MetaFilter

It's a little funny that I read about this here first. Yeah Cory asked me, we sort of know eachother through our various activist circles and are mutual self-promoters of some sort. I've ben messing with their back end today and second-guessing everything that I think might be a good post there which is karmic payback of some sort.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:10 AM on January 24, 2010

Isn't it up to the poster to provide at least some context?

Yep. But some don't and the posts are okay [I'm thinking of tellurian's post from the other day where a lot of people were like "why did you link to this?" but a lot of people seemed to find it interesting and by the time I saw it in the flag queue there was some discussion going]. I guess there's sort of a pluses and minuses sort of thing going on. To oversimplify for a sec....... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:43 AM on January 24, 2010

I have no idea what the internet video thing is a fuzzy line means.

It means that while it's an acknowledged fact that there's nothing like a firm prohibition on posting links to copyrighted stuff, there are general degrees of acceptability there ranging from "here is an obscure, unfindable cultural artifact of unknown copyright status" all the way up to "here's the entirety of a contemporary major motion picture". It means that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:27 PM on January 23, 2010

This is never going to happen.

You can ask us directly and we'll send you a list of everything you've ever had deleted from MetaFilter. That seems like an okay compromise to me.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:49 PM on January 22, 2010

If I don't even notice that one comment out of hundreds or thousands disappeared, how can I correct the behavior?

If it's a stray comment out of hundreds or thousands, it's really not a behavioral problem. And really, that's the norm: almost everybody on the site has very, very few comments deleted.

Folks who are exceptions to that rule generally do hear from us directly when we feel like it is a behavior... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:24 PM on January 22, 2010

Anything that puts a number on behavior is a bad thing, we've found.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:22 PM on January 22, 2010

I'm guest-blogging there next week, by the way, in case anyone wants to get their GRAR on for me early.
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 10:55 AM on January 21, 2010

Bevcause it addresses a really interesting issue about how a band who really built their base on the viral videos they put out wound up getting stuck in this copyright morass and in a weird sticky problem that basically made it impossible for their video to spread the way that is necessary if part of your appeal really has to do with this sort of thing. The post has 82 comments and zero flags. It touches on issues of copyright, technology, pop music, record labels and the shifting relationship... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:23 AM on January 19, 2010

Kind of like marking all the unread stuff in my RSS feed as read...

I think that's an important point to consider. Do we want MeFi to be more like an RSS reader? I personally find the total tracking method of Google Reader kind of stressful, like it's my job to unbold things and if I fall behind I feel bad about it. That could be my personal quirk, but I kind of like the lazy system here despite its inaccuracies because I get a general sense of where... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:30 AM on January 15, 2010

Maybe there are ways we can tweak our current system so it's more accurate. I don't think I've ever laid out exactly how we determine last visit time, so here is more detail for the record:

First, you need to know a little about the idea of sessions. User sessions are managed by ColdFusion, and they're a way for MeFi to uniquely identify you for a block of time on the site as you move from page to page. Here's more info about sessions from the CF 8... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:38 AM on January 15, 2010

We have no accurate way of determining your "last visit" so the system makes a best guess. If you leave the site, shut down your browser, and reopen it again after an hour or so the numbers aren't too bad. If you have the site open all day in the same browser, the numbers are worse.

We've looked into a number of ways to do actual read counts for every comment you've seen or not seen. Every potential system either stores too much data for the number of users we have or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:43 AM on January 15, 2010

Oh hey look at what showed up when I was asleep!

Just like cortex, I feel like a user first [especially in AskMe] and then a mod sort of secondary. I don't think any of us feel that this is "just a job" in any sense, more like we're happy that we've been given the responsibility to help keep the place we love to hang out awesome.

I'm still waking up, so this may be a little disjointed, but my feeling about online stuff generally and MeFi in... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:52 AM on January 14, 2010

Of course, I love the userbase or there'd be no reason to keep the site around. Once in a while a person or two goes off the rails and we still have the steady stream of SEO spammy types coming in and getting kicked out, but otherwise it's great.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:17 PM on January 13, 2010

That's a really big set of questions; the userbase is pretty huge, and nothing ever reduces cleanly to generalities, really.

