Link tweaking: is a redux to supplant dead links justified, or should the links just be tweaked?

April 4, 2006 5:58 AM

previously on mefl here, but the content is old and that link dead so I thought it was worth another post.

As meehawl points out, we've discussed Aphex Twin infinitely. If an old link breaks, is it best to send a message to jessahowie to update it, rather than dredging it back up on the front page?
posted by VulcanMike to etiquette/policy at 5:58 AM (33 comments total)

Every time you post an Aphex Twin thread, a candyraver dies.
posted by Jimbob at 6:08 AM on April 4, 2006

It looks like this post is about some new feature of Aphex Twin, the way we have posts about some new feature that Apple has put out (monthly, sometimes weekly) or some new feature of the Iraq war (daily), or maybe some new feature of the neverending USian struggle of Republicans vs. Democrats (twice a day?). So, given that, something about demon faces and spectrographs seems pretty novel and the links are new. The original post linked in today's post was pretty cryptic and weak.

That said, we don't update old links to anything that isn't pretty recent.
posted by jessamyn at 6:13 AM on April 4, 2006

jessahowie?
Mattamyn.
posted by NinjaPirate at 6:27 AM on April 4, 2006

Jessamyn, the post is about the photos embedded in Alphex Twin's music. Crunchywelch links to an old thread about exactly the same thing. It's a straight double post.
posted by cillit bang at 6:32 AM on April 4, 2006

Metavitamattamyn
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:32 AM on April 4, 2006

I don't mind the post even though it openly retreads, but I'm a little perplexed that crunchywelch chose it as his first post after being a member since 11/04.

At the very least this meta call-out gave birth to "Metavitamattamyn."
posted by shoepal at 6:42 AM on April 4, 2006

It's a straight double post.

A straight double is reposting a link to the same URL or same page at a new URL. I have no idea what delmoi linked to since he didn't explain it well, didn't tag it, and the link is now broken. Was it the same page? The usual "soft double" guidelines (different post, different URLs, same general unusual topic) are "a few years" and if people indicate that they know there was another earlier post -- so it's not a clueless double -- this really seems okay to me unless I'm missing something.
posted by jessamyn at 6:46 AM on April 4, 2006

It's exactly the same pictures extracted from the music by a different person.
posted by cillit bang at 6:50 AM on April 4, 2006

Which is not a problem. The original post is old and its single link is dead. This new post contains several links not found in the 2002 post and deserves to stay. Get over it.
posted by punishinglemur at 6:55 AM on April 4, 2006

I think it should be deleted as a double post.

The fact that the URL is different or the guy who is running the webpage is different, the content is the same thing that has already been shared. It is not "new" to a reader of Metafilter. Redundancy is becoming a pandemic here. The same topics and things keep getting reposted without any eye towards whether the post is "new" that "members haven't seen before"--the same standard that gives rise to the prohibition against double posting.

Furthermore, the "this topic I like is good enough to be exempt from the prohibition against double post" attitude is annoying.

So I vote axe.
posted by dios at 7:04 AM on April 4, 2006

The problem isn't that it links to the same page, but that it links to pretty much same information. There is no new *content* in the post.

Even though the link in the older post is gone, I wouldn't have any trouble typing the appropriate terms into google and finding exactly the same infomation.
posted by bigmusic at 7:08 AM on April 4, 2006

It quacks like a double, and water runs right off its back.
posted by ook at 7:20 AM on April 4, 2006

I agree with dios.
posted by greasepig at 7:34 AM on April 4, 2006

It's kind of cute how we talk about "voting" here. (I also vote for deletion.)
posted by LarryC at 8:02 AM on April 4, 2006

It's put together vaguely enough that jessamyn couldn't figure out the details! The jist of both posts is this: There is a man named Richard D. James who records as Aphex Twin who has embedded his face (which is creepy, see examples) in his music. The original thread has pretty much all of the details in the new post, and the Wired magazine article linked is from 2002. Nothing new here, and the old stuff has been covered.
posted by mikeh at 8:14 AM on April 4, 2006

It wasn't even new in 2002. I clearly remember a college buddy showing me AFX under a spectral analyzer in 2001, so it was floating around the web way back when.

And it's not like that 2002 post was the only time we've discussed the topic of hidden images in Aphex Twin's songs.

Don't forget this post from late 2004. It's about backmasking in general, but, in the comments, abcde provides a link to the exact same bastwood.com site crunchywelch has decided to front page.
posted by jbrjake at 8:16 AM on April 4, 2006

The release (Windowlicker) actually came out in 1999, but I'm not sure how long it took for the face to be discovered.
posted by hyperizer at 8:23 AM on April 4, 2006

It quacks like a double, and water runs right off its back.

This one is a teal though.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:35 AM on April 4, 2006

I agree with dios as well. Why is it necessary to discuss this odd but not earthshaking phenomenon more than once?
posted by languagehat at 8:44 AM on April 4, 2006

Archive.org of yerbox.

