seeking insight on many more than one occasion. But these things are based on personal offline relationships that we developed as a result of becoming friends... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by greekphilosophy at 3:39 PM on August 1, 2010

Trolls say things in which they do not believe, in a manner undirected at specific individuals, hoping for someone to rise to the bait and hook themselves. That's why it's called trolling. A troll's opinions are not genuinely held, just as that shiny bit of plastic which is the bait is not a true insect for a fish to bite.

Alia is not a troll. She might not be correct, or "in-line," but that does not make her a troll. It would be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by adipocere at 8:22 AM on August 1, 2010

why does she have carte blanche to continue injecting herself into these threads then?

Because we don't ban people for having unpopular opinions. If people stop engaging her, she goes away. She's been on a bit of a roll lately [there's another related but not-going-as-badly mini-derail in the motherhood thread] and we'd like her to tone it down some, but just having a wacky opinion doesn't make her a troll.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:02 AM on August 1, 2010

the community standards of Metafilter generally hold that if you take a position that reasonable people see as bigoted and discriminatory, you should explain yourself as to how that's not true.

I think reasonable people get bored with this sort of thing and find another thread.
posted to MetaTalk by Joe in Australia at 7:55 AM on August 1, 2010

Jessamyn,

So the question remains, why does she have carte blanche to continue injecting herself into these threads then? By your own admission it's tiresome. It's *trolling* and it keeps happening no matter how many more warnings and 'brand new days' she gets.

I'm not a big poster here, but I've been a regular reader and follower of the site and all it's colourful personalities for many, many, years and I can't think of any other poster that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by WinnipegDragon at 7:46 AM on August 1, 2010

Yeah the "let's interrogate Alia about her beliefs" is pretty much as tiresome as her bringing them up and not really engaging with people in discussing them with anything other than "that's just what I believe" So, I'm glad this MeTa is here, but that was going to be a tricksy thread in any case.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:42 AM on August 1, 2010

Our general feeling is that collaborative tools exist offsite up to and including the MetaFilter wiki which can totally be used for this sort of thing. There is already a page on the wiki for people who want to collaborate on music projects.

So, generally speaking I love the idea of MeFites collaborating on stuff, but having the mechanism to do this sort of thing on the site itself is one of those things that we should probably add to this page.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:21 AM on July 29, 2010

All askers >= 10 questions, all with median favorites >= 10.0:

Rory Marinich: 16 questions, median 26.5
Garden: 11 questions, median 18.0
dumbledore69: 15 questions, median 15.0
Despondent_monkey: 16 questions, median 15.0
availablelight: 10 questions, median 14.0
Fairchild: 10 questions, median 13.0
thehmsbeagle: 15 questions, median 12.0
Christ, what an asshole: 39 questions,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by one_bean at 2:37 AM on July 29, 2010

Low askers (< 10) (11342 users)
    oalocke: 318 favorites from 1 questions, ratio=318.00
    chalbe: 698 favorites from 3 questions, ratio=232.67
    stennieville: 131 favorites from 1 questions, ratio=131.00
    punchtothehead: 234 favorites from 2 questions, ratio=117.00
    cherrybounce: 216 favorites from 2 questions, ratio=108.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Rhomboid at 12:53 AM on July 29, 2010

Hi Metafilterians,

Kevin Kelly, host of the list here. I greatly appreciate the suggestions for great articles that have been posted on this thread. I'll add them to the list that appears on my site.

I am sorry I did not make it clearer that the "best-ever" in the name is aspirational and that the list is a work-in-progress. Two days ago the list had 4 items in it — the articles I started with. I have done no research on this list, zero.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kk at 3:42 PM on July 28, 2010

lazy-ville and P_G are both banned for it.

It's totally fucked up to abuse ask metafilter for shits and giggles. It fucks with everyone's sense of trust -- people really were answering the question seriously and trying to offer help, and to hear it was all some stupid fucking joke is really lame. Amid the serious answers counseling the person asking the question, Pretty_Generic offered the advice of throwing a pregnant woman down some stairs. Not knowing it was fake,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:43 AM on November 22, 2005

Those don't seem too far-fetched to me. But I've traveled a lot, lived in big cities, and have an unstoppable curiosity about other people's lives.

They seem really heartbreaking and I wish we could send someone to help those folks immediately. Like a MeFi Fairy Guardian, dispatched daily on missions of mercy and retribution. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
posted to MetaTalk by batmonkey at 4:21 PM on July 26, 2010

The world is a strange and complicated place full of people who, one to another, have very different perspectives, life experiences, and ways of discussing or asking about their lives.

There is always the possibility that a question has been embellished or outright invented, but if a question isn't otherwise a problem our take is to view it as legitimate and answer (or don't) in good faith and leave it at that. If you've got a specific reason to think a question might... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:22 PM on July 26, 2010

I am assuming they are real. We may think they are not real because we may have very little experience with people who are shut-ins of various stripes. The times we've known that someone was asking a question that was made up, it was a little more obvious.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:12 PM on July 26, 2010

I don't have any evidence for this, but it's probably the case that a lot of Ask Metafilter posts are made up, exaggerated, or contrived, especially anonymous ones. It doesn't really affect functionality of the site at all to have fictional questions, as long as the advice is real.
posted to MetaTalk by Electrius at 3:14 PM on July 26, 2010

those weird fighty things that happen sometimes in threads.

Just recently I dropped a note in-thread because a newer user was going off on that old "okay I disagree with you so I'm going to call you names and interrogate you and make you answer all my questions about why you believe this wrong thing" and got a little huffy when we said that's not really how we do things here. That may still be advanced MeFi stuff since I think most new... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:29 PM on July 26, 2010

Here's an old mirror of the Metafilter Scout comic you're talking about.

