Yes, But Can You Give Me One Example, Governor? October 23, 2008 8:18 PM Subscribe
Can we show deleted posts somewhere that's easily accessible, so we all might learn from example what is not keepworthy?
I'm not emotionally invested in these in particular, but as an example, I notice over the last few days there have been a lot of single-link political posts deleted... while another large number of single-link political posts have remained.
I can't find a pattern. Some of the ones left were quiet, some of the ones deleted were very active. Some of each were YouTube posts.
It's just an example, but maybe we could have a "Deleted Posts" section that's very front-page accessible? Being able to page through hundreds of deleted posts (locked, with the reason for deletion on top as always) might help all users get a better feel for what makes a good and bad post. As it is, most users never see them and can't learn anything. I lose them myself unless I happened to comment within and THINK TO DELIBERATELY GO FIND THEM.
I know that a lot of first-time posters are nervous as hell about it, and no FAQ or guidelines will ever be as good as 500 examples.
And a pony.
I'm not emotionally invested in these in particular, but as an example, I notice over the last few days there have been a lot of single-link political posts deleted... while another large number of single-link political posts have remained.
I can't find a pattern. Some of the ones left were quiet, some of the ones deleted were very active. Some of each were YouTube posts.
It's just an example, but maybe we could have a "Deleted Posts" section that's very front-page accessible? Being able to page through hundreds of deleted posts (locked, with the reason for deletion on top as always) might help all users get a better feel for what makes a good and bad post. As it is, most users never see them and can't learn anything. I lose them myself unless I happened to comment within and THINK TO DELIBERATELY GO FIND THEM.
I know that a lot of first-time posters are nervous as hell about it, and no FAQ or guidelines will ever be as good as 500 examples.
And a pony.
This post was deleted for the following reason: poster's request -- jessamyn
They're visible with greasemonkey scripts and on the deleted thread blog but we're not really interested in having them more visible on the site. There's nothing wrong with single link political posts on their own and at some level each post exists in the exact context it appears in. Since there are no penalties for making a post that later gets deleted, we don't really see that there has to be more of a tutorial style "how to not make a post that gets deleted" thing here.
As it is a good deal of deleted posts come to MeTa anyhow. It's been our feeing that making them even more visible would result in even more of this and I don't know if that would be an overall net benefit for the site. I know when we've thought it over in the past we've thought that it wouldn't be.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2008
As it is a good deal of deleted posts come to MeTa anyhow. It's been our feeing that making them even more visible would result in even more of this and I don't know if that would be an overall net benefit for the site. I know when we've thought it over in the past we've thought that it wouldn't be.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2008
But not all posts that end up deleted are made in good faith, unfortunately, and this would just increase visibility for spammers, stunt posters, etc. Not to be too harsh, speaking as a person who hasn't made an FPP yet, but posters whose posts get deleted learn quickly enough exactly why it happened. The community is not shy about letting a person know when s/he fucks something up. It isn't always done as graciously as it ought to be, but it remains a feature and not a bug.
posted by penduluum at 8:27 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by penduluum at 8:27 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
Can someone link to the greasemonkey script [again]?
I think I asked for that before, and I totally tried to use it the last time this came up but I got frustrated and gave up after a minute and read Cute Overload instead. But I learned how to use greasemonkey now, honest. And I just got my bunny fix. Second chance?
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:41 PM on October 23, 2008
I think I asked for that before, and I totally tried to use it the last time this came up but I got frustrated and gave up after a minute and read Cute Overload instead. But I learned how to use greasemonkey now, honest. And I just got my bunny fix. Second chance?
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:41 PM on October 23, 2008
The LoFi page doesn't help since they're not separated, making deleted ones impossible to identify without reading each and every link.
The Deleted Posts blog is pretty much the list that would be useful, I think, but what 0.00th percentage even know about that? And why on earth does it make more sense off the site? Likewise Greasemonkey. It's not that I WANT TO SEE THEM, it's that "this seems like obviously useful info for everyone."
Not to be too harsh, speaking as a person who hasn't made an FPP yet, but posters whose posts get deleted learn quickly enough exactly why it happened.
But the other umpty thousand cannot? It seems like obscuring the process, instead of letting it be transparent and useful, is counterproductive. It presents the appearance of arbitrary and erratic mods who delete on whims. Which is probably not true, and pretty difficult to prove when evidence either way is hidden pretty thoroughly.
Why would "Deleted Posts" on the home page be such a bad thing? Spammers? So filter out the links. I don't see how spammers benefit much from a linkless post underscored with words like "this is a scam, deleted, user banned." That would even HELP, because we'd see useful enforcement in action.
Leaving this for the occasional MeTa thread is just catering to the small portion of hardcore argue addicts. We're still left without information.
An opportunity to easily see the list of what was deleted and why would be good for everyone and bad for nobody that I can think of.
(It's also where some of the funniest comments are. Removing them seems to drain the place of some blood.)
posted by rokusan at 8:54 PM on October 23, 2008
The Deleted Posts blog is pretty much the list that would be useful, I think, but what 0.00th percentage even know about that? And why on earth does it make more sense off the site? Likewise Greasemonkey. It's not that I WANT TO SEE THEM, it's that "this seems like obviously useful info for everyone."
Not to be too harsh, speaking as a person who hasn't made an FPP yet, but posters whose posts get deleted learn quickly enough exactly why it happened.
But the other umpty thousand cannot? It seems like obscuring the process, instead of letting it be transparent and useful, is counterproductive. It presents the appearance of arbitrary and erratic mods who delete on whims. Which is probably not true, and pretty difficult to prove when evidence either way is hidden pretty thoroughly.
Why would "Deleted Posts" on the home page be such a bad thing? Spammers? So filter out the links. I don't see how spammers benefit much from a linkless post underscored with words like "this is a scam, deleted, user banned." That would even HELP, because we'd see useful enforcement in action.
Leaving this for the occasional MeTa thread is just catering to the small portion of hardcore argue addicts. We're still left without information.
An opportunity to easily see the list of what was deleted and why would be good for everyone and bad for nobody that I can think of.
(It's also where some of the funniest comments are. Removing them seems to drain the place of some blood.)
posted by rokusan at 8:54 PM on October 23, 2008
Rokusan, the reason they're not on this site is because the mods decided they should be deleted. If they were easily accessible from here, they wouldn't be "deleted", would they?
posted by Class Goat at 9:03 PM on October 23, 2008 [3 favorites]
posted by Class Goat at 9:03 PM on October 23, 2008 [3 favorites]
I hear you, rokusan, but there's a case to be made for general tidiness on top of penduluum's wise reasons. Honestly, I only want to see them for the spectacle and that's not a good reason at all.
Oh hay, look, I found the link to the script. Hurray for doing things for oneself!
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:05 PM on October 23, 2008
Oh hay, look, I found the link to the script. Hurray for doing things for oneself!
posted by cowbellemoo at 9:05 PM on October 23, 2008
I bear some responsibility for bringing this up in my semi-facetious comment in the now-deleted thread.
I was just picturing someone starting to post a weak election-filter link, and seeing a row of deleted threads on the same subject staring back. But... certainly it wouldn't matter. The intrepid poster would no doubt declare "Oh, my post is SO much better than those!" as he/she clicks the "submit" button.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:15 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
I was just picturing someone starting to post a weak election-filter link, and seeing a row of deleted threads on the same subject staring back. But... certainly it wouldn't matter. The intrepid poster would no doubt declare "Oh, my post is SO much better than those!" as he/she clicks the "submit" button.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:15 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
It presents the appearance of arbitrary and erratic mods who delete on whims. Which is probably not true, and pretty difficult to prove when evidence either way is hidden pretty thoroughly.
