MetaFilter

Anyway, I'm not feeling like this is going anywhere good so far, so I'm gonna go ahead and close this monster down. I hate to kill some good faith slivers of discussion in here, but this isn't seeming like a useful thread in which to have them in any case.

peter, I'd really recommend you put some time into figuring out what it is you want out of mefi and what you're willing to do to try and get it, because you seem to be pretty consistently unhappy with how the site... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:55 AM on November 11, 2009

Cortex should pick a favorite czar so that we have a cheap and easy target to get angry at and defame.

And I could pick someone I secretly disliked, but not let on; and they'd be all like, "wow, sir, yes, I'd be honored to serve my website" all earnest-like, and there'd be a nice big metatalk thread with balloons and champagne, and they'd think, by god, this is it. This is what I was put on this earth to accomplish.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 5:04 PM on November 2, 2009

I know that in the past I've favorited things that I agreed with as a way to communicate my belief/opinion without opening myself up in particularly contentious threads to be directly attacked/confronted/criticized for that belief. Knowing (transparently) how many other people agreed with me helped make the community feel more safe.

This is a description of an echo chamber, not what we want MetaFilter to be, right?
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:50 AM on November 1, 2009

The thing that resonates with me in this entire discussion is majick's remark that comment voting systems assume the value of all comments starts at worthless, or zero, and people have to vote things up to be seen.

If we roll back the clocks a few years to MetaFilter before favorites were added, every comment was considered worthwhile and we would occasionally highlight the best on the sidebar or in metatalk. Favorites were added to both help people track things they... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:30 AM on November 1, 2009

I'm glad this is just a trial balloon; I expect to dislike it, but I also expect the results to support the moderators' (and my) belief that favorites don't negatively affect the site, so I'm guessing after November it will go away and we can go back to complaining about memes and demanding ponies.
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 1:14 PM on October 31, 2009

I'd be curious to hear brainstorms that'd have a relatively high level of gain vs. the complexity of implementing them, but building a content search that'd be anywhere near as good as a poster searching thoroughly before posting would be I think tremendously difficult.

This seems like basically a very good example of a case where searching before posting kind of is the only non-complicated solution to the problem, and in theory it's already in place,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:42 AM on October 31, 2009

I saw this at first glance and thought "oh man, kill it" too. Rereading it now, I can see the appeal of the answerable-science core of the thing even if the dressing is kind of silly. We tend to be pretty on-the-fence about these when they brush up against answerability.

It seems like people are more down with this one than Jessamyn or I were really thinking, though. Having chatted with her about it, and in the spirit of focusing on the answerability of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:40 PM on October 26, 2009

a certain worldview that I found difficult to leave totally unchallenged.

Then a personal email is the right way to address that if you can't answer the questions without being sarcastic [i.e. unhelpful]. I'm aware that you're not asking me personally, but we want people to feel free to ask questions, even ones they might feel are stupid, without people getting all judgmental on their asses. We have moderate success through aggressive moderation, but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:53 PM on October 25, 2009

Matt: Is your objection more to the source of the post or to the conversation that ensued? I know people want to talk about the election; it's happening at water cooler's across the nation.

We went through this six months ago when Spiderman was released, half of the membership here thought a link to the spiderman movie site was just an excuse to talk about the movie for a couple hundred comments, others thought there was something useful. I was sorta... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:20 AM on November 6, 2002

I was out late and I think I'm the first to get up today. copypasting the original "someone should have been banned for this" post is really not an okay way to go about this.

This is, again, a judgment call and I would have been much happier not having to make it this morning on this topic, considering these circumstances.

That said, some of the mod actions we do aren't just for today but they're also for future "hey you allowed it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:08 AM on October 25, 2009

We're happy to go look at anything. On the more heavily moderated parts of the site, like AskMe, we'll check out every flag. On MeFi we'll check out flags when they start to cluster [i.e. when we see a post or comment that has a few flags, or more]. MeTa flags we don't check out unless there are a lot of them; this part of the site is the most lightly moderated.

Though to be clear, that's more of a "when we're under any time pressure" thing.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:11 AM on October 23, 2009

Flagging is basically when you see something and say "Hmm a mod should probably look at this" This can be when one of a few things happens

- a comment is broken in some way [HTML is busted, broken link]
- a comment is fantastic and you think it should be on the sidebar
- a comment breaks one of the site rules [this is section specific a little bit] in a way that you think might require mod action [a note to the poster, deletion, time out... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:16 AM on October 23, 2009

I give presentations sometimes on collaborative information systems and mention places like AskMe, Yahoo Answers and places where people work together to arrive at some sort of consensual truth. There are not many Twitter experiments that I've seen that have really taken off. Part of this seems to be because the 140 char. limit makes asking any questions that need collaboration a little tough -- there's only so many retweets you can fit in -- and part seems to be that it's often not the best... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 6:58 AM on October 23, 2009 marked best answer

My take, as someone who is a little maladjusted to snark and doesn't find as much of it funny as my peers seem to, is that sort of thread is now the exception rather than the rule.

