MetaFilter

The historical context is significant here. I was there, so I feel qualified to discuss...

Journalling/Diary platforms pre-date blogging by a couple of years. Although there were some blogs (or, really, proto-blogs) in existence at the time, online journals using a central platform to maintain them were there first in numbers.

Although the original bloggers were undoubtedly aware of the journalling sites, culturally there was quite a distinction... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mikel at 9:21 PM on July 21, 2010 marked best answer

Oh god no we won't update old links or re-open old threads. That said, if there's something that has a half-assed post made about it over five years ago and something new has happened, making a newer updated post is not bad at all, not even really against the rules. We don't like to go on record as saying "oh sure, repost old links" because just doing that absent any new context isn't really that great and not sort of what people were talking about above.

I'm... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:33 AM on July 21, 2010

"If you do not like a post on MetaFilter, your options are ignore it, FIAMO, or contact the mods. Coming in here with your "try harder" and "we can do better" when you admittedly make these same kinds of "substandard" posts yourself is weak and hypocritical. I'm generally a fan of your, crunchland, but on this issue, you are Wrong on Posts, Wrong for MetaFilter."

Your other option is to post a Metatalk thread,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by klangklangston at 9:04 PM on July 20, 2010

'Hey, how about another Best Post Contest?' Boom, problem addressed.

I like this idea.

I'm not sure if I actively dislike the other posts as much [weak as some of them were, they're not indicative that the site as a whole is "satisfied with weak sauce" to my read] but I'd love to see more posts where people really looked into a subject instead of "oh hey this is funny"

Super big... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:04 PM on July 20, 2010

For what it's worth, I don't recall seeing the mods saying anything in many of those threads that started or turned into Apple vs Google.

We do a fair amount of work behind the scenes on this as with any number of other topics. It's hard to know how best to quantify "the various stuff that's not explicitly visible that we do to deal with stuff", so I know that's a little handwavey, but this is a really stark impression we have of the whole thing at... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:12 PM on July 20, 2010

Blazecock, a huge huge part of the problem here is that if you change some nouns around that is essentially the same set of complaints a lot of people have about your behavior as well. It goes both ways, there are a few people who frequently react badly on either side of an Apple-related discussion, and it's those few people in particular, and you especially so among them, that make this whole thing unnecessarily into a clusterfuck.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:04 PM on July 20, 2010

[Jauxie_Raddass, you're taking the day off. If you actually want to be a member of this community in any meaningful sense, cut the shit and start conversing in good faith when you come back. Otherwise, there are plenty of other sites where you can pull dumbass late-night shit-stirring bullshit and be welcomed with open arms.]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 7:11 AM on July 20, 2010

Just like you I possess critical thinking skills and just like you I make judgments on information based on previous life experiences.

Unlike some of us, you consider your opinion strong enough and valuable enough to post it without any further backup, as though saying "I know when I am being lied to" is evidence of anything at all. This is literally an entire thread of women confirming that these sorts of stories occur all the time. But,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Astro Zombie at 5:23 AM on July 20, 2010

I have a question about ethics that I'm trying to articulate that is probably too chatty. Jess, would you prefer I just post it and see what happens, or run it by you privately first?

Send it to the contact form if you want, though we'd prefer people learned to calibrate their internal chat-o-meter so maybe run it by a few people you know on the site first?
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:56 PM on July 19, 2010

By unanswerable I mean being incapable of being definitively answered.

Things get muddy when we try and draw this line, though, as much as we get some good use out of the basic "is there such a thing as a wrong answer" metric as a chatfilter litmus. Definitive answerability runs along a continuum with most questions on askme falling somewhere toward the middle rather than at the end points. "What is the solution to this math... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:45 PM on July 19, 2010

Amusingly the first answer was left over from the pre-deletion question, so it's not that surprising that it might look that way. Again, the original question was total chatfilter and I felt that the amended one was permissable if just. Options were: tell the OP that their amended question is also not okay and wait around for more email back and forth, approve the not-great question rewrite. This is one of those things that comes up maybe a few times a year and seems to almost always make it to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:39 PM on July 19, 2010

What is the secret to modding?
posted to MetaTalk by Babblesort at 12:25 PM on July 19, 2010

Timing!
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:23 PM on July 19, 2010

We seen it, yeah; Jess may have had some sort of conversation with the poster, I'm just guessing from context.

