Comments on 12182

In this thread the commenter made an innocuous joke, the OP objected but they quickly (like, two comments later) made up. It just seems like it's stripping a lot of sense of community out, or the sense of imperfect humans interacting with imperfect humans, when these things are deleted.
posted by occhiblu at 7:27 PM on June 28, 2006

I've noticed it in other threads this week, too, but I can't remember which ones, and I apologize for not having more examples.

But I was re-reading older threads today to tag my older posts, and it felt like more of a community give-and-take rather than just "answer and shut up" robot interactions.
posted by occhiblu at 7:29 PM on June 28, 2006

I agree with occhiblu.
posted by Dr. Wu at 7:46 PM on June 28, 2006

Occhiblu: that's the rules of the game in the green. Discussions go in blue, and bitching and moaning goes in the gray.

does every bit of human interaction that doesn't quite solve the question -- but does engage with the poster in a respectful way -- need to go? It's not a law of physics, but it is the rule, set by the owner. And he has no oblication whatever to defend those rules to us.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:58 PM on June 28, 2006

AskMe isn't chatty enough please change it and let it be chatty thanks
posted by Kwantsar at 8:02 PM on June 28, 2006

I'm completely in favor of deleting asshole-ish comments. It's the comments that were not meant badly, but were then interpreted badly, but were then explained and forgiven in-thread that I'm talking about.

It seems like it's punishing bad writers, to some extent. If I make a supportive "Yeah, I get where you're coming from" comment, but phrase it a bit sarcastically (I don't know, something like "Yeah, those assholes are really obnoxious"), and then people misinterpret it, then it's my fault to a certain extent for not being clearer, but if I quickly apologize and explain what I meant then it doesn't seem like a big enough deal for deletion. It seems like a normal human interaction.
posted by occhiblu at 8:03 PM on June 28, 2006

It seems like it's punishing bad writers, to some extent.

Bad writers should be punished. That's why I've got David Schickler in a cage in my rat-infested basement at this very moment.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 8:07 PM on June 28, 2006

I think that there's plenty of "community feeling" in the Blue, and there's obviously a shitload of that here in the grey. The problem with making jokes in the green, as well as derails, is that questions and answers seems to scroll right by because of the volume of the site. It's bad enough that a question asked in the morning of a weekday doesn't even stay on the front page less than 12 hours later.

Now we have to deal with stupid jokes and unrelated comments causing good comments to get lost in the mix as well? No thank you. The more useful the site, the better, IMHO. You want a community feeling? Mix useful advice with anedotes or words of encouragement. Enough with the one-line BS that we have to wade through in the Blue.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:07 PM on June 28, 2006

Y'all take this stuff too seriously.
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:12 PM on June 28, 2006

Is this an innocuous joke? Not the first time jon's decided to involve himself in a sex thread with his witty banter, either.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:18 PM on June 28, 2006

Well, see, that I would delete.
posted by occhiblu at 8:22 PM on June 28, 2006

If it's innocuous, it's not useful, and I won't miss it.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:30 PM on June 28, 2006

All of these pale in comparison to telling a nice jewish boy to get "triumph of the will" tattooed on himself.
posted by boo_radley at 8:40 PM on June 28, 2006

I think there's always been a bit of a split between tech-type Q&A and more emotional problems. I think people ask the emotional problems here because they feel an emotional tie to the community. Deleting all interactions that aren't techy-robotic Q&A destroys some of that community tie.

I know that I will now have many people saying the relationship questions suck, but given that I like them, I'd like to encourage an atmosphere that makes them successful.
posted by occhiblu at 8:42 PM on June 28, 2006

That's fucking disgusting.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:43 PM on June 28, 2006

Urm, the 'Triumph of the Will' thing, not occhiblu's comment.

