MetaFilter

I'm not really trying to change opinions. I'm trying to make MeFi more of a place where sexism is discouraged and eventually just not acceptable. It might help to change opinions as part of the road to get there, but changing opinions is actually no longer my goal and hasn't been for ages. Changing the atmosphere is. Opinions may precede the change of atmosphere or may follow - hard to say. Some men you just cain't reach. Others are already listening, thinking, and leading... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Miko at 2:43 PM on August 20, 2012

If you go back and give this thread a cold reread, it's pretty easy to trace what happened. The question was raised "has this place gone too girlzone?" When a handful of women and men responded "not really, no" several comments popped up which asserted that yes, women here bear "hostility to men" and are looking to blame men for their problems and characterize men as "evil sexist bastards," based on scattered comments from posting histories here and there.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Miko at 9:05 PM on August 19, 2012

That was the point I made to start with. It's maybe not the point you assumed I made, or you want me to have made, but it's the point I made

Well, no. It may have been the point you were trying to make, but it's pretty clear that it's not the point that came across.

This is a big part of the larger topic, really. Scalzi put it well the other day - you don't get to decide what people think of you, how they... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by restless_nomad at 11:35 AM on August 19, 2012

That kind of hyperbole is really damaging to the conversation since it specifically steps all over the nuance many people are going to great lengths to provide.
posted to MetaTalk by restless_nomad at 11:15 AM on August 19, 2012

Let's be super clear: no one gets banned because someone says in a thread they should be banned, and saying people should be banned in conversations usually doesn't really help anything at all. It's fine to talk about why you think some given kind of or example of behavior is problematic, etc, but let's leave it there.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:55 AM on August 15, 2012

How the hell did that even happen? That user had a total contribution of 1 comment anywhere on the site before their post.

We dropped the pre-post comment requirement to one comment a while back to see what would happen, mostly in response to the fact that we (a) were not seeing dumb spammers particularly stymied by the comment requirement and (b) were seeing good-faith users who were only active on Ask previously being confused by why they couldn't... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:32 AM on August 15, 2012

The weirdest thing about this is that Anil invited me and the ex-Blogger people into a conversation and I knew it was using some sort of beta software of some kind, but I had no idea any of it would become public or that what we were doing was like a test case for the company. It was all password-protected at the time, but eventually I figured out that Ev invested in it or something. It's fine and I like how it turned out, but I probably would have been more thoughtful if I knew it was going to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:44 PM on August 13, 2012

is there anything those of us with a vested interest could do to help smooth its implementation?

Actually I think the "Will you folks who don't necessarily agree with this idea promise not to grief about it?" pact has been really helpful. We'd like to implement this. One of the things that has gotten in our way is feeling like the culture here can sometimes be resistant to change in ways that are problematic, people who just can't or won't... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:30 PM on August 8, 2012

With a bit of initial mod support, I think mefi would adapt rapidly and further develop conventions for dealing with edits ethically.

We are supportive. We like this idea. We'd like to do it. However it's clear that if we do this there will be some users who hate it and who may make their hatred of it into an ongoing problem, so we have to think about change management in that way in addition to how to do this right. And some people are going to be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:31 PM on August 8, 2012

If it's within the user's most recent 3200 tweets, you can locate it in the timeline and then read the next and previous entries.

I don't know of any web services that do this automatically, but if you're comfortable with a scripting language (like Python), you could grab all of the user's available tweets and find the ones you want.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by morninj at 8:51 AM on July 29, 2012

Well, a couple things:

- The more inside text is part of the content of the post itself and gets syndicated just like the above-the-fold bit. So for the great big pile of people and blogs that get Mefi content via RSS, "lol, clusterfuck" is part of the package. Not really okay.

- Dropping some editorial comment immediately into a thread as the first comment, while less strictly problematic because the above doesn't apply, is still... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:10 PM on July 17, 2012

I know MeTa threads aren't supposed to serve as proxies for deleted posts, but

I am always confused when people type stuff like this and then continue typing afterward.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:41 PM on July 17, 2012

I have seen deletion reasons that amounts to "this has picked up a bunch of flags and looks like it might be trouble, I'm going to delete it because I don't wan't the effort."

No, you haven't. If you hear it that way inside your own head that says more about your own personal filter than ours.