I know there's some unavoidable aspects of separation with us being mods, but frankly I don't see much of a Metafilter Towers in how I spend time at the site. Maybe more of an Employees Only backroom at the bar we're all hanging out at anyway—I was a user first and am a user still whenever I can manage it—whenever something... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:18 PM on January 13, 2010

We'll also post comments for people who don't want their username associated with a particular comment [or you could have a completely anonymous account just for posting comments you don't want associated with your username. On a few occasions I've dfinitely posted comments from members who wanted to remain anonymous.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:10 AM on January 13, 2010

To get around question limits, yes. But if you are only posting one question a week, I *think* a sock puppet would be perfectly okay for anonymous, embarrassing stuff. Mods, please correct me if I am wrong?

This is correct. It's on the person using the second account for privacy/anonymity purposes to police their own use of the extra account such that they keep firmly to the 7-day-minimum between questions; it's a per-user, not a per-username, limit.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:05 AM on January 13, 2010

cortex, I'm curious, is it common for people to do so? I can imagine they might if they left some crucial bit of information out of a post, but do people also ask you to post thanks or followup comments if their question has been resolved?

We get probably a couple of proxy comment requests via contact mail every week, on average, covering all those possibilities—someone wants to toss a quick addendum on their anony post, or wants to provide some... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:00 PM on January 12, 2010

I have been trying not to dig into the discussion of Metachat and St. Alia's apparently final departure from it last August, but if we're going to keep coming back to it I want to be clear about a couple things.

There's a general expectation, on mefi and metachat both, that folks won't engage in cross-site drama—beefing about some negative mefi interaction on metachat and vice versa, essentially—and that's something both Jessamyn and I have made efforts to support over... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:57 AM on January 11, 2010

I'm pretty much in agreement with the notion that this is more of a problem-for-the-asker type of thing than it is a problem-for-the-site, where problems do arise, and that it seems to be a self-stabilizing situation: the site is not hurt by someone's question being prolix, and though whether the asker is on average hurt in terms of quality or quantity of response is an open and interesting question, it's kind of a tough break for the asker if it is and that's the end of it.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2010

when someone doesn't feel that reminder that they need to keep it actually readable.

This then becomes the "we told you to keep it 'readable' and you didn't and now we're really peeved...!"

In other words, putting a guideline there only gives people a more righteous sense of indignation when someone else doesn't follow the guidelines. We're not going to, in nearly every case, remove an AskMe... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:54 PM on January 10, 2010

pb, I think many of us have had something like this happen in our professional capacity. So we know that horrible sinking feeling when you realize the data is really gone, and there's probably no way to get it all back again, and users are going to have to be told it's gone.

I suspect there are a bunch of us who can really sympathize with you right now, and who are thinking "eh, it happens, life goes on, no big deal," because it's happened to us too.
posted to MetaTalk by FishBike at 6:53 AM on January 9, 2010

Because I've NEVER seen jessamyn respond to alia the way she has repeatedly with Chyme.

To my recollection, I remember three instances where she's come into a thread to tell SAotB to knock it off (though I may be conflating it with konolia). And they haven't exactly been friendly head-patty sorts of "you knock it off you" but more "if you don't shape it up in a hurry you will feel the power of this fully operational banhammer.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by dw at 4:08 PM on January 8, 2010

what you said was that outrage at her negative behavior was more damaging than her behavior.

Collectively, it is. The collective, insufficiently checked reactions to her out of proportion with the text of her actual comments manages to be more disruptive than the comments themselves. I don't know how else to put this. A bunch of obnoxious behavior is more destructive than a little obnoxious behavior, especially insofar as it represents a systemic... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:23 PM on January 8, 2010

howsabout every once in a while jessamyn or you tell HER how tired you are of her, instead of Chyme just because his outrage didn't have a cutesy palin-esque wink and smile to it?

I do. We both do. Often. It makes me angry that you would even imply that we don't.

...when you PUBLICLY shame chyme but not alia

She knows where she stands on the site and she's changed the things we... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:57 PM on January 8, 2010

but howsabout every once in a while jessamyn or you tell HER how tired you are of her, instead of Chyme just because his outrage didn't have a cutesy palin-esque wink and smile to it?