I think it's on the chatty side, definitely, but it's at least going after a fairly specific phenomenon that hopefully people will be able to address substantially, so as much as anything "here is why I think I stopped liking book x..." rather than just "book x!". So, borderline, I can see going both ways with it, but the admin log shows... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:23 PM on July 19, 2010

I deleted it. OP emailed me and asked what was wrong with it. I explained chatfilter. The OP rewrote it with their "why I am asking" bit attached to it. Not really psyched with it, but didn't seem fair to delete it again. So, yeah, imperfect system, but I didn't feel like going back and forth with the OP trying to explain the nuances of chatfilter questions with them.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:20 PM on July 19, 2010

recently we've gotten the ability to see threads with the deleted stuff still in them inline [so that we can tell what the other mod did, no we are not planning on making this user-facing] and otherwise we see what you guys see site-wise except for an [edit] [x] [IP:whois|search] options. Edit lets us edit, the X will delete something and we can run a whois or a site search for an IP address. It's pretty prosaic actually. And we have the admin panel which people have already pointed out.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:28 PM on July 18, 2010

cortex: "based on an old idea someone hacked together years ago (and which I cannot seem to track down)."

Perhaps you mean my silly toy Who Wrote This MetaFilter Comment?, which somehow still works and was based on this thread.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Plutor at 3:39 PM on July 16, 2010

Another possible approach to selecting users (though one that would be a little trickier to manage logistically) would be to grab candidates from the whole userbase proportional to their contributions. So the highest volume people would still be most common, but folks who had fewer comments could still show up sometimes.

Which I think would be really nice, if I can find a way to make it work effectively. I'll put it on the experiment list and see if (a) I can make it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:22 PM on July 16, 2010

[few comments removed - if you can't give advice without insulting other commenters, please do not comment. thank you.]
posted by ??????


phrontist
thinkingwoman
LobsterMitten
jessamyn
electroboy



HRM, this is going to be a hard one.
posted to MetaTalk by deezil at 11:29 AM on July 16, 2010

Oh come on. Maybe you should have some minimum length filter.

Heh. I may implement one, yeah. Maximum length or excerpting long comments is also a possibility. Both of those are a bit more complicated than the current "hey, database, gimme a comment from user x" method, though, so they're on the TODO list for a possible 2.0 release.

It doesn't like nd¢'s username.

Yeah,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:27 AM on July 16, 2010

I'd like to see "viral" or just plain "selling a product" in the flag options.

Yeah, this is also where MeFi and DreaMeFi diverge from each other in my world too. That said, viral nonsense is part of internet culture and skipping a post because it's associated with a product isn't really feasible or what people want. It would sort of be neat if people could flag stuff in a greasemonkey-obtainable way and I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:29 PM on July 14, 2010

I would go so far as to say that everyone on the mod team has thought about how the site would be different if they could actually run it exactly the way they wanted, yeah.

You know that scene in The Shining when the elevator doors open and out comes a deluge of blood?
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:17 PM on July 14, 2010

Given this some thought, have you?