Seriously, is that supposed to be a joke, or a completely idiotic empowerment/reclamation thing, or was 'Arbeit Macht Frie' just too goddam tasteless to suggest?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:48 PM on June 28, 2006

Yes, the comments you're talking about should be deleted. I don't want to erode the signal-to-noise ratio with "innocuous" chatter. There are plenty of websites where that behavior is appropriate. AskMe is different, and that's why it's good.
posted by cribcage at 9:01 PM on June 28, 2006

I usually chime in against comment deletion, but now that I think about how I actually behave, I'm all for it.

The last few times I've been tempted to snark in Ask, I realise that I stopped myself because I thought "Jess'll can it", and then I ended up couching the snark in some sort of an answer. I did that for the guy who had too many meetings, and I didn't say anything at all to the guy who wanted Chinese translated and linked an image.

I may not agree with it, but it's stopping me from shitting in the green, and I'm just yer mild-mannered chappie.
posted by bonaldi at 9:06 PM on June 28, 2006

I'm in favor of heavier deletion, not a lighter touch. There's too much non-helpful yapping going on in there as it is.
posted by majick at 9:10 PM on June 28, 2006

In the thread in question, I deleted all the comments and they were basically someone saying the title of the question was no way to approach a woman, while the followup was I was joking, and then a follow-followup saying I was joking too and another follow follow followup saying heh, we were both joking.

In other words, noise that didn't answer the question == cut.

I'm not trying to purposely kill community yuck-yucks between pals, I'm desperately trying to maintain the high quality questions and answers of Ask Mefi. Everyone loves Ask MeFi because it's hyper useful and loaded with tons of great knowledge. No one ever says they wished there were half as many good answers and instead, twice as much joking.
posted by mathowie at 9:11 PM on June 28, 2006

What I'm trying to get at is that part of the good answers come from the joking. Not that there should be huge derails in every thread, of course, but that a small amount of friendly banter -- especially with the OP, as opposed to just between commenters -- seems natural and normal and a function of community.
posted by occhiblu at 9:15 PM on June 28, 2006

I'm also trying to get at the fact that I was really put off by the deletion, because it felt mean rather than helpful, and makes me feel like we're misbehaving children rather than adults trying to help each other.

Again, I know it's a fine line, and I'm not trying to minimize the difficulties involved in walking it, but I do think it's important that somebody pushes back here.
posted by occhiblu at 9:17 PM on June 28, 2006

occhiblu, I suspect we're never going to see eye to eye on this, but I've explained it and others have as well -- me and jessamyn are constantly pulling jokey comments like weeds in Ask MeFi to make it more useful and better as a whole.

I think you're protesting because I deleted something you said, and it was some innocuous thing that didn't answer the question but wasn't totally jokey. But I was weeding the garden and I saw about ten things that didn't answer the question and I yanked them all to keep the remains as chock full o' info as possible.

If you still don't get why jokes are deleted, lemme tell you a story. The other day I was on a car forum for a car I recently bought, and they had this great thread on all the hidden features of the car most people don't know about. Now, the bulletin board software only showed ten responses per page, and there were about 29 pages of answers. The first couple pages were pure gold. There was a way to roll down all four windows from the alarm remote using a special keystroke -- I do that one every day now. About three pages in, a couple long-term members of the board starting chiming in with "these are all great, keep them coming" and then by page five other people were basically saying "that's a great one!" after every single one.

My point is that I waded through 29 pages that by the end were mostly people goofing around and giving thanks when it really made the whole question harder to read about. I kept poking around the forum for other information and I see similar posting patterns everywhere.

They have chat threads and everyone has real-life meetups for this car, but overall I find the site is a drag because of all the off-topic banter.

Ask MeFi started out super super good, every question and answer thread was concise and after a couple months the jokes started creeping in and it doesn't take more than one light hearted wisecrack before ten more flood in trying to one-up the first one and in the end the resource suffers.

So stuff that isn't an answer gets deleted. Sorry, but them's the brakes. I'm trying to maintain a high level of signal to noise, at the expense of community chuminess.
posted by mathowie at 9:27 PM on June 28, 2006 [1 favorite]

does every bit of human interaction that doesn't quite solve the question...need to go?