I didn't like it much but it really wasn't flagged much and people there seemed to like it. I don't have to like all the threads here, obviously. The weird thing about Ron Paul [as opposed to say, obese people and/or furries and/or many other LOLGROUP people] is that he was such a weird... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:44 AM on October 22, 2009

One of the reasons Metafilter functions so well, in addition to the moderation, the clear guidelines, the transparency, etc., is that Metafilter is not filled with a bunch of idiots.

...and to pick up on this very important point, I've always felt that one of the biggest reasons it's not filled with idiots is that it's an all text, discussion-driven website. You have to be able to read and write at a fairly high percentile level... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Miko at 8:01 PM on October 20, 2009

Ignore them. It's the only means of disarming them. Your response is what they crave. It arms them to pay them any attention.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by fourcheesemac at 4:12 PM on October 18, 2009 marked best answer

I don't know, it was the stupid news of the day on every news organization, but it was also kind of insane on first read, right? I mean, it's one of those "rare & crazy enough that it deserves mention" stories when something really bizarre happens.

In hindsight, it was poorly sourced and ended up being untrue, but I could see why someone might post it since it sounded so fantastic.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:09 PM on October 15, 2009

Shetterly didn't get a great hand up, but he should have stepped away from the meef earlier (e.g. when he said he was going to).

Dude had such a habit of "stepping away now...okay I'm back but now I'm stepping away...okay I'm back!" that it was parodied and self-parodied back when he was a regular on BoingBoing instead of over here (the Violet Blue thing was the transition point). Another one of those long-running and kind of tiring... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:29 AM on October 10, 2009

Well, if one holds certain opinions here, commenting on certain threads is like chumming for sharks. It's pretty disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Presentation matters a great deal as far as that goes. There are people who do a good job, and people who do a not-so-good job, of broaching unconventional or less-popular lines of reasoning on the site. The folks who consistently do a good job generally get along famously. To pretend or to imply by... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:02 PM on October 9, 2009

You show me an equally intelligent "conservative" site and I will stand corrected. Such a site does not exist because there is no market for it among the stupid.

This shit honestly makes me angry. It is exactly the kind of unnuanced, balls-to-the-wall aggressive partitioning of people into the Us and the Wrong categories that makes it that much harder to have civil, productive conversations with people who don't absolutely... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:11 AM on October 11, 2009

"... If you eat continue eating pie, the terrorists have won."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:20 AM on October 11

Slow down, there, BB. You're imitating foamin' at your keyboard, again.

Down South, we have somewhat different values of community than folks up North do. We set out rockin' chairs on our front porches, and put our crazy relatives out there, a couple hours a day, so's everybody passin' by... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by paulsc at 10:34 PM on October 10, 2009

You must be an absolute basket case when you step away from the keyboard and into the real world.

Some people feel that MeFi is a community and that we have certain responsibilities towards one another. Considering your background, I'm appalled at the amount of nasty you can dish out here sometimes.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:02 AM on October 9, 2009

I'm just curious about people who say "I would never date a black woman, and that's just how I am, and how dare anybody question it!"

Why can't it be questioned? I think there's a lot of knee-jerk, pre-emptive, "I'm not racist" responses going on, and I think they are making it very difficult to have this discussion. Actually, I don't think that's the case -- comments of the sort as "I have never dated a black woman, and I am not racist" and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Astro Zombie at 11:02 AM on October 8, 2009

We have a problem here in that people complain in threads to degrees that fuck up threads. They have a few possible avenues that are okay... taking stuff to email, taking stuff to Meta, getting over it. Usually I'm okay with anyone taking anything to MeTa as long as they can be reasonable about it and sort of show up with an open mind, more or less. Good MeTa threads are usually along the lines of "hey this thing has been bothering me, is it bothering anyone else? If so what do we need to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:25 AM on October 6, 2009

"It is the site's opinion that if you consider making a general good faith effort not to offend people with your words somehow onerous, you may not be happy here. I'll expand on this if people find it necessary."

I would also like people to make a good faith effort not to be offended.
posted to MetaTalk by klangklangston at 10:26 AM on September 29, 2009

Was this shitty attitude necessary?

"Don't be an asshole" is one of the barebones sitewide guidelines. I was trying to restate it in a way that was even more clear without sounding threatening or nasty.

