MetaFilter

There was the "I'm not going to answer" comment and a joke about it being mathowie's question, neither of which were remotely useful.

For any given question, the set of possible "answers" that bear deleting is always going to dwarf the set of actually productive answers. It's a product of people here generally being really good about respecting the guidelines that keeps the amount of random jokey/offtopic/metacommentary/combative stuff we have to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:30 AM on February 17, 2010

Did katherineg just flameout? What is even happening here? hnnnggg

I'm honestly not precisely sure what the deal is, but as far as I can figure based in part on the note she left while closing her account, that was not a genuine leaving-and-never-coming-back flameout so much as a jokey temporary departure. I'd like to be able to state that with more absolute certainty and at the same time I kind of want to give her a noogie at the moment for pulling... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:05 PM on February 15, 2010

as far as whether a MeTa thread is necessary every time that happens?

Well from a mod perspective, the one thing it allows us to do is sometimes to delete really insane off-topic shit from the original thread because once the MeTa thread is open we can say "go do this shit there, from this point forward" So I deleted hincandenza's big f-bomb comment. I truly think the guy is haunted and got himself in a little deeper than he was expecting... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:03 PM on February 15, 2010

The full text was: Having a full-time job, a relationship and a few creative hobbies.

Which describes me fairly from 2005 (when I first became really heavily active on the site) through late 2008 (when I stopped having a dayjob). The thing is, mefi was one of my hobbies, and I think that's true in one formulation or another for everybody who spends a lot of time here, regardless of whatever else is going on in their life.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:31 PM on February 15, 2010

I'm miserable at remembering people's names, but for some reason usernames aren't a problem. Broader namespace, I suppose.

When I was traveling around last fall I'd spend every meetup doing this "oh, hey, nice to meet you, but what's your username? Oh, hey!" thing a dozen times because as much as it was nice to shake someone's hand and find out their actual name, (a) I was going to forget it five minutes later no matter how hard I tried... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:04 AM on February 11, 2010

Seems a bit pointless if you think consideration for others is equivalent to book banning.

I'm sorry we seem to have touched a nerve here. As your free-thinking anarchist mod, I'll refer you to the FAQ where we basically say that, from an admin perspective NSFW is for links that lead to NSFW images or loud sounds only.

That fact that people sometimes write NSFW on their sex questions in AskMe has always sort of confused me,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:50 PM on February 9, 2010

Our general answer to this is no. If we think someone is using their AskMe question as an exercise in racy porn writing for no other reason than to be obnoxious [and I think I've seen this happen exactly once outside of the AnonyMe] queue then we may delete it on obnoxiousness grounds, otherwise people who are asking questions can ask pretty much whatever they want, though tucking NSFW language inside if possible seems to make people happier.

Be happy you do not moderate... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:15 PM on February 9, 2010

This has been discussed to death previously. Metafilter is a site for grown-ups and as such uses grown-up language sometimes. It's considerate if posters want to tone down the language for others, but if your job is so sensitive that words on a screen will get you disciplined or fired, you may want to reconsider using Metafilter at work.
posted to MetaTalk by chiababe at 5:12 PM on February 9, 2010

We were talking about the use and non-use and implications of the "NSFW" label a couple weeks ago in reference to the blue, but it applies just as much to the green; here's a comment I made summarizing our position.

The extremely short version is that Metafilter (including AskMe) is not safe for work, even if people generally tend to keep potentially objectionable stuff below the fold.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:12 PM on February 9, 2010

I thought the whole point of "nsfw" was to confine potentially objectionable content to threads so that people could choose to visit or not visit them, not that you choose by visiting or not visiting Metafilter.

It's more like this:

- Metafilter is not "safe for work", in the broad sense of the term. Much of the content is, but not all of it.

- Some of the content broadly understood... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:40 AM on January 21, 2010

Good thing I didn't come looking for help here.

Let me be perfectly clear, closing up this question was not because it might open answerers up to legal charges. We closed it because we have a risk management approach/policy that basically says that questions that ask how to do things that are illegal or avoid legal mechanisms are questions we'd rather people didn't ask here. This is because we don't want to be seen as an outpost for this sort of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:49 PM on February 9, 2010

Yeah, sort of a different-mods-looking-at-different-things cluster with this one, basically my fault for servicing a panicked "this was supposed to be anonymous!" request without really vetting the question itself in the process in any case.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:45 AM on February 9, 2010

We do like to draw a line between "We have a problem with this topic personally" and "We have a problem with this topic being on AskMe"