If you have an actual legitimate concern with how the site works or even with specific moderator actions that we have taken... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:00 PM on July 16, 2012

It would be like our own little "bad side of town."

It's called the rest of the internet. We have no interest in having anything on the site that isn't moderated for various king-of-the-shitpile reasons. There's a place on craigslist where deleted threads go and it's become sort of contentious because stuff that was deleted for "this needs to be deleted" reasons [outing users' personal information, death threats, etc] winds up... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:46 PM on July 16, 2012

Olympics stuff has much less of a propensity to turn people into argumentative assholes though we have a few suggestions for ways to be a decent MeFite. These are all etiquette suggestions, not mod-given rules for things.

- Don't place results spoilers above the fold in Olympic posts that are roughly when the results come in because people watch them time-delayed. Don't be cutesy about what your post is about so people can know if there's a likely spoiler... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:09 PM on July 16, 2012

I just thought somebody for the hell of it would want to do this.

Which I totally get, but there's lots of stuff somebody might for the hell of it want to do that don't really fit the intended use of Ask Metafilter. We're generally not okay with stuff that's less "help me with this problem" and more "do this task for me".

So for example, trying to figure out what a snippet of an familiar language says or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:12 AM on July 13, 2012

There are maybe a few more people I can think of who would also appear to be That Guy if they posted this thread with those tags, but generally yeah someone else could do it and then we'll hope that everyone treats each other decently and I shall start drinking early.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:17 PM on July 11, 2012

Why would anyone care who posted a thread that itself was not delete worthy?

Because this is no one's personal blog, and neither axe-grindy posting/commenting on a pet topic nor the (generally pretty negative) cult-of-personality dynamics that come from that kind of hobby horse behavior improve this place at all. There are lots of personal venues where someone can have as much of a subject-specific outlet as they need, but Metafilter is by design not... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:02 PM on July 11, 2012

And what is the virtue of running and hiding from hot button issues?

We are not a hot button news blog. Increasing amounts of "Here is a new contentious thing about the US elections!" posts are problematic here since the site is lightly moderated and as international as we can make it. There is a difference between running and hiding and stuff just being less of the core purpose of the place. It's clear that you have a difference of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:53 PM on July 11, 2012

I think the high heels question is a legitimate one, but the framing and the timing were bad.

This is really where we are on it, too. If laconic s. wants to reframe a little and give it another go next week out of the weird dynamic where it first showed up, I think that'd be totally fine, but the way it originally went down was problematic above and beyond just the question of whether their was an answerable query at the nut of the thing. It's hard... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:35 AM on July 9, 2012

ferdinand.bardamu: " I said "fuck you" and got deleted. "

Excellent! The flagging system works!

The comment was rude and clueless. It wasn't hate speech. Your comment was noise, and an attack on another member. It is understandable that it was deleted.
posted to MetaTalk by zarq at 2:59 PM on July 2, 2012

Seems my reply was an entirely appropriate reaction.

It wasn't. Use the range of your vocabulary to discuss the topic with the other commenters, or flag their comments and/or email us if you feel that there is some sort of hate speech situation that you think we need to deal with. Otherwise we have a few lines that we require people not cross and "fuck you" responses are one of them. Usually it's an instant night-off but we've been relaxing that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:48 PM on July 2, 2012

Oh man, I slept terribly, and I was gonna blame the (granted, mild by national standards) heat and humidity, and the random firecrackers and the neighbor playing dance music at two in the morning and the sudden rain and the random sirens, but I think maybe I'll pin it on the leap second.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:02 AM on July 1, 2012

I am not a mod, but I would guess they would agree that they don't spend a significant amount of their time policing posts of this variety.

We don't see a ton of stuff that could be classified as porn at all, and I can't recall, in the year+ I've been working, having to deal with something that was porn without any sort of additional level of interest (whether artistry, or in the context of a post about an unusual kink, or whatnot.) I am not anti-porn... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by restless_nomad at 1:17 PM on June 23, 2012

I just don't see how that's best of the web.

