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But couldn't the mods fix the post by adding a link and/or context?

We never edit posts except for typo fixes and the like. Having us decide there is missing context or whatever puts us in a position of vetting posts for context which don't want to do.

Can someone explain to me if Huron Bob's post is stunty, then?
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:13 AM on May 4, 2010

[Like half the goddam comments removed. Please feel free to stay out of a thread if all you have to say is that (a) you don't know who that is or that (b) you think they should be beaten to death. For fuck's sake.]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:02 PM on May 3, 2010

My point is, how do people know that their comments are deleted now? They look for them, right? They go back to reread the thread or look for their favorite count or whatever. The comment is deleted. Either they have a hissy fit or not. Having a marker is not going to change this.

I disagree on two points:

1. Seeing an explicit note that they've had a comment removed has a chance of motivating someone to take some followup... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:41 PM on May 3, 2010

My point is, how do people know that their comments are deleted now? They look for them, right? They go back to reread the thread or look for their favorite count or whatever. The comment is deleted. Either they have a hissy fit or not. Having a marker is not going to change this.

Actually, I think it will and here is why. Having a marker makes it clear to other people that you had a comment deleted [depending on how such a marker would be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:32 PM on May 3, 2010

. First of all, it seems insane to me, Secret Life, that you seem to think that there wouldn't be any uptick in complaints if deleted comments were notated. In fact, I'm pretty confused by your request, because virtually every single one of your assumptions seems way off to me - no offense, I just don't know how you come to think, first of all, that most people actually check back into threads often enough to notice comments that have been deleted; second of all, that people wouldn't be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by empath at 3:04 PM on May 3, 2010

I gotta say, I'm impressed with how you mods continually rehash your policy with the members without getting frustrated or narky, even if you have had a conversation many times. Your explanations never seem cut & paste, and you're willing to really explain in depth (again) why a certain decision has been made. Sometimes (not this situation necessarily), I'd be saying "FFS, this is the way it is, deal with it." This is why I am not a mod, anywhere, anymore. So yeah, kudos to you... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by b33j at 2:55 PM on May 3, 2010

There are a dozen reasons why this is a bad idea. First of all, it seems insane to me, Secret Life, that you seem to think that there wouldn't be any uptick in complaints if deleted comments were notated. In fact, I'm pretty confused by your request, because virtually every single one of your assumptions seems way off to me - no offense, I just don't know how you come to think, first of all, that most people actually check back into threads often enough to notice comments that have been deleted;... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by koeselitz at 1:28 PM on May 3, 2010

Anyway, I'm fine with leaving everything as is. But as someone who is a casual comment reader/writer, I have no ability to remember who is who, and as an engineer I just can't help really wanting to solve this problem.

I totally sympathize with this "hey I have a problem" "hey I have a solution" call/response sort of thing. That said, one of the other things we do at our level is try to triage situations so that we can better... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:57 AM on May 3, 2010

If there were deleted comment tombstones, you might help to give some idea as to who is trolling and who is trying to engage in meaningful debate.

Or who leaves "ack, typo!" followup comments and flags them as "display error", or who accidentally double posts a comment. Or who replies, however civilly, to something else that merited deletion. A marker just says something was deleted, not why, and using them as evidence of specific... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:28 AM on May 3, 2010

I would send back a "we don't comment on deleted comments" form letter, something that can be automated.

This would be another paradigm shift, since right now we DO comment on deleted comments. We're pretty uncomfortable with the idea of having form letter responses to anything. I think right now the only thing that gets a form letter response is "Hey, we noticed that you and your sock puppet seem to have asked two questions in a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:23 AM on May 3, 2010

I know that even if it were possible to add this kind of thing to MeFi, the mods are opposed to it philosophically.

It's not even that we're opposed to this idea, I think we're all sort of into the idea loosely in an ideal world sort of situation. But I don't think that practically speaking we have any idea how to make this work with the amount of resources we have to give to this. Add to this that there's a lot of personal data available via MeFi... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:26 AM on May 3, 2010

MetaFilter is constantly evolving and adapting to new ideas.

Yes, but this particular discussion is not new; the notion of adding deletion markers has been proposed occasionally throughout the last ten years, and there's been a pretty firm and consistent mod policy on not intending to go there for a long time now.

I don't mean the "that's how it's always been" thing as some magical trump card where we don't have to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:13 AM on May 3, 2010

Why speculate? Why not test an alternative for a limited time period?