At the end of the day, we value not making an official, obvious on-site digests more than we value the potential (and in my opinion likely very marginal) reduction in accusations of erratic or whimsical deletion decisions. Speaking from long experience, the only deletion an aggrieved deletee tends to be concerned about in the heat of the moment is their own.
And everyone else who develops a taste for keeping an eye on deletions can, yes, ask or do a little googling or follow some breadcrumbs and find one of a handful of ways to keep up with the deletions on a daily basis.
We have no real incentive to encourage every single newbie to scrutinize the deleted threads index. Attentive, involved users who are developing some enthusiasm for seeing how the sausage is made? Sure. And those are the folks who are by and large going to find their way to these various tools without much trouble.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:23 PM on October 23, 2008
At the end of the day, we value not making an official, obvious on-site digests more than we value the potential (and in my opinion likely very marginal) reduction in accusations of erratic or whimsical deletion decisions. Speaking from long experience, the only deletion an aggrieved deletee tends to be concerned about in the heat of the moment is their own.
And everyone else who develops a taste for keeping an eye on deletions can, yes, ask or do a little googling or follow some breadcrumbs and find one of a handful of ways to keep up with the deletions on a daily basis.
We have no real incentive to encourage every single newbie to scrutinize the deleted threads index. Attentive, involved users who are developing some enthusiasm for seeing how the sausage is made? Sure. And those are the folks who are by and large going to find their way to these various tools without much trouble.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:23 PM on October 23, 2008
Class Goat, that is not true. They're already called "deleted" but still there, if you happen to know the post number or have it bookmarked, or can find a comment within it.
All I know is that after many years and thousands of comments, I still really have no clue why some posts are deleted and others are not, especially the shallow single-link ones. Yes, there are obvious calls, but there are so many arbitrary-looking choices that I really have no clue. It seems random to me, which makes me think I can't be the only one, especially since the vast majority don't even SEE the deleted ones. Or it's just me.
In the election one-linker examples, I could see an obvious reason for deleting them all, or an obvious reason for leaving them all. But the pick-and-choosiness is baffling to me.
I suggested a tidy little corner for those who care. I still don't see who that hurts.
posted by rokusan at 9:25 PM on October 23, 2008
All I know is that after many years and thousands of comments, I still really have no clue why some posts are deleted and others are not, especially the shallow single-link ones. Yes, there are obvious calls, but there are so many arbitrary-looking choices that I really have no clue. It seems random to me, which makes me think I can't be the only one, especially since the vast majority don't even SEE the deleted ones. Or it's just me.
In the election one-linker examples, I could see an obvious reason for deleting them all, or an obvious reason for leaving them all. But the pick-and-choosiness is baffling to me.
I suggested a tidy little corner for those who care. I still don't see who that hurts.
posted by rokusan at 9:25 PM on October 23, 2008
Speaking from long experience, the only deletion an aggrieved deletee tends to be concerned about in the heat of the moment is their own.
I had nothing deleted. Honestly, I don't think I'd dare even try an FPP post.
I just saw six or seven one-link election posts go by. Three or four were deleted, three or four stood, and try as I may, I couldn't find a value difference between them. All gone would have been okay with me, all standing would have been okay too.
Of course, it's hard to compare when there's no easy way to view them. And so. Well, that.
It seems silly to hide the info, but if you like it that way, I don't care very much. Delete and hide the bodies as you will. :)
posted by rokusan at 9:29 PM on October 23, 2008
I had nothing deleted. Honestly, I don't think I'd dare even try an FPP post.
I just saw six or seven one-link election posts go by. Three or four were deleted, three or four stood, and try as I may, I couldn't find a value difference between them. All gone would have been okay with me, all standing would have been okay too.
Of course, it's hard to compare when there's no easy way to view them. And so. Well, that.
It seems silly to hide the info, but if you like it that way, I don't care very much. Delete and hide the bodies as you will. :)
posted by rokusan at 9:29 PM on October 23, 2008
Speaking from long experience, the only deletion an aggrieved deletee tends to be concerned about in the heat of the moment is their own.
The deletions I most get aggrieved about are the ones I think should be deleted that aren't. Like this one.
posted by Class Goat at 9:53 PM on October 23, 2008
The deletions I most get aggrieved about are the ones I think should be deleted that aren't. Like this one.
posted by Class Goat at 9:53 PM on October 23, 2008
(Fortunately for the mods, my aggrievedness has no consequences for anyone except my blood pressure, and hardly ever gets expressed anyway.)
posted by Class Goat at 9:54 PM on October 23, 2008
posted by Class Goat at 9:54 PM on October 23, 2008
I had nothing deleted.
And I wasn't calling you an aggrieved deletee, or suggesting that a deletion of a post by you motivated this thread. I'm addressing the notion you raised of arbitrary users making inference about moderation by putting it into the context of my practical experience as a mod and as a reader before that.
I just saw six or seven one-link election posts go by. Three or four were deleted, three or four stood, and try as I may, I couldn't find a value difference between them. All gone would have been okay with me, all standing would have been okay too.
If you want to have a detailed discussion of why what went went and what stayed stayed in a specific case, I'm open to that. Gimme specifics and what has you confused about 'em and I'll do my best.
Generally it's a mix of (especially in late-election season) trend-spotting, community feedback, back-channel discussion, a little bit of triage depending on the day, and a bit of gut—and, yes, there's three of us doing most of the deleting and we have three moderately different guts, so there's always going to be a little bit of human whammy in there.
Of course, it's hard to compare when there's no easy way to view them. And so. Well, that.
But if we're talking about you wanting to compare, there is an easy way to compare them. There's actually three or four mentioned in this thread: by all means, compare and enjoy.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:54 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
And I wasn't calling you an aggrieved deletee, or suggesting that a deletion of a post by you motivated this thread. I'm addressing the notion you raised of arbitrary users making inference about moderation by putting it into the context of my practical experience as a mod and as a reader before that.
I just saw six or seven one-link election posts go by. Three or four were deleted, three or four stood, and try as I may, I couldn't find a value difference between them. All gone would have been okay with me, all standing would have been okay too.
If you want to have a detailed discussion of why what went went and what stayed stayed in a specific case, I'm open to that. Gimme specifics and what has you confused about 'em and I'll do my best.
Generally it's a mix of (especially in late-election season) trend-spotting, community feedback, back-channel discussion, a little bit of triage depending on the day, and a bit of gut—and, yes, there's three of us doing most of the deleting and we have three moderately different guts, so there's always going to be a little bit of human whammy in there.
Of course, it's hard to compare when there's no easy way to view them. And so. Well, that.
But if we're talking about you wanting to compare, there is an easy way to compare them. There's actually three or four mentioned in this thread: by all means, compare and enjoy.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:54 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
Rokusan, the problem with having a page for deleted threads here on this site is that it would represent an "attractive nuisance". It would encourage some people to make bad posts so that they would show up on that page.
posted by Class Goat at 9:55 PM on October 23, 2008
posted by Class Goat at 9:55 PM on October 23, 2008
I could see an obvious reason for deleting them all, or an obvious reason for leaving them all. But the pick-and-choosiness is baffling to me.
I'm baffled by this need to be black and white in judgment.
We leave some, major stories about various news items of the day. Six months ago, it was likely only one election-themed post a week, and maybe only 1 or 2 news posts a day, the rest being collections of star wars figures recreating the bible in edible lego or some other such interesting whacky links.
When election season gets into full swing, there are going to be more and more stories submitted but eventually it starts to get too much. We stemmed the tides as much as possible at the start a couple months back, keeping everything in one thread a week and deleting all the rest, but those threads got to be unmanageable so we started letting a few more in.
The election is at fever pitch at this point, but a handful a day is about all a normal person can handle without too much overlap, and when three threads about palin get posted on the same day, you should know that two are going to be deleted, because it's just too much.