We have. Many times. Publicly and privately. To the point that, again, it's frustrating to the point of making politeness difficult to have it implied or assumed that we've done otherwise.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:51 PM on January 8, 2010

and I fucking hate history digging. hate it hate it hate it. but if you're gonna sit there and say something like the above as though she didn't contribute to the pileons in the first place, and actually claim that her bigotry and willful deception doesn't hurt the site, then fuck it.

That is not my claim. My claim is that the overt collective reaction she receives is, in fact, having a greater negative impact on the site than things she has said... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:47 PM on January 8, 2010

There are maybe 3-5 users who are actually Banned4Lyfe and we don't let them sign up again if we can help it. We'll return their money and ban the account immediately.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:36 PM on January 8, 2010

If it's sock puppetry to load the ballot box in the attempted silencing of a valued member of the site? It is simply not fucking cool. Full stop.

People pulling creepy sockpuppet hijinks in arguments is the sort of thing we watch for and kick ass about. Worrying about it is our jobs as mods, and we're far better equipped to do so than anyone else. And false accusations about that sort of thing suck.

All of which is why, if... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:43 PM on January 8, 2010

zoomorphic: "... the mods are inclined to err on the side of treating everyone's worldview with respect, which is great in about 99% of Metafilter's polyphonic spread. However, St. Alia is one of those dangerous outliers... "

This has never been about treating SAotB's views with respect.

This has always been about which does more damage to the Commons: a pest digging in the garden, or a bunch of angry gardeners... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Joe Beese at 1:28 PM on January 8, 2010

In other words, this...

I sincerely think her views are not only detestable but harmful justifications for violence and disenfranchisement, and I'll keep voicing my outrage about their continued presence on this site just as if we had some racist in our midst ranting about eugenics and evolutionary psychology.

...is a lot less problematic if the voicing of outrage were actually constrained to those contexts where the things... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:26 PM on January 8, 2010

I think that her access to the site is due to the fact that the mods are inclined to err on the side of treating everyone's worldview with respect, which is great in about 99% of Metafilter's polyphonic spread.

It's more that we don't consider worldview to be something we're moderating. I don't expect everybody to have equal respect for everybody else's view of things, and much as I'd like to see people get along reasonably well and not treat on... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:18 PM on January 8, 2010

If bigots are a more valued membership for Metafilter than the other groups, fine.

Oh whatever the fuck, man. I probably agree with you more than St. Alia about just about any social or political issue we could name, and you should in any case know full well what bullshit the implication that the mod staff is on the side of the bigots is.

That people can't or won't get the fuck over their desire to go after St. Alia on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:53 PM on January 7, 2010

But I can't help feeling that your annoyance with OC has made you a little hasty to delete his comments, sometimes (in my opinion) questionably.

My feeling is that people who know OC personally, who know he's a right on guy who would give you the coat off of his back, may not have as much of a "how he is on the site if you don't know him personally" view of him. This is the view that I have and the view that most other people on the site... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:51 PM on January 7, 2010

But the way OC has been treated lately, despite what from my perspective looks like quite a bit of shaping up, has been bothering me over the past few months (it's really the only thing the mods have done that's truly bothered me), so I thought I'd speak up.

The weird irony is that OC and St. Alia are (along with a number of other folks, to be clear) both outliers in common in some ways: they're long-time, high-visibility members who despite I think... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:22 PM on January 7, 2010

Immediate removal to MeTa? Deletion of posts contending with Alia?

What we've been doing over the last year or so is trying to use some judicious notes in-thread [and the occasional deletion] letting people know that if they want to have a fight with just one person, that's not really what MeFi is for. They can take those things to MeTa or they can go to email or elsewhere. That's pretty much in line with what it says under the comment box anyhow,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:27 PM on January 7, 2010

But I do find it bizarre that my parody of that language is viewed as worse than the hateful language itself

It's not worse. It's bad, and you should stop doing it. You're someone who does -- as attested to by repeated statements you've made -- know better. You're expected to act like it. If you see people making "that's gay" comments to mean "that's bad" on the site, use the flag queue to tell us about it. Don't just act out as if that's somehow... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:32 PM on January 7, 2010

I did one more pass since this is now in MetaTalk. We don't have any specific rules about banning people for going after other members of the site but sometimes I feel like we should. There are literally 5-8 people who do this all the time and most people never do it at all.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:24 PM on January 7, 2010

"Thank you for using your PayPal Debit Card for your payment of $242.86 USD to PAIR NETWORKS INC PITTSBURGH PA."