Because we don't feel like there's a compelling reason to go through that process, basically. It's easy to decide to run a test, but it's a hell of a lot of work to actually manage that test and the whole community reaction to it and to measure the impact/outcome in a meaningful way, and in this case that'd all be in service of an idea we actively dislike.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:29 AM on May 3, 2010

Do you know for a fact that a deleted comment notation would result in more problems?

No, we're stuck with professional speculation. I've read a lot of sites besides mefi with varying closeness of attention to how deletions are managed and what the metadiscursive culture is like, and my opinion, fairly strongly-held at this point, is that raising the visibility of moderative sausage-making by e.g. automatically and explicitly noting every deletion... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:54 AM on May 3, 2010

Do you know for a fact that a deleted comment notation would result in more problems?

We know very little for a fact. I can't even think offhand of how to test for this? Have a notation for a week and see how ugly MeTa gets?

We know for a fact that when we drop in the "comment deleted, take this to MetaTalk" notes people often take it to MeTa or email us about it. Happened to me just this morning in fact. However,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:48 AM on May 3, 2010

If one of my comments isn't there, was it deleted on purpose, or did it never get posted for some reason? I don't know.

Really though, invisible moderation just seems kind of creepy.

It's always okay to ask us if you're wondering about your own comment. We're aware that this is a less-than-perfect solution but we're equally pretty convinced that a perfect solution does not actually exist.

MeTa is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:19 AM on May 3, 2010

Really though, invisible moderation just seems kind of creepy. You say you don't want to edit comments, because it would make it seem like the person said something they didn't (which I totally agree with). But this is very close: you're making it seem like the person said nothing at all, when really they just said something which wasn't appropriate for the site.

And if that person really wants to talk about the thing they said, they can bring it up in... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:18 AM on May 3, 2010

So what you're saying is I should write a Greasemonkey script that figures out where the deleted comments are and replaces them with Markov stuff all attributed to whichever username I most detest that day.

Heh. Note one thing not made clear in that previous comment about detectability: you can conceivably locate the comment id of a deleted comment, but can't tell which thread it came from. So they wouldn't have context, either. It'd just be a bunch... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:16 AM on May 3, 2010

We prefer the occasional situational friction of these orphaned backreferences (which don't result from every deletion; most deletions don't even hit the radar in this way) to the making-every-deletion-visible rubric where it doesn't make a difference whether there's any value in knowing about the deletion: in every single case there it is or there they are, drawing attention.

I feel you on the weird hiccup that comes with these odd moments, but making deletions visible... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:56 AM on May 3, 2010

I think a better solution would have been to delete jokeefe's comment, too. Problem solved.

Probably. At the same time we try to err on the side of the fewest deletions and figure that people can deal with the occasional head scratcher but possibly we figure incorrectly.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:45 AM on May 3, 2010

No, we can't. The whole reason these comments are removed is that they don't belong on the site, period. Email the person who made the comment and ask what they said or email us and we can email you the comment.

Rumple's comment was basically telling another user to shut up, in an exchange that is being discussed in another existing MeTa thread.

if there was a simple {deleted} notation above his name/time... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:37 AM on May 3, 2010

If it's interesting, why not leave it up?

Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, as carsonb says. Usually if it's something older than a few years, well leave it since MeFi is a bigger site, "can't walk in the same river twice" bla bla.

But the reason the rule is there generally is because MeFi's for neat stuff you've seen on the web. If it's already been here, people have seen it. Now there are a lot of people for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:31 PM on May 2, 2010

And yeah, there's always going to be the angle of folks not so much Making Another Post because they've weighed the situation and decided it's merited as Making A Post without knowing that it's not the first recent post on the subject. And sometimes that's an issue (we remove a fair number of things like that) and sometimes it's not really a problem because the new post is worthwhile in any case. Another judgement call thing.

Failure to search (and its trickier cousin,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:16 PM on May 2, 2010

It's fine to politely note that there's a previous/recent related thread, and if you feel like it's a situation where it's functionally a double/repeat post flagging is also a-okay. (I did indeed remove your followup comments (and Rumple's reply to them) because that was moving into the realm of obnoxiousness and should, indeed, have been taken to Metatalk immediately if you needed to talk about it. And, hey, here we are, so okay!)

There's no bright-line rule for when... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:37 PM on May 2, 2010

That is, there is no clear policy on what happens when...

Just to mention, we have almost no clear policies on anything. The idea of having loose guidelines so that things can change when the community changes is more of a feature than a bug.