I'm not making a "no political posts ever!" ultimatum because I think it's short-sighted and small-minded to not acknowledge that every once in a while something really amazing happens in the political landscape.
Conversely, I'm also not going to say "any and everything that gets submitted that has anything at all to do with the election will stay!" because I don't make a habit of connecting a firehose to a septic tank and turning it on my face to withstand a never-ending spray of shit.
We're human. We're moderators. We're adults. We can take a few news, political, and election-related threads before it all gets to be too much, and then we remove redundant, minor, antagonistic, or otherwise craptacular posts. You will likely not agree with every deletion and every one kept, but we're all working within the community norms and the ebb and flow of comments, favorites, and flags to see what people really, really don't like and what they don't mind having around.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:56 PM on October 23, 2008 [2 favorites]
I'm baffled by this need to be black and white in judgment.
We leave some, major stories about various news items of the day. Six months ago, it was likely only one election-themed post a week, and maybe only 1 or 2 news posts a day, the rest being collections of star wars figures recreating the bible in edible lego or some other such interesting whacky links.
When election season gets into full swing, there are going to be more and more stories submitted but eventually it starts to get too much. We stemmed the tides as much as possible at the start a couple months back, keeping everything in one thread a week and deleting all the rest, but those threads got to be unmanageable so we started letting a few more in.
The election is at fever pitch at this point, but a handful a day is about all a normal person can handle without too much overlap, and when three threads about palin get posted on the same day, you should know that two are going to be deleted, because it's just too much.
I'm not making a "no political posts ever!" ultimatum because I think it's short-sighted and small-minded to not acknowledge that every once in a while something really amazing happens in the political landscape.
Conversely, I'm also not going to say "any and everything that gets submitted that has anything at all to do with the election will stay!" because I don't make a habit of connecting a firehose to a septic tank and turning it on my face to withstand a never-ending spray of shit.
We're human. We're moderators. We're adults. We can take a few news, political, and election-related threads before it all gets to be too much, and then we remove redundant, minor, antagonistic, or otherwise craptacular posts. You will likely not agree with every deletion and every one kept, but we're all working within the community norms and the ebb and flow of comments, favorites, and flags to see what people really, really don't like and what they don't mind having around.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:56 PM on October 23, 2008 [2 favorites]
Speaking from long experience, the only deletion an aggrieved deletee tends to be concerned about in the heat of the moment is their own.
That seems internally silly, cortex. The reason that only the deletee seems to talk about them is that they're among the very few who see or notice them.... by virtue of the design decision we're talking about, right?
Thousands of users who never see something do not complain or comment about it. That does make sense.
I understand the "attractive nuisance" Class Goat mentions, at least in theory. But really, we're talking about something that only appears a specific place designated for deleted things? Doesn't seem much bother to me. People who do that will eventually be banned anyway, right?
But you guys have already made this decision and seem firm on it. The worst damage is that some users, or at least me, can't understand why some things are deleted and others are not.
I can live with my ignorance.
posted by rokusan at 10:02 PM on October 23, 2008
That seems internally silly, cortex. The reason that only the deletee seems to talk about them is that they're among the very few who see or notice them.... by virtue of the design decision we're talking about, right?
Thousands of users who never see something do not complain or comment about it. That does make sense.
I understand the "attractive nuisance" Class Goat mentions, at least in theory. But really, we're talking about something that only appears a specific place designated for deleted things? Doesn't seem much bother to me. People who do that will eventually be banned anyway, right?
But you guys have already made this decision and seem firm on it. The worst damage is that some users, or at least me, can't understand why some things are deleted and others are not.
I can live with my ignorance.
posted by rokusan at 10:02 PM on October 23, 2008
I'm not making a "no political posts ever!" ultimatum because...
For me, it was the single-linkiness rather than the political topic that made me notice.
But someone else said "single link political post", so I started noticing those in particular.
posted by rokusan at 10:05 PM on October 23, 2008
For me, it was the single-linkiness rather than the political topic that made me notice.
But someone else said "single link political post", so I started noticing those in particular.
posted by rokusan at 10:05 PM on October 23, 2008
And Class Goat, yes, that that post you mention stood was one of the moments when I thought I must be going insane, because I expected to see "Double!", "Triple!" and "Deleted" in ten seconds... and yet no. There it is, one link and all.
It seems to me that's the third or fourth time that the same link has been posted on MeFi this month... but maybe I misremember.
Again, I don't mean to give the impression this is A Big Deal to me, just because I'm responding to point here. Delete away as arbitrarily as y'all like... but understand that it is very confusing to some readers, because we don't SEE the logic, and I figured a nice archive of deleted stuff/reasons would be helpful in making the mystery more transparent.
It seemed both minor and obviously beneficial to me. I didn't think it'd be so controversial. If there were other threads on this before that were shot down (and it sure sounds like it's been discussed and well thought out before based on how strong some of the replies here are) then I must have missed them.
Maybe they were deleted! :)
posted by rokusan at 10:12 PM on October 23, 2008
It seems to me that's the third or fourth time that the same link has been posted on MeFi this month... but maybe I misremember.
Again, I don't mean to give the impression this is A Big Deal to me, just because I'm responding to point here. Delete away as arbitrarily as y'all like... but understand that it is very confusing to some readers, because we don't SEE the logic, and I figured a nice archive of deleted stuff/reasons would be helpful in making the mystery more transparent.
It seemed both minor and obviously beneficial to me. I didn't think it'd be so controversial. If there were other threads on this before that were shot down (and it sure sounds like it's been discussed and well thought out before based on how strong some of the replies here are) then I must have missed them.
Maybe they were deleted! :)
posted by rokusan at 10:12 PM on October 23, 2008
I'd like it if people could stop getting their posts deleted tonight. I'm trying to watch tv.
posted by puke & cry at 10:33 PM on October 23, 2008 [6 favorites]
posted by puke & cry at 10:33 PM on October 23, 2008 [6 favorites]
Deleted posts are shitty examples.
Learn by example from great posts.
posted by Gunner's Mate 1st Class Phillip Asshole at 10:49 PM on October 23, 2008 [2 favorites]
Learn by example from great posts.
posted by Gunner's Mate 1st Class Phillip Asshole at 10:49 PM on October 23, 2008 [2 favorites]
The worst damage is that some users, or at least me, can't understand why some things are deleted and others are not... we don't SEE the logic
Because they suck. I'll concede that it is a sort of relative designation and while in some cases I may not agree with the degree deleted FPPs are said to have sucked, but really, that's as plain and logical as I can put it.
Just try not to suck, and you will have nothing to worry about.
Removing them seems to drain the place of some blood.
When it comes to tainted blood, there's no such thing as too many leeches.
Heroic medicine keeps the best of the web strong!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:55 PM on October 23, 2008
Because they suck. I'll concede that it is a sort of relative designation and while in some cases I may not agree with the degree deleted FPPs are said to have sucked, but really, that's as plain and logical as I can put it.
Just try not to suck, and you will have nothing to worry about.
Removing them seems to drain the place of some blood.
When it comes to tainted blood, there's no such thing as too many leeches.
Heroic medicine keeps the best of the web strong!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:55 PM on October 23, 2008
For those of us on the wrong side of the fence (there's the left side, and the wrong side) the annoyance about all these political posts isn't so much how many there are, as that they're so damned one-sided.
I just saw this joke, which gets across the way us wrong-siders feel about it all.
I just saw this joke, which gets across the way us wrong-siders feel about it all.
