Mefi's finest moments are also very, very chatty

May 18, 2006 6:58 AM

The fantastic new Favorites feature has made me realize I have a poll/chatfilter dilemma. I've always supported the policy of deleting stupid "what's your favorite color, I'll go first, I like blue" questions, but I've been trolling the site marking my favorites and it turns out that so very many of what I consider Mefi's finest moments are also very, very chatty.
Exhibits inside.
posted by CunningLinguist to Etiquette/Policy at 6:58 AM (19 comments total)

Here are some of my faves, all arguably too chatty, all arguably marvy:

Life altering experiences, grocery store stories, life's simple pleasures, mnemonic devices, ghost stories, more ghost stories, etc.

I'm not sure what to suggest here. How do we keep out the "what's your favorite song" noise, while keeping the amorphous polling questions that get people to post so many amusing and heartbreaking personal stories?
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:58 AM on May 18, 2006

How do we keep out the "what's your favorite song" noise, while keeping the amorphous polling questions that get people to post so many amusing and heartbreaking personal stories?

Don't fix what ain't broke.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 7:05 AM on May 18, 2006

But let's say I posted a question asking "what's the freakiest coincidence that's ever happened to you?" It would probably be deleted, right? And yet, I'd love to read that thread.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:08 AM on May 18, 2006

Post it on MetaChat, add a link in your own profile. Then you'll always be able to find it again.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:26 AM on May 18, 2006

How do we keep out the "what's your favorite song" noise, while keeping the amorphous polling questions that get people to post so many amusing and heartbreaking personal stories?

1. explain to people that chatty-type questions are okay as long as there is a problem to be solved and encourage people to explain the "why do you want to know" part
2. explain that the reason there aren't more chatty questions is because AskMe already is full of questions that run off the front page quickly, adding more open-eneded chatty questions makes these other questions less likely to get answered well which seems too bad
3. MetaChat, MetaChat, MetaChat, it's so great for this sort of thing.
4. What SeizeThe Day said
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:31 AM on May 18, 2006

It sucks because I see a lot of empty chatty questions that aren't interesting, but there are a half dozen that are (like the "porn in the woods" thing). There's no way to come up with a guideline that resists all chatty questions except for the few diamonds that will get interesting responses, and being totally lax on chattyness means ask mefi runs the risk of being a lame hangout spot for people to piss in the wind, when it seems much more useful than that now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:31 AM on May 18, 2006

"what's the freakiest coincidence that's ever happened to you?"

I wanted to post a metatalk question asking, why do so many of what I consider Mefi's finest moments take place in very, very chatty threads?
posted by matteo at 7:47 AM on May 18, 2006

Ask.Me has a specific purpose, which it does really well. The few good, chatty questions are gems, and get favorited my many. But the "what song/book is this?" questions that get answered in 17 minutes are amazing; they just don't generate favorites. So, yeah, not broke, don't fix it, use metachat.
posted by theora55 at 7:49 AM on May 18, 2006

Speaking of chatty AskMe questions...

Does anyone know where to find the thread about a Mother worried about the dangerous things her son does? It quickly devolved into a discussion about stupid things Mefites did as kids.
posted by Alison at 8:25 AM on May 18, 2006

Could we maybe hide/remove/shrink any questions on the front page with 'best answer' already marked? That way we could handle a slight increase in volume. I'm also in favo[u]r of making the AskMe front page longer by days and/or posts (eg: All questions for the past 7 days).
posted by blue_beetle at 8:38 AM on May 18, 2006

(eg: All questions for the past 7 days)

The benefit of displaying 350 questions on a single page doesn't make up for the drawbacks of sending all that data for a page most people won't scroll through.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:43 AM on May 18, 2006

I would suggest that you've identified a selection effect (at least in part). It's because there are not a million boring chatty questions that the good ones stand out. The fact that they are there suggests that no changes will continue to produce interesting questions of the same type while limiting the others.

(Although we all might be able to think about chatty questions which might produce interesting threads, the truth is that all we know for sure is that some threads are interesting, and those threads are already preserved.)
posted by OmieWise at 8:48 AM on May 18, 2006

Could we maybe hide/remove/shrink any questions on the front page with 'best answer' already marked?

No. The "best answer" feature is only sporadically useful. People mark all kinds of silly things as best, sometimes completely wrong "answers."
posted by languagehat at 9:53 AM on May 18, 2006

The threads that are useful are not always entertaining. The threads that are entertaining are not always useful. AskMe's stated purpose is to provide useful information, but I suspect your favorites are the entertaining ones. (Not that there's anything wrong with marking entertaining answers as favorites. Just asking you to recognize the difference between entertaining and useful.)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:28 AM on May 18, 2006

I know that this would be contrary to the entire purpose and spirit of AskMe, but I think it's a good idea and am going to suggest it anyway:

How about a "Chatfilter" category? It can be opt-in only, and people will be opted out by default. If you don't opt in, the questions will be hidden.

I suppose this would only work for people who are members, but you could solve that problem by making the "Chatfilter" questions available to members only.
posted by Afroblanco at 12:05 PM on May 18, 2006

We had one last year CunningLinguist, not on AskMe but it might as well have been: "Incredible -- but true coincidences" - 98 comments.

What I consider that thread's finest comment was this snark. In AskMe that would have been deleted, and rightly so. Sometimes we've just got to be utilitarian about site management rules, even if it does seem we might miss out on content the future.
posted by hugsnkisses at 12:43 PM on May 18, 2006

How do we keep out the "what's your favorite song" noise, while keeping the amorphous polling questions that get people to post so many amusing and heartbreaking personal stories?

Maybe you should first realize that metafilter isn't setup to cater to your personal prefrences?
posted by delmoi at 7:25 AM on May 19, 2006

The threads that are entertaining are not always useful.

Useful in what way, DevilsAdvctate? Asking about profound life experiences or something isn't useful in the same way as a technical question about a broken keyboard, but it still is useful. It's useful because you can take strength or support or encouragement from other people's stories, and you can get a better insight into the lovely little things in life. I'd say the questions CunningLinguist is talking about are far more useful than most of the technical help ones.
posted by twirlypen at 5:44 PM on May 19, 2006

If you define "useful" broadly enough, every question is useful, on the grounds that it satisfies curiosity. I mean "useful" in a narrower way than that.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:45 AM on May 23, 2006