Kill Post

September 26, 2001 4:58 PM

How about a "kill post" function, with a tipping point. A little button next to front-page posts, that if 10, 15, 25, whatever people click within the first 10 minutes (or 5 responses) of a post, it gets deleted from the front page.

It's democratic, it's brutally efficient, and it will cut down on front page non-posts. I think people here are mature enough not to delete posts just because they're political.. and if not, the tipping point can just be scaled up a bit.
posted by cell divide to feature requests at 4:58 PM (6 comments total)

it would require a "save post" button, too -- otherwise, once the MeFi crowd gets big enough, every post will get killed.

Of course, once it gets that size, every post will get saved, too.

Argh.

(I think a kill button would work if placed in the hands of a select few, moderator types, and if guidelines for posts were more restrictive and explicit (so people know why posts get killed)).
posted by mattpfeff at 9:42 PM on September 26, 2001

The original idea puts all the power in the hands of whoever happens to get to the page first. Say the threshhold is ten. The first ten people don't like it, off goes the post before anyone else can chime in that maybe it IS perfectly good. Won't work.

Having a "save post" button is the obvious counter(though not solution as Mattpfeff also included), except then you run into the fact that this will essentially require everybody to place a vote one way or another on every single thread they look at, just to be sure. Frankly, I'm not willing to put that much effort into it, and I'm willing to say most people will agree with me there. Beyond that, I'd probably just forget.

From a backend perspective, the only way to prevent abuse is for the system to keep track of who placed a vote, and which way, for every single post. I'm not a database engineer, but that sounds like an enormous amount of clutter in the system for something that really should be handled on the user side of the equation.
posted by Su at 11:26 PM on September 26, 2001

Maybe just a "don't ever show me this thread while I'm logged in" button on each one. Don't know how that would affect the DB, I'm bad at those things. Anyone?
posted by j.edwards at 12:18 AM on September 27, 2001

> Maybe just a "don't ever show me this thread while I'm logged in" button on each one.

The reason people use databases is just so you can do stuff like this. Clutter isn't really an issue, but complex actions sometimes require complex queries which can overload the server and bog things down.

However, I'd reckon that implementing a "don't ever show me this thread while I'm logged in" button would be simpler than the "N new" links that show up custom-rendered for each logged-in members' view. Probably obviates the need for the venerable "bozo filter" upcoming feature. If MetaFilter makes it through what surely is now its very own Current Situation, this would be a good feature to agitate for.
posted by sylloge at 1:31 AM on September 27, 2001

I posted something just like this with a few checks and balances a little while ago. Naww, I'm not going to look for it because its an administrative nightmare.

Why not just have vote buttons that don't do anything? Like an approval rating. I post something that isn't so hot but doesnt deserve deletion, and everyone can vote on it from inside the thread.

Good: 30%
Bad: 70%

This will give us a more accurate picture of what MeFi'ers like and no on gets unfairly deleted. The big problem with this is that it doesn't tell you much, like why its bad. I guess that's what metatalk is for.

Of course people will be voting for their own pet peeves like "i hate all ananova posts," "I like political discussions and this isnt one," "skallas said something bad about me once," etc.


posted by skallas at 3:28 AM on September 27, 2001

i had this thought last night: why not force everyone who comments on a post to rank it, ala filepile? that way, people can't just pop onto a thread to disagree with someone, or wax philosophic without once having clicked on the link. you could say that if you have ranked it, e.g. [this is good], then you can comment several times on the thread, but you must have given the link a ranking at some point in time. it should also help to streamline discussion around the link itself, and not around related topics to the link. what do you think?
posted by moz at 8:13 AM on September 27, 2001