I'm sure we have blind spots as to our own prejudices, but for the most part things get approved in the AnonyMe queue if they meet the general guidelines, regardless of topic. People may not like the questions for any number of reasons [and there's a discussion going on right now in another MeTa about how people use... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:52 AM on February 9, 2010

This is the sort of anonymous question we would generally not approve. While I can't speak to the "whether someone helping the Anon user is breaking the law" issue, this is a little too "might cause site trouble" to be okayed. What happened here is that someone asked a question non-anon and then had an "oh shit" moment and asked a mod to anonymize it. It didn't go through the normal approval process. I closed it. The person who asked the question is welcome to find... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:27 AM on February 9, 2010

I will say on the raw data end of things, ever since just before the past holiday season, we didn't have too many anon posts, on the order of just a handful a day, but as the holidays approached, we watched it sort of grow by an order of magnitude as people dealt with new family and holiday issues. Since then we've still had a bit of a run on anon posts, maybe 1.5x what they were before the holidays and we've had to meter them out so there isn't always anon posts showing on the page. So you may... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:06 PM on February 8, 2010

It's an interesting point, SeizeTheDay. I see it from a couple different angle (in my decidedly non-business-minded capacity):

- Metafilter pays four people well* by leveraging the ad bucks generated by millions of passersby and owing fundamentally to the long participation here of thousands of users who create content in the process of enjoying their time here. If it takes that many bystanders and direct volunteer participants to get us four people paid, that suggests... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:39 AM on February 6, 2010

Metafilter has the best customer service of any business I've ever known.

I used to do support for Speakeasy way back when. It's really cool to get to work somewhere where you get to do the same sort of helpful stuff, but no one thinks that "getting yelled at by assholes" is part of the job description. This doesn't show up on the site much, but mathowie's always willing to do the tough boss-like work of dealing with some truly unpleasant... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:07 AM on February 7, 2010

As of december 2009, there were around 45,000 users in the database, so 102,000 is a bit high

Sorry, I was just going off user IDs which I see fly by each day. We don't have a count of paid users handy anywhere, but I keep seeing new users pop in with 102k type numbers.

I like to pretend that vacapinta is also a moderator ;)

So do I, but it seemed too complicated to describe a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:20 PM on February 5, 2010

See the opening of signups after MonkeyFilter's success, and now the possibility of TravelFilter after the starting of a travel guide on the Wiki (though this relies on the interview having been conducted after the start of the travel guide).

Sorry, gotta call bullshit on both of those. I have said I was surprised that someone went to the trouble of actually building monkeyfilter when their tagline was something about MeFi's signups being closed, but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:15 PM on February 5, 2010

For some background, I was kind of surprised to see this online as I thought it this was an interview assignment for a class in journalism and how to make money from it online in the future, so the questions were kind of skewed towards that. My pet hobby horse is that there's nothing wrong with building something, having it become big enough to earn some revenue, then sitting tight and maintaining that. I don't think everyone needs to be an entrepreneur that tries to take over the world.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:54 PM on February 5, 2010

I haven't been around long enough to know for sure, but it seems like metafilter's initial design worked out by good luck and guesses not expert design. From there it's evolved to what's going on now. But at about the same time metafilter was starting, so was kuro5hin and fark and livejournal and something awful. So '99 was a pretty fruitful year for starting web communities of different sorts.
posted to MetaTalk by garlic at 8:33 PM on February 4, 2010

My point was that MetaFilter is one of the best communities on the web and that if comments are about community, and not just about traffic, then as a nat'l magazine Harper's would be well-served to emulate the blue, and maybe the green and the gray too.

Is this true? I don't know. I doubt I have time to build it this year.

The thing that always strikes me about MetaFilter is that it's a real editorial success. I've now spent... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by ftrain at 2:32 PM on February 4, 2010

Posting a chatlog between two friends as an interview is ridiculous.

Interesting. I really enjoyed it, I just didn't think of it as a I Ask/You Answer sort of formal thing. It seems appropriate to The Awl which I think is a blog. So... makes sense given the format. The thing that makes this all interesting to me is that, besides the fact that Choire and Paul are both MeFites, that they're friends and so talking informally. Paul's got a certain amount... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:26 PM on February 4, 2010

My feeling about Aardvark is it's really good for quick reference sorts of questions where there's one answer [or a set of answers "BBQ joints in Boston" or something] and you'd like it relatively quickly. I was really turned off by them initially because when I went to SXSW the year they were in beta, they seemed to be doing that classic SXSW thing where they'd show up at other people's panels to ask questions that were thinly veiled promotional pieces for their own site/software.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:38 AM on February 4, 2010

Are LOLRepublican posts within the bounds of good taste?