Again, this is all way too vague and context-less to put in any kind of FAQ-like thing for n00bs. Debates are part of the site; we shouldn't tell people not to have debates.

A lot of what people are mentioning in this thread is too vague and context-less as stated. People are brainstorming. It's okay. Polishing all this up into a more organized... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:13 PM on July 26, 2010

A list of the names of the moderators would be helpful to a newcomer.
posted to MetaTalk by ericb at 11:34 AM on July 26, 2010

Evidently, MetaFilter is too complicated.

Nah it's just that some people are total assholes or play stupid games telling people how "the site" works when it's really how they'd like the site to work.

We'd like some objective-ish things we can tell people about so that if they're curious about how things function here, they've got a place to go. For better or worse, some people find this place a little daunting and/or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:27 AM on July 26, 2010

Lemme see...

One of the distinguishing features of MetaFilter is that most thread participants generally try to stay civil and assume good faith and investment in the conversation from other participants. It's not universal and it doesn't always work out, but there are very few "scorched-earth" style commenters on MeFi.

The mods are more approachable and responsive than you might think.

Flagging works. Not... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Shepherd at 10:31 AM on July 26, 2010

And when we're looking at a question that has a combination of chatty-seeming elements and concrete requests for info/resources/guidance etc, we'll generally try to opt toward a generous reading that focuses on that latter part when we evaluate whether to leave it up. It comes down to a judgement call, though, as we can't really know for sure how folks are going to react to a question if we decide to let it fly in that sort of circumstance.

Certainly it's not weird that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:50 AM on July 25, 2010

It's been a blistering hot weekend in my neck of the woods, and I've taken advantage of the fact that the air here is like the exhaust from a hair dryer to do loads of heavy, slow-drying laundry, like my duvet and my throw rugs. As I'm hanging my laundry out, there's a constant stream of bees coming and going from my top bar hive, and between each load I hang out, I take a few minutes to approach the hive, where it sits under my mulberry tree. The foraging workers race by, often passing by an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sonascope at 3:29 PM on July 25, 2010

Yeah, my feeling is that the reaction was along the lines of what rachaelfaith and zarq are saying: that while I don't think you meant to express this feeling at all, twoleftfeet, there was a weird reading of essentially "dead people spoil festival" to the framing; and it's in response to people pushing back on that that a couple of your replies were in pushing-an-editorial-position territory, as mild as it was in this case.

Sort of a multiplicative effect of two kinds... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:14 PM on July 25, 2010

As an aside, flagging mods' comments in metatalk doesn't really tell us what's bothering you about them and doesn't tell anyone else anything at all, and we're (implausible bizarro meltdowns aside) really not likely to make comments we'd consider deletable so they're not doing any useful behind the scenes work besides.

Drop me an email or bring it up in the thread here (it's metatalk, that's pretty much kosher) if you want to let me know something's up, but skip that route.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:00 PM on July 25, 2010

In defense of cortex, I think my post really was kind of weirdly framed.

Intentionally.

There's a weird conceptual mismatch between Parade and Stampede, and between Love and Death, and sometimes I get caught up in the poetry of the situation when making a post, so it comes off as less factual and more along the lines of fantasy or supposition.
posted to MetaTalk by twoleftfeet at 12:42 PM on July 25, 2010

Because 'there will be another post' doesn't address the deletion reason of this post. And that's what we're discussing I thought.

Note that that was the third of three paragraphs in the comment you're replying to, and not anything like the whole content of what I've said in this thread. "Someone can try again" isn't a blanket excuse for any deletion we choose to make, it's a silver lining, and one worth keeping in mind given the very low... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:35 PM on July 25, 2010

Then why delete the thread to punish the poster?

To be clear, the thread was deleted because the framing was not great and was bothering people and the post got flagged a bunch. I mentioned the in-thread-argumentation stuff as an aside, and this is feeling like a classic example of Deletion Reason Author's Regret because I really wasn't trying to get overly much on twoleftfeet's case so much as mention that dynamic as problematic aside from the issue... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:33 PM on July 25, 2010

Wow, that's really weak.

How so? This has come up tons of times before—deleting a post is not prohibiting future posts about the subject of the deleted post, and if someone thinks the subject deserves another go they can give it a shot. We've invoked this idea explicitly in plenty of deletion reasons and discussed it in metatalk a bunch of times.

No individual post has some sort of law-of-nature right to exist. The... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:30 PM on July 25, 2010

Wait, what? Since when is that a thing?

When it's an early and notable presence, it's a thing. Has been for a while. Doesn't come up too often, thankfully, but we've definitely removed posts now and then and/or told the poster to can it in cases where the sequences goes:

1. User makes post.
2. User jumps into post to tell people that (a) they're wrong about their interpretation of the subject matter or (b) they're... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:24 PM on July 25, 2010

Is it really the end of the world if the poster comments in their own thread and there's no derail?

It's not the end of the world, no, but it's not a great practice, and waiting around for the derail to happen-or-not doesn't seem like a great idea. twoleftfeet wrote to ask about the second half of the deletion reason and I explained that in combination with the already sort of problematic framing (and a bunch of flags coming in), the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:18 PM on July 25, 2010

Favorites are not a scoring system. This is not Digg.
posted to MetaTalk by Chocolate Pickle at 8:09 PM on July 23, 2010

Not a chance of this happening. There may be Greasemonkey scripts that will help you pull out the heavily favorited comments.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:57 PM on July 23, 2010