MetaFilter

I agree it makes for a weird use of MetaTalk, but on the plus side, I think it's great people can apologize to each other and admit mistakes. People grow up, people move on, and people realize they messed things up in the past, but you don't often hear people say they were sorry for previous behavior, so it's good to see that here.

I wonder if it should just be a button in Recent Activity though. :)
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:06 PM on January 28, 2008

I want to understand! What kind of nerd stuff can I look at if I decide to download this 85MB text file?

Imagine a question about when or how often (or rarely) or how much or by whom something on metafilter is done.

Try to frame that question in terms of the specific stats that are available—userid, datestamp, number of favorites, number of comments, etc.

Did you succeed? Okay! Download the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:33 AM on January 22, 2008

I agree it was weird to mention it in the question and comes off as vaguely anti-semitic, so I deleted it. They can try again next week.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:25 PM on January 17, 2008

Seriously, this is some kind of alpha level special forces trolling going on here, every post from your man Phil has the breathless quality of someone jerking off while they complain on the phone to tech support. Who gives a rented fucking shit about any of this nonsense at all? It's drama queenery raised to the MTV level, if you can't fucking come, stop wanking for five minutes and go have a glass of water or something, sweet weeping, limping, muttering, jitterbugging Jesus.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Divine_Wino at 8:22 PM on January 13, 2008

PhilCubeta, I think you are looking for metafilter to be something it is not and something it does not want to be. There is nothing broken here. Mathowie founded this community on a cornerstone of trust and precious few rules. It has worked well for nearly a decade and has a reputation for being one of the smartest communities on the net.

We have and we want minimal rules. We consider this to be self-policing community, one that favors more free speech rather than less,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by madamjujujive at 4:36 PM on January 13, 2008

here are the high points for me:

- Someone anonymously wrote a negative comment about MeFi somewhere else
- Some people here wondered who it was, and tried to figure it out
- Someone sent a not-so-nice email to some innocent person they thought might be the culprit

On the first, I really think it's no big deal and people should really let criticism of a community they take part in go by the wayside. It's quite unfortunate... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:34 PM on January 13, 2008

Is there a culture of bullying on Metafi, is it condoned, does it spill over into raids and witch hunts, and what can or should be done to turn it around?
posted by PhilCubeta at 12:23 PM on January 13

No, no, no, nothing, and nothing. Try being a member for more than a week.
posted to MetaTalk by Optimus Chyme at 12:26 PM on January 13, 2008

Both cortex and I went back and forth with Phil about this issue and the end response from him was that nothing was needed on our end. I missed the Catch follow-up in that monster thread, but at the point where urbanwhaleshark had said that the person on the other site was a MeFite was the point at which I offered to help Phil out. However, I also said that we wouldn't divulge personal or protected member information unless there was something more damning than "someone who we think is from MeFi... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:22 AM on January 13, 2008

I have to wonder how much, if any, moderation by deletion actually occurred in the thread; perhaps I missed something.

I'm not sure if I missed a stray comment deletion by Matt or Jess in the last six days, but the only comment I've removed was a lame softball jab at Holden's appearance some time on probably the 1st. It wasn't vicious so much as just completely ad hom—I'd say there's nastier stuff we've let stand, but nothing more... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:49 AM on January 7, 2008

I wrote Lucy a nice non-anonymous comment on her blog.Ah the irony of the hot-under-the-collar web world.

Hi -- I'm not anonymous, I'm one of the moderators of MetaFilter and I got to spend some of my New Years Eve watching this unfold and making sure it didn't get too crazy. My name is Jessamyn West and I live in Vermont.

Probabably the best place to get an idea of what happened is from the GiveWell blog where Holden explains... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:57 AM on January 1, 2008

It might be nice if you explained that this post is coming just after the deletion of your own AskMe comment and a hefty back and forth with cortex about that deletion.

The reason we don't edit is because we can't rightly say that what is left are your words; going back and forth with commenters over HOW to edit an offensive or otherwise problematic comment requires more time than we generally have. It's true that there is a bit of a hurdle to cross from the commenter's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:32 AM on December 17, 2007

I work at MetaFilter.