Yes. But that doesn't happen, your overstatement aside. Plenty of chatty silliness slips through on a regular basis; I'm surprised you haven't seen it. But reigning in frothy chat in AskMe is hardly equivalent to minimizing "human interaction." Keeping banter to a minimum in AskMe is the most community-minded, friendly and "human" thing anyone could do there. There's plenty of space for that stuff elsewhere on the site, please don't go encouraging it in AskMe.
posted by mediareport at 9:29 PM on June 28, 2006

1) None of my comments have been deleted (at least to my knowledge), which is why I thought I was OK questioning this. It's not a personal thing.

2) I've really only had a problem with it the past week or so. It feels like there's a higher deletion rate on the threads I read than normal. I have a boring job, I'm on AskMe all day long, I read a lot of threads. The cutting of innocuous comments seems higher right now. I'm pushing back so that it doesn't get even worse.
posted by occhiblu at 9:31 PM on June 28, 2006

And I would submit that while the site's gotten bigger and more popular, we're simply not at 29-page threads. Nor do additional comments make it impossible to "scroll" through and find good answers.

There is a value in knowing that other people care, have faced the same problems, and are sympathetic, even if they have no real answers for you. I understand patrolling for complete stupidity, whether it's intended to be malicious or just clueless, but it seems like there's been a heavier hand than usual on general camaraderie.

Which is to say, I have no problem with previous deletion levels. I would like them to stay as they were a month ago. Again, it just seems like the deletion of innocuous comments has stepped up the last week.
posted by occhiblu at 9:36 PM on June 28, 2006

I support any and all deletions.
posted by LarryC at 10:01 PM on June 28, 2006

Take a look at this thread.

More, heavier deletions would be great.
posted by cribcage at 10:01 PM on June 28, 2006

And bannings too! I strongly favor bannings.
posted by LarryC at 10:01 PM on June 28, 2006

What kind of car, mathowie?
posted by mullacc at 10:04 PM on June 28, 2006

It would be great if we could flag a comment as "does not attempt to answer the question" to help with this. (For that matter, "attempts to answer a question other than the one that was asked" seems more useful every day.)
posted by jjg at 10:36 PM on June 28, 2006

mathowie, i think your example is interesting, but it isn't entirely appropos.

i haven't used the AskMe resource all that heavily, but i don't feel that Ask's usefulness is diminished terribly by offhand or jokey comments. i understand your desire to keep it as utile as possible, but i don't think the "weeds" ruin the garden.

if i'm the OP, and the question attracts maybe 10 answers (a rough askme average?) and 2 of those or even 4 of those are jokey, well, big whoop. there's 30 seconds of my life i'll never get back, but if i had that approach to time economy i wouldn't be on the 'filters anyway. even if i'm asking once a week under several puppets, and i know people are going to reply with some jokes, i would still use AskMe for its intended purpose and be largely satisfied, unless it got so far out of hand that it was anarchic. but there are plenty of mefi cops out there that would help nip that in the bud.

if i'm a casual reader of AskMe, then analyzing AskMe strictly from the standpoint of its utility is not a huge priority -- i tend to read it in the same way i read other threads, with the general attitude that "it's all good," to borrow an incredibly trite and overused phrase. but i mean the sentiment, though -- it is all good, even the crap. and if something is really offensive to me, why, the power not to subject myself to it is in my possession alone. i can look away. i can skip it. i can ignore it.

if it's a concise answer to the question at hand that one seeks (even if you're not the poster of the question), hopefully the poster has used the "best answer" option, thereby filtering it for you. that's a prime way to sift through chaff.

if i'm desperately seeking the answer to a question and i want to consult AskMe as a knowledge base, i think the best method to achieve that end is a high-powered search function, far more so than any other factor.