Which is fine, and there are people who will agree with you and people who will disagree with you on that front. To the extent that we all want our own certain something out of our Metafilter experience, some posts are gonna hit the mark and some aren't, and that's pretty much life on the front page when a large, heterogeneous group collaborates informally to create a mix of content.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:04 PM on June 23, 2012

Only one out of the four favorites he linked to was of "very sexy" women, and there was ample warning that they were nude. I don't think there was anything wrong at all
posted to MetaTalk by Fig at 7:53 AM on June 23, 2012

Add to this that the photos were well-marked before the fact so that users who didn't want to click through and look at the last set which was purely nudie shots didn't have to. Folks are certainly welcome to their own opinions, what we ask generally is that people be clear so that if there are things behind links that people might find problematic they can choose to avoid them. This post did that. It also received no flags besides yours including in the comments [which somewhat indicates that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:43 AM on June 23, 2012

I thought the general post was to theseamericans.com which has a bunch of photos racy and non-racy [but definitely some front page NSFW] and gman pulled out his favorites one of which was a bunch of vintage nudes. I saw nothing problematic at all about the post. If the post was just "Hey here are some naked ladies!" I would agree with you. This was not that post.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:38 AM on June 23, 2012

Something may have happened, where he can't respond quickly. It does happen. The post is going to be open for a whole month, and he has plenty of time to respond.


What happens a lot--and not really reading anything into nickrussell's non-commenting--is that people post a MeTa thread when they are 1) annoyed and/or 2) on their way to work/school/the subarctic/an airplane and can't reply. While the "something came up and I was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:20 PM on June 21, 2012

> I agree with Greg Nog and presumably the OP that editing text size is absolutely editing for content.

I find this a completely bizarre point of view; it seems to extend the meaning of "content" to cover anything and everything.

I also find it bizarre that nickrussell has not deigned to explain what the oh-so-important "reason" was after repeated requests. And, for that matter, that he felt the need to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 11:42 AM on June 21, 2012

We never edit things except when we edit things.

We never edit things except for rare cases that have been spelled out in the FAQ for years.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:17 AM on June 21, 2012

I can't say I really care for the continuing mod mission creep around here.

You should probably make your own MeTa post about that, then. Unless your argument is that axing a small tag that seemed to be an error is in some ways overstepping the boundaries of what we usually do. I understand where people are coming from where some people feel more and less strongly that formatting is part of a post's essential content, but we do pop in and fix things... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:12 AM on June 21, 2012

entropicamericana: If only there were a way for people with less than optimal vision to increase the text size in their browser.

I can't say I really care for the continuing mod mission creep around here.

How is it mission creep? Someone flagged the comment as a HTML/display error. Jessamyn followed up the flag, said "yup, sure looks like that to me" (because honestly, eighteen paragraphs of tiny text looks more... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Scientist at 10:02 AM on June 21, 2012

Also, what are the arguments for and against removing small from the list of acceptable html?

Primary argument for would be no more small-tag-related headaches. Primary argument against is that used sparingly and with discretion the headaches are already pretty few and far between and people seem to enjoy the extra bit of expressiveness. We don't have any plans to remove it at this point, but folks need to keep in mind that overuse of it is likely to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:38 AM on June 21, 2012

Giant blocks of text in small font are difficult for people to read and there have been complaints about them previously in MeTa. Usually people employ small text in AskMe when they are making some sort of off-topic aside in the hopes, I guess, that their off-topic answers won't be deleted. Your comment was flagged as an HTML error and I went in and thought it looked like an HTML error and fixed it. If you're using and HTML tag in some sort of "no one else on this website uses this tag this... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:10 AM on June 21, 2012

Giant swaths of small text are hard for many people to read. Consider conveying whatever the "this is in small tags" angle is explicitly rather than paralinguistically if it is important, and keep in mind that not everyone is going to understand small tags to convey the same meaning in any case.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:08 AM on June 21, 2012

There is nothing wrong with flagging. All flagging does is brings something to mod attention. We're fine at ignoring flags that don't seem to make sense and we rarely even look to see who flagged something. There are a small minority of people here who would prefer that MetaFilter was less moderated than it is who will denigrate flagging, but they are the distinct minority and include no one on the mod team.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:16 PM on June 19, 2012

I guess I just don't get it when the majority of women (on any website whatsoever) all agree that yes, they get sexually harassed all the fucking time, certain men can still be all, "No, you don't" or whatever about it.