So, Sarah Palin's advisors decide that it is time for her to meet a bunch of serious world leaders. They head to Europe, where, first up, she has an appointment with the Pope. The Pope and some of his Cardinals invite her for a boat ride on the Tiber. As they are sitting in the gondola talking, a wind starts up and blows the Pope's hat into the water. Palin looks around and realizes that no one is going to do anything about it, so she calmy rises, takes off her her high heels, and steps off the side of the boat. Instead of diving into the water, however, she walks across it, to the hat, picks it up and walks back across the water to the boat. She climbs in, hands the Pope his hat and continues discussing whatever it was they had been talking about. The Cardinals are open mouthed in astonishment at what they have just seen. The news media, in nearby boats are busy discussing among themselves how to report it. Headlines the next day at the New York Times, The Washington Post and the networks all blare:posted by Class Goat at 10:59 PM on October 23, 2008
New Revelation: Sarah Palin Can't Swim.
It wasn't a political thing for me. That was just the example. Ten single link posts on bacon, five of which were deleted and five of which were not, would be the same for me. It's just confusing.
posted by rokusan at 11:07 PM on October 23, 2008
posted by rokusan at 11:07 PM on October 23, 2008
What really annoys is when the post-deletion happens while you're actually formulating a comment, such as happened to me today with this one. The comment I was working on was so insightful, so evocative, so humane that it might just have justified keeping the entire thread ... and now it's lost, not even recorded on http://deletedthread.blogspot.com/. I'd re-post it right now if I could remember what it was.
posted by philip-random at 11:15 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by philip-random at 11:15 PM on October 23, 2008 [1 favorite]
It's on the deleted thread blog, philip-random, three posts down (for now). Feel free to put your comment there (not that anyone will see it). I publish any comment that isn't spam. And Class Goat, I think you may need your own metatalk thread if you want to argue the whole left vs wrong thing.
posted by puke & cry at 11:22 PM on October 23, 2008
posted by puke & cry at 11:22 PM on October 23, 2008
I know that a lot of first-time posters are nervous as hell about it
I know I am.
posted by davejay at 12:10 AM on October 24, 2008
I know I am.
posted by davejay at 12:10 AM on October 24, 2008
Well, you left that mystery meat out on the counter for what, like four years? I'd be nervous too.
posted by carsonb at 12:25 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by carsonb at 12:25 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
OK, I get it. Cut back on multiple posts about Sarah Palin. So I won't bring up the $200k the RNC spent on making her presentable and won't ask if only $150k went for clothing, did the remaining $50k go for lipstick?
posted by Cranberry at 12:36 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by Cranberry at 12:36 AM on October 24, 2008
because I don't make a habit of connecting a firehose to a septic tank and turning it on my face to withstand a never-ending spray of shit.
And yet you invited most of the internet to have a rowdy conversation in your living room.
I'm sorry. I had to pee in your banana plant. There was a huge line.
posted by loquacious at 12:40 AM on October 24, 2008
And yet you invited most of the internet to have a rowdy conversation in your living room.
I'm sorry. I had to pee in your banana plant. There was a huge line.
posted by loquacious at 12:40 AM on October 24, 2008
the annoyance about all these political posts isn't so much how many there are, as that they're so damned one-sided.
Yeah, we deleted about 50 anti-Palin and anti-McCain posts in the past couple months.
It is kind of one-sided.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:44 AM on October 24, 2008
Yeah, we deleted about 50 anti-Palin and anti-McCain posts in the past couple months.
It is kind of one-sided.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:44 AM on October 24, 2008
Jeez, maybe I am getting picked on after all.
Why the heck was my (lame) joke comment deleted from this thread, but the immediate response to that comment stayed (though it makes way less sense now with the prior comment removed), and equally lame jokes are left intact?
Y'all are just fucking with me now, right? Havin' a little fun at the rokuster's expense?
And, same problem as vanished threads... no explanation given, nowhere to look to understand... again, it seems arbitrary and there's not even a record for historical WTFness? I feel like an SNL writer now: nothing makes sense, and you're fired or promoted based on whether Lorne laughs on Thursday.
This happened with some AskMe a couple weeks back too. 20 people made jokey answers, half were deleted, the other half stayed. I know you're a bunch of different admins with different personal guidelines, but are you sure one of you isn't a random number generator?
Since waves of "not wanted" are washing over me now, I'm going to bed.
posted by rokusan at 12:57 AM on October 24, 2008
Why the heck was my (lame) joke comment deleted from this thread, but the immediate response to that comment stayed (though it makes way less sense now with the prior comment removed), and equally lame jokes are left intact?
Y'all are just fucking with me now, right? Havin' a little fun at the rokuster's expense?
And, same problem as vanished threads... no explanation given, nowhere to look to understand... again, it seems arbitrary and there's not even a record for historical WTFness? I feel like an SNL writer now: nothing makes sense, and you're fired or promoted based on whether Lorne laughs on Thursday.
This happened with some AskMe a couple weeks back too. 20 people made jokey answers, half were deleted, the other half stayed. I know you're a bunch of different admins with different personal guidelines, but are you sure one of you isn't a random number generator?
Since waves of "not wanted" are washing over me now, I'm going to bed.
posted by rokusan at 12:57 AM on October 24, 2008
It is kind of one-sided.
The majority ofMetafilter America has spoken!
posted by clearly at 2:03 AM on October 24, 2008
The majority of
posted by clearly at 2:03 AM on October 24, 2008
Oh, get off the cross. The moderators aren´t Platonic philosopher-kings, but they do alright.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 2:08 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 2:08 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure what the benefit is of hiding the bad posts so that only the worthy can find them, after a quest. The worthy probably do not need to learn from example.
What I do know is that having a deleted posts location would probably help cut down on the number of posts in MetaTalk of people looking for and wanting to see deleted posts more easily. Is this the ... twentieth time this has come up? More? While users ask for weird and useless things from online systems all the time, this is a very consistent and specific request that comes up time and again and it has an arguable benefit. Would an experiment really kill anyone? Chaos in the streets? Dogs and cats, living together?
And if the mods aren't really interested in having it, but enough of the users are, well ... I ask this question all the time professionally: As the requests grow, must we develop better and better reasons for rejecting them? Is this system for us, or for the users?
Thanks for the philosopher-kings, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot; now I've got this vision of a disembodied voice, moaning at cortex, "What is secret of the Grail? Whom does it serve?" as he stares at the limp form of mathowie, bathed in blue LED glow from a server rack.
posted by adipocere at 3:05 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
What I do know is that having a deleted posts location would probably help cut down on the number of posts in MetaTalk of people looking for and wanting to see deleted posts more easily. Is this the ... twentieth time this has come up? More? While users ask for weird and useless things from online systems all the time, this is a very consistent and specific request that comes up time and again and it has an arguable benefit. Would an experiment really kill anyone? Chaos in the streets? Dogs and cats, living together?
And if the mods aren't really interested in having it, but enough of the users are, well ... I ask this question all the time professionally: As the requests grow, must we develop better and better reasons for rejecting them? Is this system for us, or for the users?
Thanks for the philosopher-kings, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot; now I've got this vision of a disembodied voice, moaning at cortex, "What is secret of the Grail? Whom does it serve?" as he stares at the limp form of mathowie, bathed in blue LED glow from a server rack.
posted by adipocere at 3:05 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
Good beautiful morning! :)
Okay, so I see now that I'm an idiot for blithely wandering into what I didn't realize was a third rail made up of poisonous, radioactive landmines here. I thought it was a boring and reasonable idea: why not a link to see the deleted posts along with why they were deleted? I even thought I done good by hauling it out of the blue and into MetaTalk.
Oops. I did not know this had been a longstanding issue around here, let alone such a loaded and contentious one that would bring such strong slap-downs. I apologize for adding gasoline to what's clearly been a long-smoldering fire.
In the middle of this thread, a random comment of mine was deleted from another thread without explanation or apparent sense. I figured it was a mod joking around. It was an almost-perfect example of what I meant, after all, at just the right moment... something vanished to nothingness without comment while other near-identical things stood right beside it. (Yeah, it was comments rather than posts, but I figured it was some admin or other making a funny point about inscrutability being the goal. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Doesn't matter. It happens to something I say every couple days, anyway. Maybe more, I don't know how to check.)