The link in the new FPP definitely goes to a newer page, but I have absolutely seen that newer page before... odd, because I somehow remember seeing both at the same time. Wonder if we had a previous post that linked to the Archive.org mirror of yerbox...
posted by VulcanMike at 11:09 AM on April 4, 2006

Ahh, probably the thread jbrjake mentions is where I saaw it. Hmm.
posted by VulcanMike at 11:11 AM on April 4, 2006

Metavitamattamyn.

Nice.
posted by genefinder at 12:07 PM on April 4, 2006

At least it's not more newsfilter or bushfilter.
posted by loquacious at 12:26 PM on April 4, 2006

So wait a minute...

4 years is too soon for a repost with updated content? What sort of turnover has there been in Metafilter readership in that time? Of the people who have read Metafilter that long, how many remember every single post that was made in 2002?

Or is that theory that every new reader of Metafiler needs to read 6 years worth of posts to get the most out of it?

Lighten up, oldtimers. It's not like people are posting "Mouse Balls" or something.
posted by tkolar at 2:50 PM on April 4, 2006

This isn't a new aphex twin feature. Embedded images in the sound is a pretty old gimmick.
posted by cellphone at 3:02 PM on April 4, 2006

No, tkolar, the theory is that if it's 4 years old, it's old. And if it hasn't changed substantially in 4 years, which this hasn't, it's old and moldy. If you want to see years-old retreads, go to ebaumsworld or something; metafilter is supposed to be better than that.

I have zero patience for double posts in general, and less-than-zero for "I know this is a double but I'm going to post it anyway."

Everything is shiny and new to somebody, no matter how arthritic it may be. And if we start saying fine, some double posts are okay because some sufficiently large percentage of people might have missed them the first time around, then there's no basis for preventing people posting mouse balls and zombocom and blue dog and whatever other ancient detritus they've got lying around. Because, hey, it was new to me. I liked it. So I thought it was worth posting again.
posted by ook at 4:14 PM on April 4, 2006

I wrote....
It's not like people are posting "Mouse Balls" or something.

Damnit! :-)

ook, your point is well taken. You reason quite well for an orangutan librarian's utterance.
posted by tkolar at 5:21 PM on April 4, 2006

Ook— That would be fine if we based things here on a binary argument, or had an overly legalistic interpretation of the rules. Instead, we go by the judgement of two folks, which embraces gray areas like this.
Besides, under yout theory, there'd be nothing at all to post since everything on the web has been seen by someone else somewhere sometime. And as soon as you're allowing anything seen by anyone to be posted, you're simply making a judgement call about how far on the continuum posts have to be before they're deleted. This post has been found to be sufficiently worthy not through any real metric but by a subjective determination by the people who have the power to alter it.
posted by klangklangston at 7:04 PM on April 4, 2006

tkolar: yep, I was just coming here to congratulate the giant pill for that one :) Nicely done, pill!

klangklang: under your theory, there'd be nothing at all to post since everything on the web has been seen by someone else somewhere sometime.

I didn't mean to go quite that far, though I guess I can see how you read it that way... I'm saying that anyone could post anything here as long as it hadn't been posted here before. Hence double. (I'm not one of those people who see a post and say "oh, this sux, I saw it on boingboing/waxy/slashdot/whatever three days ago." Don't have much patience for those people, either: that's there. This is here. I'd just like it if we could keep here tidy, because I like it here.)

You're right, of course, that at the end of the day it's subjective and imperfect and things slip through and that's just fine... but we have to keep kind of quiet about that part of it, and trumpet the strict binary legalistic rules, or else people take advantage.
posted by ook at 7:47 PM on April 4, 2006

I somehow missed the original post; this was news to me. I'm thankful for this fpp.
posted by starscream at 9:33 PM on April 4, 2006

1) Not everyone has been reading mefi for 4 freaking years.

2) Of those who have been, not everyone remembers posts that old.

3) Of those who have been but do remember posts that old, scrolling down a few inches isn't the end of the world.

4) Of those who can't deal with seeing something that was posted 4 years ago and scroll past it remain the Irritating Old MetaFogeys that I seriously wish would just leave, or get the bug out of their ass and find something better to do, anyway.

I understand the desire to make sure that the blue doesn't degenerate into self links, spam, and generally craptacular posts, but seeing a pile-on about a "double post" that talks about something a lot of people find very interesting seems a little absurd to me. Have a beer or something.
posted by twiggy at 11:26 PM on April 4, 2006

Well, that's why I only posted "MeTa" on the Blue, and posted a thread here. It really was a legit question, and one I didn't find explicitly discussed before. If we can't pile on here, where can we pile on?
posted by VulcanMike at 10:30 AM on April 5, 2006

And I'll argue that the post has extra value through its generation of matt + jess name combination jokes.
posted by VulcanMike at 10:32 AM on April 5, 2006