I think the larger problem is that we've all created something that is very well loved, but it's loved so much that people want it to do things that it wasn't really designed for and/or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:06 AM on May 1, 2010

Not a chance. It's not really the sort of thing we want to put ourselves in the middle of, though an update sidebar isn't a terrible idea.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:08 AM on May 1, 2010

I mentioned this in another thread and my feeling is basically threefold

1. if the thread was a substantial thread in MeFi, then a MeTa update makes sense (and a possible "previously" MeFi post)
2. if the thread was not that substantial, then make a new MeFi post if it's the sort of thing that would make a good MeFi post
3. If it's not the sort of thing that would make a good MeFi post, maybe just skip it

I don't mind the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:00 AM on May 1, 2010

Yeah, Askme is already well past Mefi on post ids, at 152,xxx to the blue's 91,xxx currently. I see comment and post ids all day long every day because of the flag queue, so I'm constantly aware of roughly where we are on each section.

And while we've got the stuff explicitly identified by type (e.g. mefi, askmefi, metatalk_comment), my eyes jump straight to the numbers when I'm checking the queue because I already know which type each flagged item is based on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:42 PM on April 28, 2010

LOL wat

The best part is I assumed that something had happened recently that pissed off some guy, so he's ranting about it now because he's raw about it. But then I saw the first blog post is two years old and two years later he still posts about it.

I don't know if you're the blog's author, harold_dumbacher, or really someone different, but either way this obsession with cortex is unhealthy. I'm not... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Nattie at 6:07 PM on April 28, 2010

Hey team, I'm happy this didn't turn into some sort of tar and feathering, but I have to go eat some salad and I want cortex to be able to finish his dinner so I'm going to close this up. harold_dumbacher I'm not totally sure what's going on with you, but you might want to contact mathowie or consider that you may just be under a set of misunderstandings about how this place works. You can contact me directly if you want to also, though I'm not sure what more have to add. I'll close this up now.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:23 PM on April 28, 2010

He's grouchier than jessamyn.

Oh that's a good one. He's occasionally more curt with people actually on the site than I am, but I assure you I am the grouchy one. If you have messed with the site in some serious fashion and are not banned, you have cortex to thank for that.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:11 PM on April 28, 2010

Ugh. I'm out to dinner so I'm not really in a spot to dig in here. harold, I don't know you from Adam but this honestly feels like your friend metasonix re-upping a two-year-old grudge by proxy and I don't really know what your stake in it is. This reads really weird to me, but at least, this is the right part of the site.

I work here and try to help keep the place in working order, and it's my hangout. I'm sorry if you don't like me, but that's your right. Not liking... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:02 PM on April 28, 2010

Not doing this to be a pain, just want to know why we have this community with virtually no dissenting voices visible.

People really like him. He's a nice guy online and in person. There are plenty of MeTa callouts of him where people complain about things that they think he's done wrong and we talk about that for a while, but really maybe you don't click with him. Check your own tag, there are a ton of people calling him out.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:34 PM on April 28, 2010

done! Today only! in this thread! butts and polka for all!
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:44 AM on April 26, 2010

I do not complain to the moderators on a "regular basis", but in fact I have been asked to contact them more frequently when Artw behaves badly.

This is not a very good characterization of what I've asked you to do, which is not to keep track of Artw's behavior but to try and opt for dropping us a contact mail instead of getting fighty in a thread, something you do too often and which is part of a pattern of problematic behavior around... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:23 PM on April 24, 2010

We've been telling multiple people not to call multiple people that, actually. "Troll" is this stupid, overloaded grenade of a word on the site, that accomplishes nothing other than putting people's shields up and derailing a conversation into an is-he-or-isn't-he thing. People can just make the effort to actually say something like "this aspect of your argument seems contradictory/inconsistent/whatever because..." instead, which will address their objection with a hell of a lot more accuracy... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:37 AM on April 24, 2010

Blazecock Pileon is one of a number of people on the site who can be a real pain in the butt at times despite generally being a pretty good contributor the rest of the time. It's not entirely a fixable problem, unfortunately, but from the mod end we try to talk to folks when there's recurring problems and encourage them to find some way to keep the focus on the good contributions and try to avoid the negative stuff.

I've talked a little to BP about some specific stuff... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:17 PM on April 21, 2010

Injoke or no, I don't remember the amazon camera thing ever being uncontroversial, but it is ancient history at this point. The site has grown up in some ways since then, and I don't think you'll see another "let's raid the etailer!" post fly these days.