I'm here to see Mr. Haughey.
posted to MetaTalk by itchylick at 8:36 AM on December 14, 2007

First, I don't think MeFi's not part of the boom. Web 2.0 means a lot of different things to different people -- to some people it's an eye-rolling buzzword about trying to shoehorn community into the same old sites that flopped during the last bubble. To others, it's a reflection of the fact that the experience of discovering and sharing and connecting online has fundamentally improved over the first generation of web apps.

The upside of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 3:58 PM on December 11, 2007

This is a feature not a bug
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:26 PM on December 11, 2007

What I hate is when I hit the carriage return and the monitor flies to the left with excessive force and the platen gets dislocated. Can the mods fix this?
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 1:05 PM on December 10, 2007

I'm alleged in my own time.
posted to MetaTalk by wendell at 6:56 PM on December 9, 2007

Everyone needs a hug is what I told pb jokingly when he asked "we have stuff under the mefi and ask mefi comment boxes, what should MetaTalk say?" If you read that old thread, it was a discussion of how the phrase ended flamewars on another site. We'll likely remove it shortly if it's annoying, I think it's cute but didn't seriously intend to add it.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:04 PM on December 6, 2007

I do think there needs to be a cut-off somewhere - some point where you say, "this is just too small a thing to worry about." Like everything else in life, it's all about choosing your battles.

Totally agreed. And as I said I think this falls into the "mildly annoying" category more than the "OMG Sexist" category for me personally, but I'm interested to know why people feel otherwise. Also, understanding that part of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:00 PM on December 5, 2007

Disappearing websites aside, why do you think it's not stealing? ... If I take the approach that I'm entitled to your content/services for free and block out your revenue stream, how is that not de facto theft? The content provider is paying to produce and deliver, and you're refusing to balance out the equation...I have a real fundamental problem with this attitude, because it ignores a couple of important points.

Firstly, a website doesn't exist... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Pinback at 2:15 PM on December 5, 2007

                   .

_____/                           \___________  

posted to MetaFilter by popcassady at 1:57 PM on November 30, 2007

Talk of Super Mario Bros. always brings a smile to my face. If it weren’t for those games, my childhood would have been a lot less exciting. I grew up as a carney. My parents were carneys and my grandparents and great-grandparents were carneys. My father was a concessionaire who sold food at fairs all over the U.S. and Canada. He sold popcorn, cotton candy, snow cones, candied apples, funnel cakes, and fiddlesticks to name a few. We lived a very nomadic sort of life, traveling around the country... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by inconsequentialist at 7:54 AM on November 9, 2007

I'm not holding my breath waiting for a nother flag for homophobia, look how long it took for Mefi to get this far. First women's suffrage, then sexual liberation, right?

This was an initial move so that we could actually get going doing something and stop just talking about it. I'm sure it will evolve over time and transphobia and homophobia were other non-acceptable things that came up in the course of that thread and a lot of emails to me and I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:42 AM on November 24, 2007

Just to sum up my current thoughts on this stuff because I think some people mischaracterized my thoughts on it:

- either having a new explicit sexism/racism/bigotry flag or extending the "offensive" tag to include sexism is an easy change and would make moderation easier and more consistent along the lines of sexism on metafilter specficially

- mentions in the guidelines and new user pages sounds like a good idea as well. some ideas... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:33 PM on November 22, 2007

Matt, no one on a slippery slope actually recognizes they're on a slippery slope.

Please. I've been running the site for over 8 years, introducing incremental (and major) changes all along the way and every time we ask the membership to dial something back, the slippery slope arguments come out and I was directly addressing that. If you want to go down a list of changes to the site over the last five years that were met with slippery slope arguments,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:31 PM on November 23, 2007

I just want to add that we're sort of raising a bit of awareness with this in the guidelines, faq, and/or wiki, in addition to the flagging, with the hopes and goal of making the site more welcoming to women by weeding out the hostile jokes and other stuff that can be problematic. I didn't think it was a huge problem before but it comes up often enough (and in the monster-sized thread it's clear is a bigger problem than I thought) that it's worth doing something about and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:41 PM on November 23, 2007

It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the gist. The big thread spawned a lot of interesting discussion including feedback from many women that they feel that the atmosphere here can be hostile or alienating to them. We'd like that not to be the case, as moderators, keeping in mind that this is a site with a lot of people, men and women, and a long (proud?) tradition of snark and ass-grabbery.