the example you cited, with 29 pages in a cumbersome interface -- that doesn't really happen on Ask. and if something like it did happen, you'd be able to moderate your example into more useful form.

but the micromoderation that's frequently inconsistent (not meant as a criticism, for it's a difficult task, just an observation) is i think what occhiblu is perceiving.

having said all that, i totally acknowledge that if left unmoderated, Ask could become overrun with weeds. i'm merely saying that my preference would be for you to have a lighter hand -- deletions smack of censoriousness. if someone gets carried away? give 'em a timeout.

but what do i know? i'm merely your humble sock puppet.
posted by Hat Maui at 12:31 AM on June 29, 2006

The other day I was on a car forum for a car I recently bought, and they had this great thread on all the hidden features of the car most people don't know about. Now, the bulletin board software only showed ten responses per page, and there were about 29 pages of answers

OT - but most forums out there (at least phpBB, IPB, and vB) all allow you to configure this in your profile if you are logged on. This is one of my pet peeves too, and one of the things I always do on a forum site I plan to use more than twice is create an account and set the "posts per page" and/or "threads per page" to as high as they go.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:33 AM on June 29, 2006

It would be great if we could flag a comment as "does not attempt to answer the question" to help with this.

It already exists, it's called "Noise". And anyway, the flag reason is kind of academic anyway, from what I've read at least it's the existance of the flag that matters, not which particular option you happen to choose. In most cases the reason should be pretty obvious to matt/jess, they aren't machines.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:36 AM on June 29, 2006

does every bit of human interaction that doesn't quite solve the question -- but does engage with the poster in a respectful way -- need to go?

The problem is positive feedback - jokes and non-answers beget more jokes and non-answers, chatty questions beget chatty questions etc. Just like weeds. If mathowie looks out of a window, he sees a sea of overgrown and uncared-for gardens reaching all the way to the horizon, it's not really surprising that he's unsentimental about keeping his patch tidy.
posted by teleskiving at 1:16 AM on June 29, 2006

unsentimental about keeping his patch tidy

see, some of us aren't so metrosexual.

thanks a lot!i'm here all week. be sure to tip your server. i got a million of 'em. take my wife's patch. please?
posted by Hat Maui at 2:29 AM on June 29, 2006

I support any and all deletions on AskMe, precisely because allowing in a small degree of non-answers gets people into thinking that discussing a question because it's interesting, as opposed to answering it, is good acceptable behaviour, and then it starts to spiral.
posted by bugbread at 3:01 AM on June 29, 2006

SeizeTheDay writes "You want a community feeling? Mix useful advice with anedotes or words of encouragement."
posted by peacay at 5:28 AM on June 29, 2006

I've been away a lot of this week and so some of the clunkiness you've been seeing may be the result of AskMe having a slightly different moderation style. When someone is around to keep an eye on threads as the day goes on, it's easier to see a few chatty comments and say "I'll see if those go anyplace." If there's less time, there's more pruning. Sometimes it's just that, someone will say "Oh hey X I know you from this other site" "Oh, hey" and then it drops. Other times, the thread turns into a whole bunch of people talking about the other site and the OP can get miffed. I don't get a lot of emails about people being sort of steamed about their threads being derailed by chat, but it's a nonzero number.

A lot of times it's a judgement call trying to figure out if the new comments are potentially derailing noise, whether the question has been satisfactorily answered (though there is no "hey since this question has been answered, let's chat!" clause) or whether a joke someone put in is going to lead to more jokes. Part of this may be how AskMe works at a major level -- people almost never get time-outs for joking around there because it seems very rude to ban someone for being jokey -- and yet we all know there are people who are way more noise than signal on AskMe. I can also be a bit clueless about net.jokes, so I'll leave things in if I can't parse them.

There's also the flag queue, if someone posts something annoying or objectionable, it may be flagged a whole bunch before everything is smoothed out. I try to read ahead to figure out how the story ends before doing anything, but flagging is pretty low on AskMe generally and something that gets a lot of negative attention will definitely be noticed.