And, yes, there are fundamentally worse things in the world than website griefing, but that's a foolish non-starter of an argument. By that standard we ought to shut mefi down and replace it with a single page that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:11 PM on April 24, 2010

And I can see why you wouldn't want people doing it. I'm just don't think that when a single person reacts like that, that it reflects on the site that they saw the link at.

Which was really the only point that I wanted to make, I suppose.

I hear you. And I agree that, in principle, what what member of the site says on the site about what they intend to do elsewhere shouldn't be read as some official statement by the site as a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:39 AM on April 24, 2010

But he might have seen himself on there and got furious about it was my point.

Maybe. Or, more likely just given the raw odds of random mefite showing up on random website, he may have just thought the site was shitty and mean-spirited and gotten furious. Or he might have thought the site was shitty and mean-spirited and decided it be funny to pretend to be angry. All of those are understandable reactions of a sort.

In any... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:00 AM on April 24, 2010

If I were to read something linked here that pissed me off, I'd be pissed off all for myself, not on metafilter's behalf.

And if you went off and made a mess somewhere for yourself and by yourself, I don't have any control over that. Talking up those intentions on metafilter makes it look like something on mefi's behalf, and that's ugly bullshit that we're not okay with. That's the issue.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:51 AM on April 24, 2010

Ugh. I don't know if that was Damn That Television following through or someone elsewhere running with or independently developing the idea, but, yes: not cool. Not something I have any interest in seeing people doing on behalf of metafilter. If you think a website is shitty, let that website be shitty and leave it at that.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:24 AM on April 24, 2010

My take on this was that it was the adherence to group harmony at the expense of individual expression. That is to say, we place a high value on some sort of social cohesiveness and assert that things sort of go kablooey if people start ripping into other posters, so we moderate based on tone somewhat, and much less so on content. This is definitely a choice, not something we think is some sort of Natural Law and I'm aware that this is not how other people would choose to run the same community.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:29 AM on April 24, 2010

Crabby Appleton: “If you're looking for dismissive insults to be outraged about, you might take a look at her telling me I'm welcome to leave.”

EmpressCallipygos: “Crabby, I'm asking yet again, sincerely. I do hope you're not taking my question as a "you're welcome to leave" dismissal, but genuine, sincere, and earnest seeking to understand -- because you give the impression of someone who is very unhappy being... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by koeselitz at 9:42 PM on April 23, 2010

It does remind me a bit of 30 Rock's joke about Tracy Jordan learning every derogatory racial term in every language and from every era and then taking offense to the use of words that, in archaic usage, might have negative racial connotations.

You may be lucky enough to not have it hurled at you somewhat regularly when people are trying to minimize your feelings or beliefs. I think you're right that people on MeFi are more sensitive to it than, say,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:46 PM on April 23, 2010

"hysterical" is not seen as being anti-woman generally

Depends on who you are. It's come up enough times on MeTa/MeFi that using it as a rejoinder against a woman who you think is being exaggeratedly upset about something seems like a pretty gendered insult. It's got the unfortunate double meaning where one aspect is "hey I'm going to use this term that's been used against women to belittle their feelings and opinions for a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:20 PM on April 23, 2010

If you're looking for a mate, I guess it might be a smart thing to do, and it seems to be sanctioned and engaged in by the mods, so whatever.

I assume you're talking about me because all the other mods are married dudes and have been since they were working here. MeFi is just a place where you can meet people, same as the supermarket, same as church, same as the pizza shop. I'm not sure why you have this sneery approach to that. You don't want to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:16 PM on April 23, 2010

do discussions like this also contribute to your overall style of moderation and choice-making in moderation?

Just to "me too" here, I agree with what cortex said. Without these discussions, all we have is the flag queue and the occasional email pointing to community feeligns on a bunch of different things. It's useful for people to speak up and say how they feel.

And also as cortex said, any change that comes is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:38 AM on April 23, 2010

> is really the person whose opinion we want to leave up on the original thread when there's clearly a lot of community dissent to that opinion

God forbid an opinion should be allowed to remain when there's clearly a lot of community dissent to that opinion.
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 9:22 AM on April 23, 2010

Let me know if it works better.

What would work better is if you considered that many people seem to think youre a trollish asshole and if you don't want them to think that you need to worry about substance and not style. If you don't feel like addressing any of that, it's your business but the benefit of the doubt we're giving you can be easily rescinded.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:08 AM on April 23, 2010