I would go so far as to say that everyone on the mod team has thought about how the site would be different if they could actually run it exactly the way they wanted, yeah.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:12 PM on July 14, 2010

I do think the "Didn't Read The Question" flag would be a great (as proposed by trunk muffins).
posted to MetaTalk by cjorgensen at 12:54 PM on July 14, 2010

No. Other is fine. We basically should have three flags: look at this QUICK, look at this eventually and fix this. Having the other options is just to sort of encourage people to think about the guidelines and to encourage pointing out stuff that breaks them. There is no guideline against being uninteresting.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:35 PM on July 14, 2010

I've got a question about MetaTalk double posts. FPPs regarding the use of a single dot in obit threads come up a fair bit. Do people not use the 'double post' flag in Meta? Because I can't understand why this wasn't closed, especially since two mods had entered the thread to comment almost immediately.

We don't worry much about double posts when it's a matter of like social conventions or community etiquette being discussed—there are always new... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:03 PM on July 14, 2010

Here are the flags I would like to see. If I ran this site as a total dictatorship.

- derail/noise
- wtf
- I will flag this instead of being a dick in the thread, but really, this sucks amirite
- "not best of the web" is not a reason we delete posts ever - do not use this flag. take a walk.
- typo making me itchy and can't rest unless you fix it
- someone doing that THING we just talked about not being... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:04 PM on July 14, 2010

The FAQ says this Can I post a link to CNN if there's a breaking news story that doesn't have a permalink yet?

There are very rare cases where this is appropriate, usually large scale disasters (like once-in-a-lifetime events). Updates to the latest political intrigue do not qualify. Generally speaking, if a breaking story isn't linked on the Internet yet, it won't make a very good post. If you're posting it thinking, "I'd better hurry before someone else posts... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:00 AM on July 13, 2010

Aside from the FAQ, there's been a couple dozen other direct and indirect discussions of the history, meaning, and practice of the dot convention. I've added the "dot" tag to this post just for consistency's sake; you can check out the previous posts on this tag results page.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:56 AM on July 13, 2010

This is in the FAQ.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:51 AM on July 13, 2010

a good article is a good article

And a good post is a good post, and the presence of a good article on the other end of a link does not automatically make the post that link is in good. Our job is more about evaluating the posts as they stand in context on metafilter than declaring any given link officially good or bad, as much as there is in the ideal case an overlap between good post and good link.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:44 PM on July 12, 2010

Also, here be a spammer.

You know this isn't the awesome-est way to point this out to us, right?
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:25 PM on July 12, 2010

The subject has come up more than twice, sometimes directly but without that exact phrase in the post (e.g. this from March of this year), sometimes a bit more incidentally (e.g. July of last year). It's showed up in a whole pile of comments, aside.

Which, I'm not looking at it as purely a "we've discussed it so no more discussing it" thing—we don't really do that for general topics—but it's not a new idea to metafilter, and a post really needs to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:34 PM on July 12, 2010

Single link outrage filter.
posted to MetaTalk by BeerFilter at 6:30 PM on July 12, 2010

Also, that post was like a pointy stick jabbed into the soft underbelly of MeFi. Maybe if it had been a bunch of pointy sticks corded together with a rubber band and jabbed into the soft underbelly of MeFi, maybe then it could have stayed. But a one-link news-horror post to the front page? Spare me.
posted to MetaTalk by carsonb at 6:30 PM on July 12, 2010

there are no mods in this thread. NO MODS.

I don't know if I need to show up in a thread where the question is "should I flip out?" because my answer is always "of course not sweetie, have another rice krispie bar"
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:32 PM on July 12, 2010

Barn door after the cows are out and all, but I went ahead and tweaked the wording to make "non-British" explicit.

Fundamentally, not everybody is going to read the question carefully; the ambiguity in the phrasing on this one just sort of exacerbated the effect of that in a way that I'm sure was frustrating to behold, SLoG, but you're really best off just making a clarification or two in thread and hoping people catch it.

Stuff like... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:27 PM on July 12, 2010

We're currently beta testing IRL which means it's not quite ready for prime time. We're still determining what features will be available at that site and working out the bugs. We only have one category for events, and we'll be opening that up soon. So there will be a transition time while people test/try out the site.

