MetaFilter

Anonymous questions remove the element of community in the same way that anonymous comments on the blue would remove the element of community. We do not allow anonymous comments on the blue for that reason; virtually the same logic can be applied to anonymous questions on the green.
posted to MetaTalk by Justinian at 7:00 PM on June 3, 2010

Poor jess/cortex/matt/pb/vacapinta. Some day I'm going to post this AskMe,

"I'm writing a book about frustrated mods on a hypothetical community blog that deal with thread-shitting and bean-plating on a daily basis.

In my book, they patiently explain the site policies, defending both deletions and non-deletions on a case-by-case basis, day after day, ad infinitum (even before their morning coffee).

I'm writing the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by misha at 6:03 PM on June 1, 2010

Someone who's not deathly lazy wanna help a mefite out?

I started this. Maybe someone else can find some other examples so it doesn't look so weird and empty. I'll look through my favorited stuff on MeTa and see if there's other stuff I could add.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:22 PM on June 1, 2010

There's actually nothing in the guidelines regarding illegal activities. The unofficial guideline in the past was more about curtailing questions that could get metafilter into legal trouble. It has since seemed to be further refined due to the popularity of the site; they don't want it to become a forum for explicitly getting information on breaking the law. I don't think it's a matter of whther the mods agree with the law or not, just that it if there's a reasonable legal interpretation, it's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by team lowkey at 3:34 PM on June 1, 2010

So basically there's no hard rules regarding this...its just whatever the mods feel like doing depending on their personal preferences backed by some general assumptions.

None taken. The general policy is "please do not ask questions about how to do things that are illegal because they may be deleted" And there has been an ongoing discussion about what that really means in MeTa over the years where we've simplified that by... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:33 PM on June 1, 2010

> But I'd want to share them even if I didn't know them; it has nothing to do with our personal relationship, and I don't even know them all very well, I just happen to go to school with them. If I had just heard them at a concert, I'd still want to share their music, because it's awesome.

You do not know this. It is impossible to know how you would react to the work of friends if you didn't know them. Every parent and grandparent thinks their... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 9:57 AM on May 30, 2010

But I'd want to share them even if I didn't know them; it has nothing to do with our personal relationship, and I don't even know them all very well, I just happen to go to school with them. If I had just heard them at a concert, I'd still want to share their music, because it's awesome.

Part of the reason the rule is pretty flat and straightforward is that we don't want to have to spend a lot of time (a) trying to hash out the thorny territory between... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:59 AM on May 30, 2010

I'd want to share them even if I didn't know them; it has nothing to do with our personal relationship

Nothing personal MaiaMadness, but this is exactly why we have this rule. Yes "had beers with" is too close. You can put the links in your own profile page. You can encourage them to get MeFi accounts. MetaFilter does a lot of great things, but there are a few things that it doesn't do well and offering a place to promote friends' works is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:46 AM on May 30, 2010

Friends-linking is pretty much not okay. If you know them enough to know their names and vice versa, that's too close.

The basic thing about the friendslinking is this

1. People are often not the best judge of how awesome their own friends are.
2. we don't want to have to second guess and think "Are they linking to this site because there's some money angle and they're trying to help out their friend?"
3. We... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:35 AM on May 30, 2010

We are not going to implement this. It has been frequently suggested and always refused. Our basic feeling is that we want people to use AskMe when they need to and not have some reminder "hey, time for an extra question!" that comes around. People can keep track of it themselves. We're happy that AskMe is so popular and well-liked but giving it a way to get used even more isn't on our "to do " list.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:25 AM on May 28, 2010

----------
/ \
/ REST \
/ IN \
/ PEACE \
/ \
| cortex |
| 23554 + |
| killed by a |
| troll... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:10 PM on May 26, 2010

I too thought of the same pony a while back! But then imaginary cortex appeared over my shoulder and said something like special-k, dude, you know we're not going to do this right?

I abandoned my quest for the pony and instead attacked a bag of pirate's booty. mmm, pirate's booty.


It's true. Imaginary cortex and imaginary Jessamyn stop me from doing many bad things here on Mefi. Their influence on me is inversely proportional to my BAC.
posted to MetaTalk by special-k at 11:29 AM on May 26, 2010

Does this kind of thing violate the prohibition on bringing a poster's personal details into a thread?