But this here MetaTalk thread has now gone waaaay farther, at least for me, and gotten more serious than I ever cared about the issue, so I'm backing away slowly and leaving y'all to heave around baggage that I don't understand.
In terms of gestalt understanding, I'm closer to getting it now: The frequently-unasked question of why some things are deleted and why some other, near-identical (?) things are retained is supposed to go unasked, and I fell for the trap of asking it. The method is supposed to be opaque and inscrutable by design, and we're not supposed to see or or understand it unless we're willing to put on a flame-proof suit and wade into MetaTalk to "protest" each single issue... at which point we'll be ridiculed for caring so much about a given post/message/jokey-comment or whatever... even if we didn't, and we were just curious.
Anyway, I get that now, and it's actually fine with me. Seriously. It's y'all's website, and you should run it however you like, and you're clearly tired of hearing certain suggestions that you really don't want to hear anymore. I'm sure I'd be just as sick of the hearing the same things after so many years. I just didn't quite understand that before I jumped in, sorry.
So I now sheepishly return to the more familiar confines of blue and green-walled gardens, where things both beautiful and horrible wink in and out of existence from time to time, silently and mysteriously, like lights in the void.
And I will learn to admire this as an essential part of the Glorious Creation. :)
posted by rokusan at 5:11 AM on October 24, 2008
Okay, so I see now that I'm an idiot for blithely wandering into what I didn't realize was a third rail made up of poisonous, radioactive landmines here. I thought it was a boring and reasonable idea: why not a link to see the deleted posts along with why they were deleted? I even thought I done good by hauling it out of the blue and into MetaTalk.
Oops. I did not know this had been a longstanding issue around here, let alone such a loaded and contentious one that would bring such strong slap-downs. I apologize for adding gasoline to what's clearly been a long-smoldering fire.
In the middle of this thread, a random comment of mine was deleted from another thread without explanation or apparent sense. I figured it was a mod joking around. It was an almost-perfect example of what I meant, after all, at just the right moment... something vanished to nothingness without comment while other near-identical things stood right beside it. (Yeah, it was comments rather than posts, but I figured it was some admin or other making a funny point about inscrutability being the goal. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Doesn't matter. It happens to something I say every couple days, anyway. Maybe more, I don't know how to check.)
But this here MetaTalk thread has now gone waaaay farther, at least for me, and gotten more serious than I ever cared about the issue, so I'm backing away slowly and leaving y'all to heave around baggage that I don't understand.
In terms of gestalt understanding, I'm closer to getting it now: The frequently-unasked question of why some things are deleted and why some other, near-identical (?) things are retained is supposed to go unasked, and I fell for the trap of asking it. The method is supposed to be opaque and inscrutable by design, and we're not supposed to see or or understand it unless we're willing to put on a flame-proof suit and wade into MetaTalk to "protest" each single issue... at which point we'll be ridiculed for caring so much about a given post/message/jokey-comment or whatever... even if we didn't, and we were just curious.
Anyway, I get that now, and it's actually fine with me. Seriously. It's y'all's website, and you should run it however you like, and you're clearly tired of hearing certain suggestions that you really don't want to hear anymore. I'm sure I'd be just as sick of the hearing the same things after so many years. I just didn't quite understand that before I jumped in, sorry.
So I now sheepishly return to the more familiar confines of blue and green-walled gardens, where things both beautiful and horrible wink in and out of existence from time to time, silently and mysteriously, like lights in the void.
And I will learn to admire this as an essential part of the Glorious Creation. :)
posted by rokusan at 5:11 AM on October 24, 2008
Looking at the deleted threads blog I see that vacapinta still needs to get into the swing of "This post was deleted for the following reason".
posted by ninebelow at 5:23 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by ninebelow at 5:23 AM on October 24, 2008
rokusan I really am having a tough time trying to see what your beef is here.
You asked a question and it was answered - several times over - by other users and also by the moderators.
Since then you've done your best to disregard what people have said to you on several points and have turned it into a conspiracy theory.
posted by panboi at 5:36 AM on October 24, 2008
You asked a question and it was answered - several times over - by other users and also by the moderators.
Since then you've done your best to disregard what people have said to you on several points and have turned it into a conspiracy theory.
posted by panboi at 5:36 AM on October 24, 2008
Maybe the posting screen should show the last few previously deleted threads. Then someone who is posting could see the context of their post, but they would still be deleted from everyone else.
posted by smackfu at 5:47 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by smackfu at 5:47 AM on October 24, 2008
Just Curious:
Are there weblogs/forums that have deleted posts sidebar/thread etc? If so, how has that worked out for them?
Also, are there weblogs/forums that inform the user whenever a comment has been deleted?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:48 AM on October 24, 2008
Are there weblogs/forums that have deleted posts sidebar/thread etc? If so, how has that worked out for them?
Also, are there weblogs/forums that inform the user whenever a comment has been deleted?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:48 AM on October 24, 2008
As the poster of the deleted FPP that spawned this discussion, I can say that penduluum was right.
The community, harshly or otherwise, corrected my posting behavior for the better. This pressure is something that, as a relatively new user, I must expect from time time and adapt to if I wish to remain a member.
FWIW, it seems to me like the poster of a deleted FPP can still find it easily enough to learn from the deletion and make a better post next time. Heck, my deleted post still appears on the front page for me, it's just grayed out and has cortex's reason for deletion tacked onto it.
posted by aheckler at 5:49 AM on October 24, 2008
The community, harshly or otherwise, corrected my posting behavior for the better. This pressure is something that, as a relatively new user, I must expect from time time and adapt to if I wish to remain a member.
FWIW, it seems to me like the poster of a deleted FPP can still find it easily enough to learn from the deletion and make a better post next time. Heck, my deleted post still appears on the front page for me, it's just grayed out and has cortex's reason for deletion tacked onto it.
posted by aheckler at 5:49 AM on October 24, 2008
I truly don't get the fear of posting to the blue. The absolute worst thing that could happen is that people on the Internet will yell at you. Is that really so bad?
posted by Rock Steady at 5:51 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by Rock Steady at 5:51 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
Are there weblogs/forums that have deleted posts sidebar/thread etc?
Something Awful has a forum that deleted threads are moved to. Amusingly, their Orson Scott Card thread got deleted just like ours. OTOH, they have a deleted thread titled "any grls here under 16??" too.
posted by smackfu at 5:53 AM on October 24, 2008
Something Awful has a forum that deleted threads are moved to. Amusingly, their Orson Scott Card thread got deleted just like ours. OTOH, they have a deleted thread titled "any grls here under 16??" too.
posted by smackfu at 5:53 AM on October 24, 2008
Rock Steady: For me, it's the fact that I, inadvertently or not, violated the (unwritten?) standards of the community when I did not wish to do so.
posted by aheckler at 5:55 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by aheckler at 5:55 AM on October 24, 2008
and have turned it into a conspiracy theory.
Argh. And this is why I gave up. Why am I here? :/
It's the opposite of a conspiracy: it's apparently random and clearly uncoordinated and (as this thread explained to me) it is supposed to go unexplained by design. I thought the under-rug-swept nature of deletion reasons was just an oversight, but now I understand it was a deliberate decision in the way MeFi works, and it's been well-discussed and thought-about long before my time... and roundly rejected.
But most of all my point was: now that I get that, I really don't mind, and I won't step into the trap of asking again! I can live in a world with crazy randomness. It's all good!