I see this personally from time to time but not in a major way... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:35 PM on November 23, 2007

The more we indicate to people that they need to watch what they say lest they offend other members' sensibilities, the more this place is going to be less than it is.

Yeah, because god knows I've got a baker's dozen ass rape jokes just rarin' to go and oh no! what is this? the PC police?! Oh no, my creativity is being shunned! MeFi just won't be the same without my jokes how I would violently act towards Ann Coulter if given the chance!... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:12 PM on November 23, 2007

I am pretty all the time, fuckers.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:28 PM on November 22, 2007

Well my feeling which is just mine is that a few things would help.

1. changing the flag tag to be offensive/sexist/racist

2. elaborating the guidelines in a few important ways
a. determining some sort of general "hey it's not okay to be gratuitously sexist here" loose guideline, in the FAQ while explaining that flag
b. linked to some elaboration on the wiki or someplace.

I sort... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:48 PM on November 22, 2007

Catching up after not having followed closely for a few days. I'd like to thank cortex and jessamyn for following the thread so closely; to express my appreciation to all the great guys who have taken the time to read & participate in the thread, both the "usual suspects" who have long been vocal about supporting women on the site as well as some of you for whom the discussion may have provoked some discomfort, but who stuck with it - I'm looking at you, tkchrist, Blandon Blatcher,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by madamjujujive at 11:48 AM on November 23, 2007

I thought the question could have stayed if it was a bit more specific. As it was posted it was so open-ended and polling the audience that it seemed chatfiltery, but it was salvageable if you stated it as a question about how to figure out one's purpose in life (esp. if you tell us a few things you like and think are worth fighting for, and what is holding you back right now from just going after those things).

The worst thing about the question was the first answer --... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:13 AM on November 17, 2007

Just out of curiousity, what's the difference between that question and "what is it like to feel loved"?

One was asking for a personal motto and one was trying to understand an emotion that they weren't sure (or were sure in the negative) that they didn't have. Basically one was on the other side of the edge case scenario and this one wasn't. There's not always a definitive answer to why a certain question was and was not over the line. We go from... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:07 AM on November 17, 2007

I always assumed no one teaches him because it's simply uninspired popular fiction, much like Tom Wolfe.

I always kind of put him in the Jackson Pollock or Wm S Burroughs category... that you can take or leave his work, but his life was a work of art, a true original.

He'd have taken the two of you out with one punch, then gone back in and written another great novel just to spite you.

Yeah, a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by languagehat at 11:57 AM on November 10, 2007

I'm a co-op developer in Ontario, Canada - I get a lot of requests like this. Each jurisdiction is different, with legislation and what-not, but I'd be happy to point you at some of the resources I have if I knew where you were located. Or provide some of my own if you were based in Canada, or even better, Ontario. I'm currently working on a business succession project with our national association that may have some resources.

I could also provide some general advice... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Cyrie at 9:35 AM on November 9, 2007

Besides the brain's ability to affect the physical processes inside your body (for example consciously controlling your muscles, the hypothalamus raising your body's temperature, etc.) the only scientific theory for consciousness affecting the real world is in quantum mechanics. Even then, most interpretations of quantum mechanics say consciousness plays no role, except in interpreting reality.

Here's a chart of different interpretations of QM. As you can see, the... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by justkevin at 9:59 AM on November 7, 2007

Usually if we remove more than a few comments -- and not just one throwaway joke -- we'll leave a note. I thought it was sort of clear what happened so didn't, possibly in error. This time we had two conflicting guidelines at work.

- remove derails that aren't answering the question, especially when they occur early in the thread and the question hasn't been answered yet
- if at all possible, don't remove comments by the original question... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:28 AM on November 4, 2007

That's interesting, but what's the point?

It's to surface what your friends are doing on the site, if you don't have all the time in the world to read everything they write. It's hard to tell what it's good for on day one, but we've been using it for a week internally and it's really great at highlighting stuff I'd normally miss.