It's sort of borderline.

Going out and making a connection to someone's identity elsewhere in a way that makes explicitly public some part of their identity that previously wasn't so on the site is the main issue we're concerned about, and will generally get removed quickly unless the person in question is themself really... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:47 PM on May 25, 2010

Most likely scenario analysis

Your definition of "most likely" and mine vary quite a bit.

I've been spending a little time over the past few days hopping around to other sites leaving a few comments on other blogs and spending a lot of time emailing/phoning with Kathrine and fake and fuq and a lot of other concerned people. If people think I'm a shill or a dupe, that's just what they're going to think. There are... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:08 AM on May 24, 2010

We've seen a ton of new signups, many more then usual. One of the interesting things is that there are more people actually making it all the way through the sign-up process [i.e. clicking sign-up and getting all the way to paying $5] than we usually see. The numbers are in my email someplace but I think we're seeing like 10x as many signups over the past 24-48 hours, maybe more. So look out for a lot of dopey questions seven days from now in AskMe.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:46 PM on May 22, 2010

Oh one last thing (lol).... you guys really did a good job coming together as a community the last couple days. My hats off to all you. Great work.

But i should remind you this one time on Fark we had a guy who got his sack stuck in the chair he was sitting on. We really came through for him on that one. Plus another time some chick took photos of a UFO off her back balcony, we ran some forensics and determined it was a streetlight.

So... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by chudogg at 4:17 PM on May 21, 2010

That Newsweek blog seems one of the best sum-ups of this I've seen. Obviously they talked to IFD9, but with the linking to the individual comments, it looks like the writer actually did some work and maybe even read the discussions. Much better than that POS post on that Slate blog.
posted to MetaTalk by marxchivist at 4:00 PM on May 21, 2010

Two posts now! Welcome aboard.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:39 PM on May 21, 2010

wow, chudogg, you registered just to say that?

Yep, I've been on fark off and on since about 02, and never once paid for TF. Metafilter manages to sucker 5 bucks outta me for just one post. Go figure!
posted to MetaTalk by chudogg at 3:38 PM on May 21, 2010

I bet Fake is regretting his screen name now. I don't know why people get hung up on.

I think a lot of people outside looking in don't realize how established the people involved with this are on the site. To someone like me the names Fake, internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 (and her previous name), Pollomacho, etc. are all real people that I recognize instantly but to someone else they might sound like sock puppets that were made up for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by burnmp3s at 2:52 PM on May 21, 2010

MetaFilter, a decidedly less controversial community (more prone to asking for advice about interest rates and/or digestive issues)

My favorite description of us, ever.
posted to MetaTalk by scody at 2:31 PM on May 21, 2010

Amazing. We are not very far away from the reality of Bruce Sterling's short story Maneki Neko. Nice people from the internet provide!

Kudos MeFites.
posted to MetaTalk by artlung at 2:07 PM on May 21, 2010

Folks who are interested: I had a nice long chat with fake today and shorter talks with mathowie and with Mother Jones Magazine [gave them contact info for kathrineg and fake]. Right now I think we are here

- IFDS,S#9 and pals are set for a few days with food/beer. Do I have that right?
- fake is starting a new job Real Soon Now but if people are feeling generous, he would like to be able to get to NYC to rendezvous briefly with his friends. I can help... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:26 PM on May 21, 2010

Hmm. That's kind of annoying, I'll ask them to stop.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:26 AM on May 21, 2010

Is there a compelling reason that you're creating a new site instead of using an existing event service?

Being able to customize and control the content to our specific needs, and to provide the service without third-party barriers to all mefites, is pretty much the big selling point; it's specifically worth it to us to make the effort because the wins there justify the work.

Upcoming et al do a good job of being services for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:17 PM on May 18, 2010

I don't think anything like Upcoming or Socializr offers a way to link MeFi-only events with an outside site, or offer ways to list really small events.