(Also, jesus bloody christ, humor just doesn't work in gray for me, does it?)
posted by rokusan at 6:27 AM on October 24, 2008
Argh. And this is why I gave up. Why am I here? :/
It's the opposite of a conspiracy: it's apparently random and clearly uncoordinated and (as this thread explained to me) it is supposed to go unexplained by design. I thought the under-rug-swept nature of deletion reasons was just an oversight, but now I understand it was a deliberate decision in the way MeFi works, and it's been well-discussed and thought-about long before my time... and roundly rejected.
But most of all my point was: now that I get that, I really don't mind, and I won't step into the trap of asking again! I can live in a world with crazy randomness. It's all good!
(Also, jesus bloody christ, humor just doesn't work in gray for me, does it?)
posted by rokusan at 6:27 AM on October 24, 2008
Rokusan, maybe I can help with this thread. The ONLY way to ever get anywhere in MetaTalk is to make the post, and don't come back to it for a few days. If your idea is good, other people will champion it (but they won't if the original poster hangs around). If it is bad, other people will flameout on your behalf. The only winning move is not to play the game.
Also, those threads wouldn't have been deleted if they hadn't been dressed like that.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:48 AM on October 24, 2008 [3 favorites]
Also, those threads wouldn't have been deleted if they hadn't been dressed like that.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:48 AM on October 24, 2008 [3 favorites]
...the way us wrong-siders feel about it all.
Yeah, when something that's been spinning one way for eight years suddenly switches directions, it takes a while to get used to, doesn't it?
posted by Rykey at 7:20 AM on October 24, 2008
Yeah, when something that's been spinning one way for eight years suddenly switches directions, it takes a while to get used to, doesn't it?
posted by Rykey at 7:20 AM on October 24, 2008
Also, those threads wouldn't have been deleted if they hadn't been dressed like that.
I never get tired of orthogonal rape jokes in unrelated threads!
And rokusan, in answer to your more recent query, we tend to work from the flag queue and some jokey non-answers are either more flag-bait than others or more offensive/annoying than others. Many of the things we delete are clear-cut and then there's a few that are really judgement calls. We could leave them or remove them and we try to make that choice based on how the thread is going, what we know about the poster what we think might be likely to happen etc. Comment removal, esp in MeFi, happens pretty rarely [more frequently in AskMe] and it's a whole different animal than thread deletion which usually follows some more standard metrics.
I don't think there's anythign wrong with asking why the system works the way it does, but I sort of feel that we havne't quite gotten at your question yet. Clearly you'd like to see the site work slightly differently, we've said, and others have chimed in, why that likely won't happen and I'm not sure what else we should talk about. Craigslist has the island of lost threads, where deleted threads go to die [the ones that aren't out and out deleted, it's confusing over there too] and the place becomes a weird fetid cesspool sometimes and I think that's the sort of thing we're hoping to avoid over here.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:22 AM on October 24, 2008
I never get tired of orthogonal rape jokes in unrelated threads!
And rokusan, in answer to your more recent query, we tend to work from the flag queue and some jokey non-answers are either more flag-bait than others or more offensive/annoying than others. Many of the things we delete are clear-cut and then there's a few that are really judgement calls. We could leave them or remove them and we try to make that choice based on how the thread is going, what we know about the poster what we think might be likely to happen etc. Comment removal, esp in MeFi, happens pretty rarely [more frequently in AskMe] and it's a whole different animal than thread deletion which usually follows some more standard metrics.
I don't think there's anythign wrong with asking why the system works the way it does, but I sort of feel that we havne't quite gotten at your question yet. Clearly you'd like to see the site work slightly differently, we've said, and others have chimed in, why that likely won't happen and I'm not sure what else we should talk about. Craigslist has the island of lost threads, where deleted threads go to die [the ones that aren't out and out deleted, it's confusing over there too] and the place becomes a weird fetid cesspool sometimes and I think that's the sort of thing we're hoping to avoid over here.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:22 AM on October 24, 2008
The absolute worst thing that could happen is that people on the Internet will yell at you. Is that really so bad?
The "It's just people on the internet" thing doesn't really hold water when we get into what an on-line community is - when folks go out of their way to help a member who is going through a rough time, is it just people on the internet? When two individuals who wouldn't have met otherwise collaborate on a way cool project or even *sigh!* fall in love, is it just people on the internet? Chalking up MetaFilter's occasional failings and negative crap to "just people on the internet" diminishes the awesome things this community has achieved or that the site has facilitated or empowered its members to accomplish.
aheckler already addressed it, but I understand how it can be disheartening and discouraging to see your effort to contribute to and participate in a community you enjoy - Enough to drop a fin, the mighty and persuasive power of five dollars cannot be ignored! - derided or dismissed.
That said, if you're worried about catching FPP flak, just don't suck. Browse your Favorites and get a feel for what it was that appealed to you, or check out the posting history of a MeFite whose contributions you enjoy.
Just don't suck.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 7:53 AM on October 24, 2008
The "It's just people on the internet" thing doesn't really hold water when we get into what an on-line community is - when folks go out of their way to help a member who is going through a rough time, is it just people on the internet? When two individuals who wouldn't have met otherwise collaborate on a way cool project or even *sigh!* fall in love, is it just people on the internet? Chalking up MetaFilter's occasional failings and negative crap to "just people on the internet" diminishes the awesome things this community has achieved or that the site has facilitated or empowered its members to accomplish.
aheckler already addressed it, but I understand how it can be disheartening and discouraging to see your effort to contribute to and participate in a community you enjoy - Enough to drop a fin, the mighty and persuasive power of five dollars cannot be ignored! - derided or dismissed.
That said, if you're worried about catching FPP flak, just don't suck. Browse your Favorites and get a feel for what it was that appealed to you, or check out the posting history of a MeFite whose contributions you enjoy.
Just don't suck.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 7:53 AM on October 24, 2008
I'm wondering leaving an FPP PoliticalFilter was left standing so all the minor league electoral stuff could stuff could go there would work... I'm kind of missing the days of supersized catch-all electoral threads though.
posted by Artw at 8:12 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by Artw at 8:12 AM on October 24, 2008
The frequently-unasked question of why some things are deleted and why some other, near-identical (?) things are retained is supposed to go unasked, and I fell for the trap of asking it.
No, really, that's not the case. It's fine to ask. Metatalk is here for asking. The reason this discussion has happened in various forms as much as it has is that this is the place to have it. We're not telling you not to ask, or that anything is supposed to be a big secret.
Like jessamyn just said, I think we're kind of stuck here about not knowing what the question you feel is still unanswered is supposed to be. If it's just "why are some things deleted when other things aren't", the problem is that that's a huge, broad question that we can't answer by just pointing at some explicit rulebook that determines the fate of a post according to a set of strictures. It doesn't work that way; there's a whole lot of contextual details and long-memory stuff that go into the work we do that can't be nailed down that easily.
If you can be more specific about the kinds of things that are leaving you confused, or a specific set of posts that are or aren't deleted and the your queries about how the hammer fell as it did, again, I'm totally happy to try and hash that out a little. But right now it feels sort of like you're saying "Why?" and we're saying "Why what?" and you're responding with "What, I can't ask a question?", and so I'm sort of stuck scratching my head not knowing how to respond.
And please, please don't keep throwing random gripes about deletionism into the blue. This is what metatalk is for.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:32 AM on October 24, 2008
No, really, that's not the case. It's fine to ask. Metatalk is here for asking. The reason this discussion has happened in various forms as much as it has is that this is the place to have it. We're not telling you not to ask, or that anything is supposed to be a big secret.
Like jessamyn just said, I think we're kind of stuck here about not knowing what the question you feel is still unanswered is supposed to be. If it's just "why are some things deleted when other things aren't", the problem is that that's a huge, broad question that we can't answer by just pointing at some explicit rulebook that determines the fate of a post according to a set of strictures. It doesn't work that way; there's a whole lot of contextual details and long-memory stuff that go into the work we do that can't be nailed down that easily.