People use MeTa less than maybe they should sometimes. They have concerns about the site or have feature suggestions or are having a problem with another user and instead of going to MeTa, they do nothing, other than... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:34 AM on September 29, 2009

Wondering what kind of data is still sleeping under the floor. (bru)

Despite its zippy motion sensor lights that blink on and off to distract my already absent-minded attention and despite its other modern accoutrements the Flatiron Building has acquired over the years, you can still tell that this is an old building, at least by the standards of the ever-changing city. First, there's the old mail chute by the elevators (a relic from the days when... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by ocherdraco at 6:16 PM on September 21, 2009

Not really anywhere for this to go what with the account closure, so I'm going to go ahead and close this up.

jfrancis, if this is feeling like not such a big deal to you a little ways down the road, you know you're welcome to drop us a line and reactivate your account. This wasn't really a good way to attack the problem, but I know everybody has a bad day now and then so don't sweat it and talk to us later when you've cooled down if you like.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:14 AM on September 16, 2009

I've never advertised MetaFilter anywhere online, and every accountant I've had always reminded that me most every business spends something on advertising. I kept that in mind as I continued not spending any money trying to convince people to use MeFi.

A couple years ago, Jesse was asking for money on his shows every week and I must say it started to sound like the situation was veering towards desperation, like now that he was out of college and trying to do his radio... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:11 PM on September 13, 2009

Yeah I don't see jjg's contributions as totally germane, but I guess it speaks the the reason we have the guidelines in the first place. Back in the hippie days when mathowie knew everyone (before my time really) people just did whatever and if something wasn't cool or seemed to be screwing around matt could talk to them because hey, it was Matt's site. Over time the site expended to include friends of friends, other web dork people, random people who heard about it from those people and so on.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:29 PM on September 10, 2009

Why does "what's your favorite song" get a pass when "what's your favorite scientist" (for instance) not? People compile all these things.

Honestly? Because we really can't do much to stop it and people ask these questions All The Time. If I ran this place like a dictator, I'd say "no more mixtape questions!" I'd also say "no more 'what should I name my _______ ?" questions. But, we established the boundaries... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:54 PM on September 10, 2009

A lot of our oldest and most famous questions have been slightly chatty. Stuff like "Have you ever found porn in the woods?" seems like polling the audience. One hundred yeses or nos don't seem like they solve any problem. Another was something along the lines of "I'm a new dad and I don't want to screw up. Can you point to a moment in your childhood that you still remember learning a lesson from?" Both were argued that they were chatty, but we could tell they had something... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:57 PM on September 10, 2009

A lot of this has been covered pretty well upthread already, but I think one thing worth emphasizing if we're gonna get all theory-of-mind on spammers is that they're not used to getting shut down. We do an awful lot of fairly attentive house-cleaning around here compared to a great big proportion of the web in general—downright sketchy shill comments, shit I could call out from a hundred yards, manages to live long happy lives on everything from Joe Blogger's comment... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:41 PM on September 10, 2009

It's amazing what a powerful tool recent comments is for catching some of these twits.

We actually have a back end tool call "straggling comments" or something that only lists comments that have been made some longass amount of time after a thread's basically been dormant. We find a lot of weird sneaky spam action in there.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:50 PM on September 10, 2009

Nobody reads the guidelines

Yep. The checkbox was basically so we didn't have to sit through tortuous "I didn't KNOW!!!" emails from people who would then fight with us over the return of their five bucks. I know we all felt ridiculous even having to get to that point, but man is it nice to be able to say "look you affirmatively checked the box. If you didn't read the three sentences, I can't really help you"
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:05 PM on September 10, 2009

Or don't realize there's even a policy.

Before you make your first post, we require that you click off a checkbox agreeing that you just read the giant highlighted paragraph that explains anything you post must not be something you were involved with, or know someone involved with the creation of and that you will be banned and the post deleted if you are lying to us.

I used to feel sorry for people accidentally not reading... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:00 PM on September 10, 2009

It's a hassle really. The information we have available to us that you guys don't see include

- the user's IP address
- the user's PayPal address (and other paypal related stuff if it's included)
- maybe the user's email address

We spend a lot of time in various Google configurations trying to see if there are any hinky matches between the URL, domain or other information of the linked website and the user information.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:33 PM on September 10, 2009

Or is it just that you can't link to something where you're on the masthead?

The basic policy is that your post needs to pretty much pass the "smell test" of not looking like a self-link and this is because we don't want to have to fish around and see just how related you are to the site in question to see if you're SEO/spamming us and/or because you'll be too close to the subject to be able to determine if something is good for MeFi. This... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:48 AM on September 9, 2009

yet the mods (cortex excepted) somehow felt the need to engage in a game of one-upmanship about how little gets deleted.