We built projects even though digg exists, I think we can have a meetup/events subsite here that can do more and offer more than other outside services.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:13 PM on May 18, 2010

Will there be some way for posters to provide an optional bit of info that only shows up if viewers are logged in? That way people could, if they wanted, provide discount codes and the like to mefites. I would definitely do that for my events, but I don't want to post a discount code for everyone in the world who uses google.
posted to MetaTalk by grumblebee at 3:39 PM on May 18, 2010

Also, please provide RSS feeds to each of the categories you end up using.

Yep, we plan on having location-centric views, tagging, RSS feeds, and all of that organizational goodness.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:24 PM on May 18, 2010

I'm definitely leaning towards types

- standard meetup [hangout time with mefites, nonspecific]
- "I'm in a thing" meetup [performances, music, djing, conference talk]
- "I made a thing" meetup [art openings, book signings, garden walk]
- "let's do this thing" meetup [book club, hiking club, event-specific thing w/ mefites]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:33 PM on May 18, 2010

Lazarus adds this option to Firefox. If you're to the point where you're writing long messages in MeMail, it might be good to switch to a real email client. MeFi Mail could very easily turn into a race to duplicate GMail, and we're not going to do that when it's fairly easy to switch over to something like GMail.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:23 PM on May 12, 2010

No, it'd better to flag and then drop us a line directly via the contact form; we're likely to see it sooner and it'd help to have a little bit of description of what exactly happened in any case.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:19 PM on May 12, 2010

there is a subsect of the community who value their time and the signal/noise ratio here enough to think the risk of banning the former is outweighed by the benefit of banning the latter.

We have a pretty codified set of procedures for when and if someone gets banned from the website and "asking clueless questions" is not one of the current reasons.

I don't mean to make light of this, but it's pretty important to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:32 AM on May 13, 2010

there doesn't need to be a dramatic to-do about the guy except that you and Jessamyn have fueled it.

Excuse me? I'm not sure what you're suggesting, that we close this MeTa thread and just keep closing his posts until he wanders off of his own accord?

Both cortex and I have MeMailed with the guy and we're working through this with him. This may not be fast enough for some people, but that's how long this sort of thing takes.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:03 PM on May 12, 2010

Which is more likely: that he's actually cluelessly sincere as to the workings of the entiere world and everything in it -- it's all a magical mystery tour and he only needs some gentle guidance -- or he's just dicking around?

Based on trying to have discussions with him via email, and trying to check out what we can in terms of paper trail elsewhere on the internet and so on, the chances that he's actually clueless and tonedeaf feel pretty solid, yes.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:18 PM on May 12, 2010

That question isn't gonna work, and if abbat really can't figure out a way to rework this aspect of his use of askme then ultimately, yeah, it could be an unworkable situation. It's rare that we see someone not able to turn things around with AskMe, but it's possible for it to be an issue if nothing changes.

In this specific case, I'm not sure if abbat is really aware of Metatalk or whether he's likely to show up here; I do know that Jessamyn exchanged some mail with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:13 PM on May 12, 2010

"Google yourself at least once a week," advises Richard Levick, who heads a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. "You need to track what's being said about you" on blogs, message boards and social-networking websites.

Note to self: Do not hire "strategic communications firm" that's never heard of google alerts.
posted to MetaFilter by Nothing... and like it at 9:53 AM on May 11, 2010

Anonymous AskMe's go into some sort of posting queue, and have to be approved before they go live. Could we do that with obit threads? Maybe add an "is this an obit?" checkbox, or just watch for tags or something.

It would solve the multi-deletions that occur every time someone famous enough dies.
posted to MetaTalk by graventy at 3:50 PM on May 10, 2010

Yeah there's a continuum of this sort of thing. Usually what happens is that someone who has been a long time member realizes that people in their personal life are joining the site and they have one or two questions they'd rather not have associated with their username.

So we email with them seeing if maybe anonymizing is okay [with the associated hassle that this works poorly if they've responded in-thread a few times, but sometimes we'll err on the site of keeping... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:45 AM on May 10, 2010

I didn't realize you'd go back and delete question that much later

Like I said, it's an occasional thing, and pretty much a you-can-only-ask-us-once situation besides that. Requests to wipe large chunks of asking history won't fly; an ask-regret-delete dance that keeps happening will not be okay either, we'll basically tell you to stop asking questions you might ever regret if you can't avoid doing that repeatedly.

On... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:31 AM on May 10, 2010

Well, if you know who posted it you can drop us a quick line and we can look. Obviously if it's a deleted-after-the-fact-at-poster's-request thing we don't want to have it be a discussion in the thread here.

We do occasionally delete (or, as often, anonymize) older questions if someone has a one-off poster's regret feeling a year or five later, so it's entirely possible that's what happened.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:16 AM on May 10, 2010

I flagged and (mostly) moved on, but really, if everyone made a FPP every time they came across an offbeat or lesser-known movie they'd never heard of before, we'd never see anything else on MetaFilter.

True, and if it seemed like that really kicked up to a crazy degree we'd basically step in and start culling the herd to get it back down to normalish levels. It's something we've done on a couple occasions in the past, in part by talking to specific... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:46 PM on May 8, 2010

Yeah, what makes a good post is a lot more complicated than just a continuum between thin and not-thin (thick? rich? there's not really a good complement here). The thinness of a post is thus kind of a context-sensitive descriptor; we'd use a more precise word or words if there was a ready expression that lent itself better to the idea we're trying to communicate in a short deletion reason.

The main problem with this post is the kind of thing it is, which is what... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:37 PM on May 8, 2010

We just talked about this, and the general consensus is that if the thread is still open, updates go there. I don't mean to sound callous in the face of what's obviously a heart-wrenching story, but this whole 'update in MeTa' wound is fresh, like your Electron Boy thread. Copypasta your update to your thread and don't get too upset if this gets closed up.
posted to MetaTalk by carsonb at 4:28 AM on May 9, 2010

Really?

Really. I was pretty on the fence about that post too, honestly, and did not think it was great. If you're hoping to guide policy with a gotcha, it's not likely to work out that well because we're conflicted about this stuff too and don't really need to smacked around with evidence that this stuff is fuzzy to implement. Trust us, we really, really know.

Anyone looking for some rigid, bright-line rule about exactly... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:42 PM on May 5, 2010

are these posts also under threat of deletion?

Can we not play this game here? Please flag posts if you don't like them.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:59 PM on May 5, 2010

It doesn't matter what the tone of the post was, which was fine by the way, but there's going to be no way a "hey these cops shot some people's house pets" is a thread that is going to go well.

Threads about cops go badly, and threads about very specific shitty things that cops do go a lot worse. There's not much that's new to say, the same old people get mad at the same old stuff and as far as newsfilter posts go, they're not good. This has nothing to do with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:58 PM on May 5, 2010

What is the post for? Seriously, I don't think anyone would disagree that police shooting a family's dogs is sort of fucked up awful news, but what makes it something that's a good idea as a Metafilter post? It was getting flagged quickly and this is not the first time we've removed "awful thing happens" posts that otherwise seemed to lack postworthiness, so it's neither a by-fiat or a without-precedent sort of situation.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:54 PM on May 5, 2010

Other things that do not improve conversation

- *rolls eyes*
- "don't you have anything better to do?
- "Tennessee is underwater and you're worrying about THIS"
- "oh please"
- "couldn't help myself" post-snark pseudo-apology
- aggressive support of your pet topic that has nothing to do with the topic
- irony that no one gets
- "oh yeah what about... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:19 AM on May 4, 2010

Yeah, he seems well-meaning as far as that goes but has really had an awful lot of low-content answers removed, so what's left behind doesn't really tell the whole story. "Must-Answer Syndrome" is not a terrible way to describe the general phenomenon, if we have to settle for a three-word "X Answer Syndrome" label, though I mostly hope we don't have to. Namespace is not coming from nowhere here, dfriedman's ongoing over-answering is something we know about and are a bit... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:58 AM on May 4, 2010

Agreed. But couldn't the mods fix the post by adding a link and/or context? We can do that with spoilers and NSFW, which reveal too much, so why not posts that reveal too little?

Again, no. We'll throw the occasional tiny tag into a post, generally at the poster's request when we do, but we are not going to start inserting link content into posts by fiat. That's seriously counter to our very firm "we aren't going to edit other people's posts for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:20 AM on May 4, 2010