If you can be more specific about the kinds of things that are leaving you confused, or a specific set of posts that are or aren't deleted and the your queries about how the hammer fell as it did, again, I'm totally happy to try and hash that out a little. But right now it feels sort of like you're saying "Why?" and we're saying "Why what?" and you're responding with "What, I can't ask a question?", and so I'm sort of stuck scratching my head not knowing how to respond.
And please, please don't keep throwing random gripes about deletionism into the blue. This is what metatalk is for.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:32 AM on October 24, 2008
Maybe it's too late to derail this thing, but I have a question for the mods about deleting of Metatalk threads -- why do some get deleted and some simply "closed"? For a long time I didn't realize that MeTa threads ever got deleted, assuming that "closing" was the deletion equivalent.
posted by camcgee at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by camcgee at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2008
MeTa didn't used to have both deletion and close options; it used to be that nuke from orbit was the only setting. Now we have both. Usually if discussion has run its course and people are just starting to fling poo or whatever, we might close a thread. Deletion is more when someone's question itself is either part of the problem [long standing grudge nonsense that needs to go elsewhere] or if it's potentially very embarassing in the clear light of day etc. We don't delete MeTa threads very often, but it does happen.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:49 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:49 AM on October 24, 2008
...a third rail made up of poisonous, radioactive landmines... gasoline... a long-smoldering fire.
Well, I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what could be the centerpiece to my November 5th BBQ and I think rokusan just nailed it. Add booze and a limbo pole and we will party that won't just be good, it'll be legendary.
posted by quin at 8:51 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
Well, I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what could be the centerpiece to my November 5th BBQ and I think rokusan just nailed it. Add booze and a limbo pole and we will party that won't just be good, it'll be legendary.
posted by quin at 8:51 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
The distinction is generally between "this doesn't really need a metatalk thread" or "this has served its purpose and/or gotten out of hand now" for closures vs. "making this metatalk post was a really awful idea" for deletions, though there's a bit more nuance in there too from situation to situation.
Deletion is usually reserved for Metatalk posts that are more trouble as visible landmarks than they're worth—over-the-top Fuck You posts, really confused users posting the wrong thing in the wrong place, misc. dramarama hijinks, that range of stuff. For everything else, a note and a closure is what we usually prefer, since it's a little clearer what's up that way and given the meta-policy nature of this part of the site that seems to work pretty well.
For a long time, deletions in Metatalk weren't normal the-thread-is-still-accessible deletions like we have on the blue and the green; if we deleted a post, it was gone, period, a holdover from the very early days of the site. Few things got deleted because of that, and so closure was really the only option if we didn't want to nuke something from orbit. That meant more closures where now we'll be inclined to delete the worst stuff; as a result, there was more danger of (a) a feedback loop on problematic stuff that got closed instead of deleted, since it was still staring everybody in the face on the slow-moving front page of metatalk, or (b) upset users wanting to know why something was so awful that it had to be nuked from orbit, with attendant high drama and conspiracy theorizing to boot.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:55 AM on October 24, 2008
Deletion is usually reserved for Metatalk posts that are more trouble as visible landmarks than they're worth—over-the-top Fuck You posts, really confused users posting the wrong thing in the wrong place, misc. dramarama hijinks, that range of stuff. For everything else, a note and a closure is what we usually prefer, since it's a little clearer what's up that way and given the meta-policy nature of this part of the site that seems to work pretty well.
For a long time, deletions in Metatalk weren't normal the-thread-is-still-accessible deletions like we have on the blue and the green; if we deleted a post, it was gone, period, a holdover from the very early days of the site. Few things got deleted because of that, and so closure was really the only option if we didn't want to nuke something from orbit. That meant more closures where now we'll be inclined to delete the worst stuff; as a result, there was more danger of (a) a feedback loop on problematic stuff that got closed instead of deleted, since it was still staring everybody in the face on the slow-moving front page of metatalk, or (b) upset users wanting to know why something was so awful that it had to be nuked from orbit, with attendant high drama and conspiracy theorizing to boot.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:55 AM on October 24, 2008
That we do things like independently produce the phrase "nuke from orbit" six minutes apart is one of the many reasons I like working here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:57 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:57 AM on October 24, 2008
That you can be so like-minded and still produce such random deletion patterns is especially fascinating.
posted by carsonb at 9:00 AM on October 24, 2008
posted by carsonb at 9:00 AM on October 24, 2008
We bought our dartboards from different manufacturers.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:09 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:09 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
The frequently-unasked question of why some things are deleted and why some other, near-identical (?) things are retained is supposed to go unasked, and I fell for the trap of asking it.
No, really, that's not the case. It's fine to ask.
Okay, I will try again, but man this is so much a bigger deal than I meant it to be, already. I already learned what I needed, which is that there's no real pattern or rules to what is deleted, no way for regular folks to see the reasons, and it's deliberately that way. I did not know those things before.
Here's a very long re-attempt. I can't believe I'm still talking about something so silly, but now that cortex and jessamyn have followed up so kindly, I feel like I should try harder too.
So, there were now two different questions, I guess.
(1) FPPs: Since there is no hard and fast rulebook, and the decisions on which FPPs are deleted and which are not seems so random sometimes, especially lately (single link youtube bad... single link youtube good), my original question was: why isn't there a nice, simple, "Deleted Posts" link so that we can see what was deleted, and most of all, why? It might be a good learning tool, especially if you want new posters to make higher quality FPPs sooner.
The majority of deleted posts... I probably saw them, maybe, but I really can't remember. Unless I happened to comment on them, I really can never find them again once they're poofed away, right?
BUT this really wasn't about any particular post, or even about me (because yes, lots of folks here have explained Greasemonkey hacks and that deleted-posts blog and other not-part-of-MetaFilter ways to find them if I want to sit down and try). But rather, I was saying "This could be helpful to many people who, like me, might be confused about WTF the criteria really are, no?"
Which would only work if it was a regular part of the regular site, not some extra-site tool for digging with. And the answer to that was a pretty clear and resounding "No." from all quarters, for various reasons. Fine. Bad idea I guess.
(2) Not part of the original post here, and totally only came up during the thread by accident because it happened at the same moment: when comments are deleted in what appears to be a similarly random way (some jokey ones deleted, some adjacent jokey ones left standing, and there's no pattern that makes sense), why can't the user who made those now-deleted comments still see them, and the reason for their deletion?
(The bad "What does Obama smell like?" AskMe was like this. I didn't participate, but I was watching and I was dying to figure out why some were killed and others were left intact. It would have been nice to know where the line was, even vaguely, or see the reasons for each individual kill switch... even though that was a silly question/topic.)
Because whenever I see this, I think maybe there is a pattern, just no way to see it. I do not believe we have any way to see why individual comments were deleted, or most of all, even that they were deleted, except in those rare occasions an admin adds a note saying "Some comments deleted that were racist and also featured poor spelling". Those are tremendously helpful, but also very rare, and of course they're addressed to everyone, not just the commenter.
As I said somewhere else a few weeks ago, I have had dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of comments deleted... or maybe it was just three comments. I don't really know, because I don't think there's any way to tell, and so for each rare time I notice (by reading an old thread and remembering... hey, I said something there and it's gone!), I assume there must be ten other comments that were silently vanished, too. But I can't be sure: I can't see them or read why they were deleted, and so I don't have any way to learn to be a better commenter even... when it seems to me that it would be so easy to just show mewhy various things were killed. Heck, I trust the editors here to censor appropriately for the most part: I would just like to see their blue lines on my own rejected blather.
So while (1) was about other people's FPPs, (2)'s shorter question would be: why aren't MY OWN deleted comments still visible to me alone, along with nice little explanations like "comment removed -- cortex thinks this blows" or whatever? I could use that. I could learn from that.