I called Pair.com, talked to billing and the above quote from my email was me making sure Bradlands.com will stay online until Feb. 2011. Pair.com asked if I wanted to become the new account owner of his sites, but I felt uncomfortable with that, but the upside is Pair.com was cool about me renewing all his sites for another year and they are open to working... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2010

Do the mods send a note when something is not approved?

As cortex said, we don't. We will, very rarely, contact someone and this involved some guesswork or fishing in the database and we don't like to do it and we doubt people like it being done. Again with the lists, we might do it because

- your question really does seem like an emergency but there's something keeping it from being approved [last time I saw this, it was a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:01 PM on January 6, 2010

We'd very much rather answer email about why a question wasn't approved than share all the anonyme questions that we delete. We may approve more like 70%, but it's still pretty high. If we don't approve them it's for one of a few short reasons usually

- you need to contact a lawyer/doctor directly and not ask this here
- suicide/revenge questions
- "why is this anonymous?"
- you use AnonyAskMe too much [rare, but it does... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:31 PM on January 6, 2010

Yeah, the nature of the anonymous function is such that, all else aside, having failure happen privately is generally the better way to go.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:28 PM on January 6, 2010

I think you're asking for a more automatic and responsive queue with detailed responses built in and some way to view those.

I would argue the current system works as-is, that we're not robots and we can't often explain how to make things better in a tiny one-line deletion reasons. We post the vast majority of questions sent to the anon queue (maybe in the 80-90% range?) and when we don't we often hear back over email, where it is easy, private, and comfortable to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:12 PM on January 6, 2010

[comments removed - this is not the Cory hate thread you are looking for, go to MetaTalk]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 6:43 PM on January 6, 2010

Sys Rq: “Why is it cortex's job to silence people who are ‘really pissed off at latent homophobia’?”

[I have been avoiding this thread, so I didn't see this response, Sys Rq. And I know you're gone now. And frankly I'd welcome you back just as much as I'd welcome dnab. But I have to say that it's pretty damned hurtful to accuse somebody of that when they clearly have no intention whatsoever to silence or censor anybody. cortex... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by koeselitz at 10:33 PM on January 5, 2010

I think what may have confused you both is that the word "community" probably has warm, fuzzy associations for you.

Well, it's more that it doesn't have explicitly negative associations for us, I think, which I gather is something you don't share with us, and fine, that's your thing. There's a lot of value to this place as a community, in my opinion, but your twice emphasizing the "nice" in your characterization... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:34 PM on January 5, 2010

There is rarely a topic so obscure and yet time-sensitive that waiting until you have the time to make a decent post about it isn't sufficient. Using MeTa as a way to make not-quite-ready MeFi posts for whatever reason isn't a really great use of MetaTalk. Give your topic time, or be okay with your topic not being on MeFi.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:51 AM on January 6, 2010

There's really no facility for or accepted practice of formally handing off "this could be a post" links on the site itself, and I don't really think there should be or needs to be one.

Informally it happens and I think that's fine when it does. Say, someone in a thread mentions something interesting but tangential to an existing thread and someone else runs with it or suggests that someone run with it, and a post is born. Or someone who has something they... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:49 AM on January 6, 2010

1. Was I wrong about how you view things?

Yes. And uncharitable.

2. Is the fact that I disagree with your views sufficient reason for me to go away?

Nope. But enough for me to ask why you continue to want to stay since this sticks in your craw enough to bring it up in snide ways.

3. If I want to stay around for other reasons (that, let's say,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:52 PM on January 5, 2010

I was waiting for that.

You know what, if you want to take the position of telling sympathetic moderators to go screw for daring to suggest you not act like a jerk, you can do that, but don't try to dress it up as some sort of bucking of systemic oppression or whatever the fuck. It's just you reserving the right to act like a jerk on the basis being upset about something. Asking people not to act like a jerk is part of my job here, even if I more or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:05 PM on January 4, 2010

we're mostly interested in what a dozen or more mefites think is bad.

There ya go. The Mods only love us in aggregate. :(
posted to MetaTalk by Atreides at 8:52 AM on December 31, 2009