So, I'm sorry this doesn't really answer your question particularly well, but I'd hope that a little more transparency in the process might at least make things make a bit more sense.
posted by jessamyn at 6:25 AM on June 29, 2006

There's too much non-helpful yapping going on in there as it is.

Yes.

I support any and all deletions on AskMe, precisely because allowing in a small degree of non-answers gets people into thinking that discussing a question because it's interesting, as opposed to answering it, is good acceptable behaviour, and then it starts to spiral.

Yes.

Occhibiu, you've made your point a dozen times now. I think you're wrong about the alleged increase in moderation, but it doesn't matter, because Matt likes it the way it is and he's running things. Furthermore, he's right. Continued "pushing back" just makes you look whiny. A word to the wise.
posted by languagehat at 6:28 AM on June 29, 2006

Agree. Even though I've been guilty of this in the past, I think AskeMe is a better resource when it's kept chat-free.

Also: great answer, Jess. Thanks for that.
posted by blag at 7:29 AM on June 29, 2006

It's a resource. If it turns into a recreation, the resource is devalued. And no, it can't be both and still be an optimal resource. Maximum utility = minimum chat.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:55 AM on June 29, 2006

When someone is around to keep an eye on threads as the day goes on, it's easier to see a few chatty comments and say "I'll see if those go anyplace."...Sometimes it's just that, someone will say "Oh hey X I know you from this other site" "Oh, hey" and then it drops.

Jessamyn, your answer was exactly what I was looking for. It's been the deletion of those types of comments this week, which hasn't really happened in the past, that I'm objecting to.

Glad to know I'm not totally insane for having noticed it.
posted by occhiblu at 7:56 AM on June 29, 2006

So, the point of this post was to encourage the sprouting of more "Oh hey X I know you from this other site" comments as a way to build up "human interaction" and a "sense of community" in AskMe, occhiblu?

Is that really your point here?
posted by mediareport at 8:09 AM on June 29, 2006

No, my point was that the feel of deletions had really changed over the last week, to the detriment of the site in my opinion, and I wanted to know why.

Jessamyn's answer explained it, and seemed to indicate it wasn't a new policy, just a lack of time in the last few days:

I've been away a lot of this week and so some of the clunkiness you've been seeing may be the result of AskMe having a slightly different moderation style.

I'm hardly going to berate anyone for taking a vacation or being busy. Like I said earlier, I've found previous AskMe moderation and deletion to be appropriate, and so I would assume that when jessamyn comes back or has more time it will go back to that, which is what I was hoping to accomplish.
posted by occhiblu at 8:19 AM on June 29, 2006

'kay, but it still seems like you're saying you'd like to see more "oh hey how's it going" comments in AskMe, which seems way off-base.
posted by mediareport at 8:27 AM on June 29, 2006

No, that was just an example that jessamyn used.

I'd like to see conversations that are quickly resolved, not abusive, not derogatory, not made simply to be one-liners, and not totally derailing the thread stay, as they usually have in the past. Some degree of interaction among the participants does not seem like the end of the world, and does have side benefits. I think jessamyn's always had a good ear for what's distracting noise and what, at heart, is people just supporting each other or being friendly.
posted by occhiblu at 8:53 AM on June 29, 2006

I have no particular opinion on whether jokey comments should be deleted or not, but I do want to point out that the "mark as best answer" feature/highlighting makes it much easier to ignore the noise than, say, a forum with 20 pages.

If there was a link that filtered the answers to show only "best-marked," I think it would help. In fact, I often click on the check mark graphic on the main page, somehow expecting it to link to the first marked best answer, but it doesn't. That seems like a feature that would at least help users avoid the first round of jokes/banter.
posted by helios at 1:25 PM on June 29, 2006

It already exists, it's called "Noise".