I found two friends asking questions this week that I could help out on, but I didn't notice... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:04 PM on November 2, 2007

I looked at my 29:81 ratio and got to thinking about it and decided that it made me look sort of snobbish because of that implicit reciprocity

That's an odd reaction, not in a "you're doing it WRONG" way, just odd. I've never felt the pull to add people that add me on other services. I always figured everyone uses the service as they see fit. For something that is purely social, like say, friendster back in the day, it did seem like someone... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:01 PM on November 2, 2007

It was my understanding that asking how to engage in illegal behavior was against the guidelines. Apparently it's fine, though.

It's not a black and white world, sorry. There's no "line" we can point to and say those are illegal and must go. To do so would be silly and inflexible (I can imagine a situation where we would have to delete a question on keeping a ferret in a state that disallows it).

Slate just did a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:18 AM on October 21, 2007

where's the totally misleading element of this post?

Are you fucking serious? The element is this: General in charge of Iraq says "It's the oil"I don't know what they teach in livejournalism school, but the little quote marks around "It's the oil" indicate that someone actually said something, word for word. I opened the link attached to that quote, did a control-f for "oil" and didn't see the phrase uttered by the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:59 PM on March 15, 2006

There's this whole insinuation that Internet culture isn't actually real culture and actual people interacting. That it's all a fake substitute for the real thing. This is getting tiresome.

I remarked to someone else that got interviewed that from the first time I talked to the reporter, I understood that was his thesis and he was going to hammer it out no matter what I said. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone explaining why people flock to mefi,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:38 PM on September 28, 2007

Chop the tomatoes, some fresh basil, a clove or two of garlic and if you like some vegetables, heat them in a large skillet with some olive just until they start to warm. Add freshly boiled and drained pasta, such as bows, and stir. Add, salt, pepper and grating cheese to your taste. This way the tomatoes retain all of their fresh flavor. A cooked sauce is great too, but it changes the flavor.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by caddis at 8:07 AM on September 28, 2007

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cut the tomatoes in half and remove seeds. Place them cut-side up on a half-sheet baking pan and drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle a couple of tablespoons each of chopped parsley, chopped oregano, and chopped basil, along with some finely minced shallots (2-3), salt and pepper.

Roast for 2-3 hours. Check after about 90 minutes to make sure that the tomatoes aren't burning. A little browning is okay.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by briank at 7:53 AM on September 28, 2007 marked best answer

I do.

Sort of. My job essentially boils down to taking a long list of stories that have come into the newsroom today, from agencies, freelancers, the press syndication groups and our reporters, and deciding which of them go into the paper, and where they go.

This is how it works for a morning newspaper. The process is identical for all types of media, but timings are different:

1. The news is gathered. Reporters find... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bonaldi at 5:37 PM on September 20, 2007 marked best answer

So, comments such as, "flagged for X" are really good indicators in real time in the thread.

Actually, they're really only a way to let pissed-off people feel better about themselves. The original poster either doesn't care, is amused, or will get defensive and not listen, 99% of the time. Such feedback is useful only as catharsis, which is to say, almost totally useless. The whole point of flagging is to alert the admins and... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by middleclasstool at 10:25 PM on September 19, 2007

blink is like cilantro.

Use it sparingly, no one wants to eat a whole bowl of freaking cilantro for breakfast.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:50 PM on September 13, 2007

Hopefully, a new shiny thing will come along soon and it won't sustain widespread use.

Which is inevitable, yeah. Note that the world didn't end in 2003 when GeneFilter hit the scene, either; toys wear out fast here, and long-term markov abuse should be flagged like any other noise (that is, context'll matter inna final analysis). Today's sort of wacky demonstrative outlier day because the shininess is at peak level, but regardless.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:33 AM on September 12, 2007

Because I don't really see what jessamyn and cortex describe as an extended freak out with personal insults.

I don't know who this missing rich guy is, but over the course of half a dozen comments, the thread starts to become about item and his freakout over some missing rich dude. Calling another member a fuck, and following up with anyone that responded to him -- this is classic "whoa" behavior we cut people off for. So it's not that we... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:38 PM on September 9, 2007

That would be just all kinds of crazy bad.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:35 PM on September 3, 2007

52,000 members think this would be the end of MetaFilter
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:35 PM on September 3, 2007