Once IRL is officially live we're still going to propose meetups over here in MetaTalk. Once the meetup has a solid date/time, it will move to IRL. The... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:18 PM on July 12, 2010

It is important to make sure people aren't trolling the community by posting fake questions.

While I think this is true to a certain extent I think we've maybe had a handful of fully-identified trolling questions [I can think of one that I know of, and probably a few more that might have qualified] and many many more MeTa "this is a troll" threads. While I'm fine with having discussions about whether people think a certain question is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:53 PM on July 10, 2010

> And while you can avoid participating in the further discussion after reading the initial premise and deciding it does not interest you, you can't avoid those initial threads of conversation—not unless you want to give up on conversation in general (even temporarily).

Oh, bullshit. There's no conversation involved when you're "reading the initial premise," because that's the post. To get to the conversation you have to click on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 11:14 AM on July 9, 2010

But hey, enjoy your false sense of readymade belonging

The thing is, it IS belonging. This is culture. You may not like it or enjoy it or it may not be your idea of a good time, but in the US and I'm sure in many other places, having a sports affiliation [even if it's just "Go Packers!"] gives you a bunch of people who will see you as someone who is, in some small way, part of something that they are also part of. This is true for TV shows... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:58 AM on July 9, 2010

One minute. Pow.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:12 AM on July 8, 2010

Sure, we'll get that added.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:07 AM on July 8, 2010

but honestly I think AskMe is a better place the fewer chatty pseudo-questions there are.

We pretty much agree. Like Jess said, that was just one that kind of got by us for a while for random logistical reasons. And, honestly, we're a little more likely to be clement on one of these oddball got-its-steam-up-while-we-weren't-looking things if it's a pretty positive sort of thing that everybody seems to be really enjoying than if it were some sort of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:12 PM on July 6, 2010

you guys are totally not paid enough to deal with that on a routine basis, but honestly I think AskMe is a better place the fewer chatty pseudo-questions there are.

I agree. However, we'll tend to err on the "fewer butt-hurt" side and remember to check the flag queue more often in the future. Honestly Matt's in town and I was having ice cream with him so I was a bit asleep at the wheel. Not sure about cortex, I think he is having ice cream... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:45 PM on July 6, 2010

it's nearly impossible to axe a question that has a hundred answers

Why? It's still crappy, just long and crappy not short and crappy. I mean, I get it that deleting now will leave a lot of people feeling butt-hurt and you guys are totally not paid enough to deal with that on a routine basis, but honestly I think AskMe is a better place the fewer chatty pseudo-questions there are.
posted to MetaTalk by Forktine at 9:37 PM on July 6, 2010

It looks like chatfilter to me. I'm kind of surprised it wasn't deleted.

It's one of those weird questions where if we'd seen it immediately we probably would have axed it, but it's nearly impossible to axe a question that has a hundred answers.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:29 PM on July 6, 2010

Getting invested in a derail does not make the derail something other than what it is.

cortex got to it before I did, I have the same basic feeling. Someone who read the words of the post decided to get het up about them and hollering ensued at the expense of the linked content. I agree I dislike the term warfighter. This is the place to talk about that.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:20 PM on July 6, 2010

Wow, really, you're going to delete half the thread?

Yes. Someone wants to make a passing note about "warfighter" in an otherwise earnest attempt to look at the content of the post, okay; giant derail with people yelling at each other about jingoism and lingo, that's more of a Take It To Metatalk Pronto situation. Getting invested in a derail does not make the derail something other than what it is.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:16 PM on July 6, 2010

I've been wondering lately if there are many people here like me who don't use the blue but only follow AskMe.

Just to put some numbers to this, in a fairly recent copy of the Infodump, there are 386 users with 100+ answers in AskMe and 0 comments on MeFi. That's a pretty strict filter and already there are a lot of people who are like that.

You actually have some comments in the blue, so if we said your ratio of blue:green was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by FishBike at 1:33 PM on July 6, 2010