Well, really:

1. cortex didn't mention numbers because he was keeping his comment as short and civil as he could, which took some rewriting and a lot of restraint giving the insulting, buffoonish signoff at the end of the original post. I would have given a little stats dump myself if I weren't too fucking... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:21 AM on September 8, 2009

Without opening up the SQL query console, consider jessamyn's numbers on total deletions per day of around 30 items (posts/comments combined) across all sites, and consider there are roughly on average about 100 posts per day when you sum everything across front pages, and comments run around 3,000 per day across all sites combined. So we're roughly cutting out the 1% of the worst stuff.

Yeah, pretty much exactly like the internet in China.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:41 PM on September 7, 2009

The deletions here are so regular it's like using the internet from China.

Since midnight PST there have been 34 things deleted.

- Five MeFi posts [you can find them on the deleted thread blog]
- Twelve MeFi comments [most were, if I recall correctly, one big shitty derail]
- Seventeen AskMe comments [mostly random jokey noise]

I'm not sure what your definition of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:51 PM on September 7, 2009

Whatever your personal feeling is about Time or any of the other big publications, this has to be helpful as far as ad revenue goes for MF. More clicks? More ads? How does that work?

Probably a mild boost in traffic for the next couple days. I'll watch the referrer logs tomorrow and Wednesday, try and get a gauge for what happens to traffic. I doubt this will have any practical effect on our ad stuff, but I don't fiddle with that so I guess only Matt... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:20 AM on August 24, 2009

This isn't trolling. Seriously, it's not. Your question was touchy from the get go and you seemed not to be prepared for getting responses from people that diverged from your - touchy - question.

The thing that I see happen a lot, and apologies if your question was not what you were referring to, is that someone who is het up about something asks a question. People respond in various ways the way people do. The question asker, who is already het up, now focuses that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:50 PM on August 23, 2009

Do the mods here have the ability to edit a post rather than delete it, and do they ever do that?

We can edit and our policy is that we pretty much never do for content. We'll fix broken HTML or the occasional typo but anything else we'll only do if the original poster asks us to and even then we're really sparing with it. Once you start messing with people's words it's a big problem and there were a few high profile situations before the policy was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:04 PM on August 21, 2009

you'll be more inclined to leave a marker explaining why.

We usually do, we sometimes don't. There's a balance we have to strike between being as transparent as possible versus spending as much time explaining our moderation as doing it. At the same time, we have a "ask us pretty much anything" policy here so if there are concerns, they can be discussed publicly. I don't feel that we have much to prove in the "we're not like the people... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:36 PM on August 21, 2009

It was a shit comment and I don't know what Mayor Curley was thinking. Mayor, if you're reading: cut that shit out. It's stupid and hurtful and it's not adding a goddam bit of worth to this place, and you need to throw a lid on it.

That said, the whole ensuing out-of-the-gate derail had been excised and the thread had righted itself before this was ever posted, so this feels kind of like picking a scab, especially since no one who didn't see the brief pre-cleanup... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:34 PM on August 16, 2009

Sometimes a little more direct than is necessary, but his bluntness was often an asset in relationship questions.

The ones that stayed were the ones we didn't remove and even they were on the too-blunt side for many people. I don't think I'm being too inside baseball to say that he'd had over 100 comments removed [on a website where most people have zero comments removed and very few have more than a few removed, ever] and was causing a lot of strife... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:13 PM on August 13, 2009

But really, putting a limitation on the aesthetics of natural expression and discourse like that generally seems unnecessary.

With all due respect, you've been here a month. MetaFilter's been around for ten years and even though it is pretty lightly moderated [with the exception of AskMe] we do consider having a "don't be an asshole" guideline to be a pretty minimum-level necessity for a community like this one that is as large as this one.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:57 PM on August 8, 2009

Batgirl was a librarian. Just saying....

As a mod, what was helpful to me in dealing with my own GRAR was realizing that whatever I said, if there was a way to take it the wrong way, there would probably be at least one person and perhaps more, who would take in a way I did not intend. That person was also likely to bring it up in a heated thread and say "well you did THIS back THEN" and I figured that would sort of derail whatever was actually going on. Whether I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:08 PM on August 7, 2009

Cortex, the suggestion about stepping away from the computer helped. And I did, for a while, although something tells me that when certain hot-button issues come up I'm just not going show my face in them, or at least until I can figure out how to post what I want to say, how I want to say it, without coming off as an asshole even to the people who agree with me (coming off as an asshole even to the people who agree with me is a pretty big indication, to me, that something's wrong).... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:42 PM on August 7, 2009