Not usually, no. Or rather they're within the bounds of good taste but not usually great posts for MetaFilter. Nate's a good guy, but I usually feel like posts like these are some mild way of saying "look at these assholes" and I feel that the people who enjoy that sort of thing already do that sort of thing on other sites. This is not a mod opinion [i.e. this does not form a part of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:51 AM on February 4, 2010

Hey, Winsome Parker Lewis, to avoid writing a whole post before finding out your link's a double, just put all your links in the post box and hit preview. It'll tell you straightaway, and then you can go about building your post knowing your links are clean, or you can move on to a new topic before you write an epic.
posted to MetaTalk by ocherdraco at 8:24 AM on February 3, 2010

I think where we are at this point is that the joke has gone meme on the site and usage is evolving steadily away from where it started. Folks are generalizing and extending their HAMBURGLERY as they see fit, with the strict notion of "post-fix HAMBURGER to a statement to denote that that statement is sarcastic" ceding to the broader conception of "alluding to the word hamburger in some way suggests sarcastic intent" without any formal requirements.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:06 AM on February 2, 2010

what if it points to the possibility that the asker is actually trolling?

If it's just an inconsistency between two questions, bring it up in the thread in a decent "I'm trying to help..." way. If you think the person is truly trolling [i.e. this is backed up by a lot of their comments and/or behavior on the site or something else you know about them] let us know. Any sort of "gotcha!" in an AskMe thread is pretty unwelcome, even... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:39 AM on February 2, 2010

This is sort of being discussed in the other thread, but this is a totally different aspect of what I think is the same question.

Generally it's okay to look up someone else's AskMe questions and mention them. But you need to not be a jerk about it. And it's a pretty fine line. And it sometimes gets messy because people sometimes ask us to anonymize an old question and this sort of cross-linking can mess that up.

So, commenting in some sort of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:05 AM on February 2, 2010

So to give you a specific [made up] example. We get an email that says

"new anonymous question from user cortex, approve it here" with no other info about the question. I don't know about the other mods, but that email goes directly into a folder and I never look at it unless I have a concern.

"here" is a link that goes to the anonyme queue which usually has 2-3 questions in the hopper. Often if we know the user we can... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:01 AM on February 2, 2010

However, it sounds here as if the mods (or, at least, jessamyn) are fairly aware of this stuff as soon as it hits the site and can offer a count of how often it happens.

The event of an anonymous poster outing themself is unusual and notable enough that we tend to hear about it, either from folks worried that the poster might have done so without thinking or in rare sketchier cases from folks worried that something smells.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:30 AM on February 2, 2010

It's fine to have a jokey account and/or an account for just asking/replying to sensitive questions. But running two identities as if there were two separate people is what we'd like to avoid. If we see people doing this [especially replying to their own questions] we'll tell them to knock it off. This may just be a terminology thing. I see a sock puppet as an account that is sort of set up to be another legit-looking account but in a sort of deceptive way. I guess I get my idea of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:26 AM on February 2, 2010

If we see people replying to AnonyMe questions, especially really touchy ones, we'll do a reality check to see if it's actually their question [hard to explain, but it's simple for us to see a list of, say, who has asked an anonyme question in the past week, though much harder to link them to a specific question] and if it's plausible, we'll leave the comment alone.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:13 AM on February 2, 2010

If an anonymous asker wants to out themselves in a question, that's their prerogative and they're never gonna get in trouble for doing so.

If anyone ever pretends to be the asker outing themselves, they are getting banned.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:13 AM on February 2, 2010

I wondered why everyone had flagged that comment.

No generally speaking account sharing is not okay. That said, we know there are a few people who have a family account and we have dropped them a note about it but otherwise it's not a big "you are in trouble" sort of thing. I'll drop that OP a note too. Generally we try to gently enforce the one-account-one-person rule which means

- no account sharing
- if you have a sock... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:45 AM on February 2, 2010

"This is very important. In my state, getting caught smoking a little marijuana is not even a crime, it is a violation (the difference between a crime and a violation is that you cannot go to jail for a crime. Think speeding ticket). Not a big deal. However, manufacture and distribution of the items described in the post are felonies. Meaning, go to prison for years."

Then you should definitely not have a Haiti pot party.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by klangklangston at 9:37 PM on January 31, 2010

The piracy stuff is also another topic that legally we don't care about so much, but have more of the "this is quasi-legal and could cause trouble for the site" And so at some level we've drawn some lines that may seem arbitrary but we can explain them fairly well and they've been pretty consistently applied since the get-go. To restate

- general questions about drugs, usually okay
- questions about how to buy/sell drugs, not okay
-... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:13 PM on January 31, 2010

is seriously criminal in most places.