I think about this a lot. I agree with the people above that it's not very many people, at least here on MetaFilter, but they are often very vocal and very defensive. And conversation can stop while people argue with them which is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:16 AM on June 20, 2012

For what it's worth, I was up for about four hours with some jet lag, enjoying the USA midday emails/tweets when the outside connection seemed to die (but I still had 5 bars of wifi). I was curious what was wrong and remembered I had a network/port scanner (iNet) on my phone so I ran it for the hell of it, found the wifi router on a weird IP and saw the port 80 open.

I loaded up the IP in mobile safari thinking it might show the status of the outside connection and it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:34 AM on June 18, 2012

I don't understand why all selflinks are always such an unquestioned "bad thing" all the time.

Technically mathowie could make a call along the lines of "this self-link is so great I'll let it stand" which maybe has happened in the past when the site was smaller but couldn't really happen now. We've explained it before a little but the point I want to make super clear is that we like having a hard and fast rule specifically so... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:59 PM on June 17, 2012

As a relatively new contributor to this site (but a lurker for a while), I don't understand why all selflinks are always such an unquestioned "bad thing" all the time.

We have the bright-line rule about self-links and friend-/company-/client-links because they are frequently seriously problematic (because it's marketing or self-promotional, or because the poster has an inappropriate degree of investment in it, or because they don't have sufficient... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:27 PM on June 17, 2012

Even if it doesn't bother the mods to remove it, it can sting a bit for the poster, particularly when they (so far as they know) do everything right.

But that's true for any number of other "it might get through the cracks" situations with content rehosted on the same domain at a different url or under a different url presentation format or hosted at a different domain. The kinds of non-youtube cases where a poster won't be helped by the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:33 AM on June 13, 2012

hincandenza, if you make one of the first comments in a thread, and your comment is just "this is dumb" (or similar)... don't think of its removal as a deletion meant to silence you, think of it as an explicit invitation to write more and say exactly what you think is dumb about the linked material.
posted to MetaTalk by taz at 10:06 PM on June 12, 2012

You know cortex got a haircut, right? taz is now the longest-haired mod.

And yeah we've been thinking a little about the "post a thread" process for both AskMe and Meta. I'd love to have some sort of checkbox that says

[ ] I am aware that emailing the mods will result in a speedy and non-judgmental response. The same may not be true for Metatalk.

posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:12 PM on June 11, 2012

Christ on a cracker, it's never a good thing when you see a website *you* run called out on Metatalk for stealing content. There's a Seppuku level of shame falling over me at the moment.

Hey everyone -- Dan Koch here. The Reckoner is mine. And the fault is therefore mine -- I didn't post that question on the site, but I do approve every question, and I approved that one despite it seeming pretty fishy and familiar from something I'd seen on AskMefi. Turns out that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by workingdankoch at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2012

I honestly think that there needs to be some sort of require challenge put into place in MeTa in order to post a question/complaint about a deletion. The frequency of this is, to me, getting absolutely ridiculous (and I don't mean that as a specific callout of anigbrowl; this is genuinely an observation about the general trend).
posted to MetaTalk by scody at 11:33 AM on June 8, 2012

> potentially a Twilight-Zone sort of careful-what-you-wish-for experience

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!

Narrator: [opening narration] Witness if you will a community. This community is made not of buildings, streets, and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 8:06 AM on June 8, 2012

It feels a bit like the Quebec government's overly heavy-handed response to the student protesters.

Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted to have a real conversation about this.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:50 PM on June 6, 2012

For the record: here was your deleted post.

then is there truly a shortage of intelligent, reasonable people who are willing to volunteer as moderators/discussion monitors?

You're aware that we are paid moderators with benefits and stuff right? We're not planning to hire volunteer mods. We have a lot of people who help us out in the flagging department and this seems to be a pretty good balance but honestly, part of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:24 PM on June 6, 2012

if the mods would feel comfortable being more aggressive with the moderation in those questions?

We have been babysitting that thread most of the day. We've deleted a fair amount of comments. There has been a fair amount of flagging.

We've been talking on the back end about how those sorts of threads could go better where the solution can't be "Everyone on the site behave differently." At some level there are... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:49 PM on June 6, 2012