The flag interface is an opportunity to clearly communicate exactly what kinds of behavior are discouraged. A flag like "does not attempt to answer the question" would communicate this.
posted by jjg at 1:39 PM on June 29, 2006

As would NOISE, DERAIL, or IT BREAKS THE GUIDELINES.

Thus, there is no problem to be solved here.
posted by cribcage at 3:13 PM on June 29, 2006

helios writes "In fact, I often click on the check mark graphic on the main page, somehow expecting it to link to the first marked best answer, but it doesn't."

Me too. Any chance this could be implemented?
posted by Penks at 3:26 PM on June 29, 2006

I know some folks are offended when Matt and Jessamyn say "take it to MeCha", but when an AskMe question is interesting to a lot of people who want to discuss it or joke about it w/o offering an answer, how about allowing one comment in the AskMe thread that provides a link to the MeCha thread about the question?
posted by Devils Slide at 4:25 PM on June 29, 2006

As would NOISE, DERAIL, or IT BREAKS THE GUIDELINES.

Surely you can see that there is more, and more useful, information contained in "does not attempt to answer the question" than is contained in any of the above phrases.
posted by jjg at 5:14 PM on June 29, 2006

Useful for whom? J & M just see good or bad flags and go prune/ban/praise/standoff according to what they find. If the flagging was made public you would have a point but as it stands it's only you that would feel that something was gained by greater specificity. In reality it would have no effect.
posted by peacay at 7:42 PM on June 29, 2006

It's an opportunity to be more precise with the users about exactly which behaviors are discouraged (i.e, considered flag-worthy), which is what people here are advocating for.
posted by jjg at 9:03 PM on June 29, 2006

I don't get all the hand-wringing about community in AskMe. Believe me, I'm all in favor of community. But we have community coming out of our butts here in MeTa and MeFi. The sense of community of MetaFilter is not imperiled if it's muted in AskMe.

Honestly, one thing that I think is a factor in this is that there's a group of people who are very active on AskMe and not very active elsewhere on the site. So, for them, AskMe is the MetaFilter community. Furthermore, I understand this perspective to a degree because AskMe has always been a nicer place than the rest of MeFi. But none of that changes the fact that AskMe was never intended to be a "community" place. It's a utility, not a community—the community is the rest of MetaFilter. If you don't like how the rest of MeFi "feels" as a community, then try to change how the rest of MeFi is. Don't try to change AskMe, because that's not appropriate. It's also selfish.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:07 PM on June 29, 2006

No, that was just an example that jessamyn used.

No, it was you who said "innocuous jokes" should be allowed to remain, and that deleting them is the equivalent of "stripping a lot of sense of community out" of AskMe. That's where you're wrong.
posted by mediareport at 10:38 PM on June 29, 2006

jjg, gotcha. I see what you mean. Still, the wiki and guidelines on posting pages not to mention MeTa-roasting and snarkish comments are perhaps more readily visible fonts of behavioural 'modification' or socialization.

By way of example, I seriously don't think I've read all the flag categories. I don't use them much and I generally pick 'noise' for whatever it is that has got stuck in my craw. So adding another category is unlikely to stop me from being a dickhead.
posted by peacay at 11:44 PM on June 29, 2006

The points been made, but I'll bandwagon it...

Let's help keep Talk a Talkapedia experience, not a look-how-amusing-I-am kind of thing, even though, you know, I'd like you to look at how amusing I am.
posted by ewkpates at 6:58 AM on June 30, 2006

I am dying, dying, DYING, ~~<blink>~~DYING!!!!!~~</blink>~~ to preach about condom usage in this thread. May I? Pretty please? I'll be nice, I swear. Technically, it's a potential answer to the, "Am I a clueless lover?" part of the posters' question. (Okay, I'll leave that snark out.)

Okay, feature request: Can we have a way to flag our own derail posts and a special link or bottom of the page space to put them?
posted by Skwirl at 11:10 AM on June 30, 2006

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