It's criminal in some places. We don't know where the OP lives. In the US it's getting less criminal all the time. And, at some level, he or she is not asking how to sell weed or how to buy weed [things that are more problematic in more locations] but basically good ways to cook with it. Which is AOK as far as we're concerned. Pot is illegal in some places and not in others.

There's no... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:45 PM on January 31, 2010

The spittle brigade with its mob panties in a bunch. Again.

You have a problem interacting with people on this site without lapsing in to serious jerkishness. It doesn't seem to be getting any better, and we're well and truly sick of having to deal with the fallout of your crappy behavior. You've been given more than enough chances and warning to figure it out, and I'm done trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Find another site to kill time on.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:33 PM on January 28, 2010

I frankly don't know many gay couples that have been together for 9 years.

Sure you do. They're on MetaFilter. What a strange thing to say.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:01 PM on January 28, 2010

We don't have any funny banning options. Banning looks just like the site looks to a guest, except that when you try to log in or comment, you can't. I'd love to see An Overview of Banning, of what other sites do, like the hellban [you can keep commenting, no one sees you] or the sort of banning mathowie used to do way back when, when he'd redirect any requests from your IP address to plastic.com.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:37 AM on January 28, 2010

Someone used overblown rhetoric that was unfair to the other side of the debate.

Someone used one word, "actively", that you interpreted too literally as an excuse to act like an ass at length. There is nothing hard to suss out about the idea of an ectopic preganancy or other severe complication in gestation or fetal development being a health- and life-endangering state for a woman; you are not stupid, you know this, even if you think it's a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 7:25 AM on January 28, 2010

Feel free to continue responding to the survey. If I notice more people using it, I'll post updated results. For what it's worth, if anyone cares for another measure, here are the results from the survey so far, with 72 respondents:

NATION # FRACTION
United States of America 31 0.43
Canada 11 0.15
United Kingdom 7 0.1
Australia 3 0.04
Germany 3 0.04
Mexico 3 0.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Salvor Hardin at 9:10 PM on January 26, 2010

Here are the stats for what people have listed as "Location" in their profiles, from the .kml file. This is the parsed lat/lon coords run through GIS and a Groovy script. Some folks obviously not listing their actual location (why so many Kyrgyzstan?) and the numbers are about an order of magnitude low because not everyone lists a location, but I think it's a pretty accurate overview. Except for Kyrgyzstan (NOT KYRGYZSTAN-IST).

United States: 6201 (77.20%)... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Who_Am_I at 5:31 PM on January 26, 2010

I have no idea how Alexa gets their numbers, but apparently we're huge in Ireland.




posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:52 AM on January 26, 2010

Here you go:



(I wish I could embed the Google Analytics map of the world, you can mouse over every country and get a result for now many visitors came from that specific country)
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:22 AM on January 26, 2010

They're not doing anything wrong per se....

- they ask a time-sensitive question without enough time for it to be approved
- they ask a question which doesn't seem like it should be anonymous and don't include why it's anonymous
- they ask a question that is so clearly "see a doctor/lawyer" that it's not worth approving
- they ask a "sure to be a trainwreck" question that is fairly indistinguishable from... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:11 PM on January 26, 2010

Perhaps the mods could ask the anonymous question-askers to clarify things before the questions are posted?

We really don't know who people are, is the thing. Occasionally I'll get email from someone asking "hey did you not approve my question?" and I don't know which one it is. As the site has gotten larger, the AnonyMe queue has gotten a little onerous. Part of this is, I think, not wanting to approve questions in the middle of the night... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:46 PM on January 26, 2010

I think the biggest problem we've seen with this idea is the de-anonymizing aspect of it. Right now there's no hard and fast link between your info in the database and your anonyme question. As we've said before, we can do some timestamp correlations to figure it out of we needed but there is no link. Doing something like this would create a link and then have a bunch of almost-never-used accounts floating around. I post follow-ups for people maybe a few times a week, more lately as there have... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:05 PM on January 26, 2010

sebastienbailard, relax. Yeah, I'm not a fan of silverlight either, but it sounds like you REALLY don't like it and you use linux and it won't work for you, but the link provided by someone that happens to work on the project (usually, we celebrate when an insider chimes in to help) actually does help the question asker solve their problem and is welcome here.

It's not a Microsoft spammer and the member in question has been around since soon after the site started. It... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:03 PM on January 24, 2010