Again, understand I'm not whining about any deleting in particular: I probably wouldn't mind 99 percent of the removals, since lots are off-the-cuff things anyway that I might even delete myself with a sober second thought. But heck, as a near-professional snarky comment writer, I sure would appreciate being in the feedback loop!
Instead, I have to notice/remember something was killed, and then I have to care enough to make a big whiny MeTa thread about "Why my comment #6524 was removed OMG CENZORSHIP!?"
And that's overkill. I would feel even sillier e-mailing a mod over some six word joke, but that's the only way I get to find out, right? That seems silly to me when it'd be so easy to show the reason to me. No admin time-wasting needed. I can self-analyze. :)
On reflection, I derailed and should have left (2) for another day, though I probably would never have dared return to ask about a feature here for a long while.
But what I did learn from this thread (and this is not snark!), is that y'all have made (1) the deleted FPPs and (2) the reasons for comment deletion deliberately obscure/absent, and that's what I did not understand before. I assumed it was an accident or oversight.
You have chosen to not "show your work", and all along I was assuming that because MetaFilter seems pretty process-transparent most of the time, that "of course" you meant to, and this is just a feature that somehow slipped past and nobody suggested before. Ha. I was very wrong. I learned that its a "feature, not a bug", and you have given the idea much consideration in the past, but have decided to leave that info absent or hard to dig out for your own carefully considered reasons.
That's fine and good, but it's what made my whole premise false: I thought I was suggesting some simple thing that would be maybe-useful-to-others... but the response was much stronger and more negative than I expected, and worse, it seemed to be aimed back at me more than was logical, as if I was whining about some post I made that had been deleted. (I've never even made a post!) And I think that's because as a few have alluded, this issue is not only not new, it's been pounded into the ground before. I didn't know that. Sorry for wasting everyone's time, etc.
I can survive fine with people insulting me and whatnot on the blue, and even the green. But yeah, I felt sort of ambushed here, where for some reason I expected a different kind of conversation. I wasn't griping about (x) post being deleted unfairly, or how-dare-you-delete-my-bad-joke... I was just suggesting that it might be nice for everyone to see the actual editorial decisions more easily and transparently so we could all learn more naturally, as we go.
But I have heard, in addition to the above, that I'm sort of way out in left-crazyfield in desiring this, and so I meant it when I said that it's not a big deal: now that I know that the editorial decisions are indeed quite random and deliberately obscure, I can live with that.
posted by rokusan at 9:39 AM on October 24, 2008
No, really, that's not the case. It's fine to ask.
Okay, I will try again, but man this is so much a bigger deal than I meant it to be, already. I already learned what I needed, which is that there's no real pattern or rules to what is deleted, no way for regular folks to see the reasons, and it's deliberately that way. I did not know those things before.
Here's a very long re-attempt. I can't believe I'm still talking about something so silly, but now that cortex and jessamyn have followed up so kindly, I feel like I should try harder too.
So, there were now two different questions, I guess.
(1) FPPs: Since there is no hard and fast rulebook, and the decisions on which FPPs are deleted and which are not seems so random sometimes, especially lately (single link youtube bad... single link youtube good), my original question was: why isn't there a nice, simple, "Deleted Posts" link so that we can see what was deleted, and most of all, why? It might be a good learning tool, especially if you want new posters to make higher quality FPPs sooner.
The majority of deleted posts... I probably saw them, maybe, but I really can't remember. Unless I happened to comment on them, I really can never find them again once they're poofed away, right?
BUT this really wasn't about any particular post, or even about me (because yes, lots of folks here have explained Greasemonkey hacks and that deleted-posts blog and other not-part-of-MetaFilter ways to find them if I want to sit down and try). But rather, I was saying "This could be helpful to many people who, like me, might be confused about WTF the criteria really are, no?"
Which would only work if it was a regular part of the regular site, not some extra-site tool for digging with. And the answer to that was a pretty clear and resounding "No." from all quarters, for various reasons. Fine. Bad idea I guess.
(2) Not part of the original post here, and totally only came up during the thread by accident because it happened at the same moment: when comments are deleted in what appears to be a similarly random way (some jokey ones deleted, some adjacent jokey ones left standing, and there's no pattern that makes sense), why can't the user who made those now-deleted comments still see them, and the reason for their deletion?
(The bad "What does Obama smell like?" AskMe was like this. I didn't participate, but I was watching and I was dying to figure out why some were killed and others were left intact. It would have been nice to know where the line was, even vaguely, or see the reasons for each individual kill switch... even though that was a silly question/topic.)
Because whenever I see this, I think maybe there is a pattern, just no way to see it. I do not believe we have any way to see why individual comments were deleted, or most of all, even that they were deleted, except in those rare occasions an admin adds a note saying "Some comments deleted that were racist and also featured poor spelling". Those are tremendously helpful, but also very rare, and of course they're addressed to everyone, not just the commenter.
As I said somewhere else a few weeks ago, I have had dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of comments deleted... or maybe it was just three comments. I don't really know, because I don't think there's any way to tell, and so for each rare time I notice (by reading an old thread and remembering... hey, I said something there and it's gone!), I assume there must be ten other comments that were silently vanished, too. But I can't be sure: I can't see them or read why they were deleted, and so I don't have any way to learn to be a better commenter even... when it seems to me that it would be so easy to just show mewhy various things were killed. Heck, I trust the editors here to censor appropriately for the most part: I would just like to see their blue lines on my own rejected blather.
So while (1) was about other people's FPPs, (2)'s shorter question would be: why aren't MY OWN deleted comments still visible to me alone, along with nice little explanations like "comment removed -- cortex thinks this blows" or whatever? I could use that. I could learn from that.
Again, understand I'm not whining about any deleting in particular: I probably wouldn't mind 99 percent of the removals, since lots are off-the-cuff things anyway that I might even delete myself with a sober second thought. But heck, as a near-professional snarky comment writer, I sure would appreciate being in the feedback loop!
Instead, I have to notice/remember something was killed, and then I have to care enough to make a big whiny MeTa thread about "Why my comment #6524 was removed OMG CENZORSHIP!?"
And that's overkill. I would feel even sillier e-mailing a mod over some six word joke, but that's the only way I get to find out, right? That seems silly to me when it'd be so easy to show the reason to me. No admin time-wasting needed. I can self-analyze. :)
On reflection, I derailed and should have left (2) for another day, though I probably would never have dared return to ask about a feature here for a long while.
But what I did learn from this thread (and this is not snark!), is that y'all have made (1) the deleted FPPs and (2) the reasons for comment deletion deliberately obscure/absent, and that's what I did not understand before. I assumed it was an accident or oversight.
You have chosen to not "show your work", and all along I was assuming that because MetaFilter seems pretty process-transparent most of the time, that "of course" you meant to, and this is just a feature that somehow slipped past and nobody suggested before. Ha. I was very wrong. I learned that its a "feature, not a bug", and you have given the idea much consideration in the past, but have decided to leave that info absent or hard to dig out for your own carefully considered reasons.
That's fine and good, but it's what made my whole premise false: I thought I was suggesting some simple thing that would be maybe-useful-to-others... but the response was much stronger and more negative than I expected, and worse, it seemed to be aimed back at me more than was logical, as if I was whining about some post I made that had been deleted. (I've never even made a post!) And I think that's because as a few have alluded, this issue is not only not new, it's been pounded into the ground before. I didn't know that. Sorry for wasting everyone's time, etc.
I can survive fine with people insulting me and whatnot on the blue, and even the green. But yeah, I felt sort of ambushed here, where for some reason I expected a different kind of conversation. I wasn't griping about (x) post being deleted unfairly, or how-dare-you-delete-my-bad-joke... I was just suggesting that it might be nice for everyone to see the actual editorial decisions more easily and transparently so we could all learn more naturally, as we go.
But I have heard, in addition to the above, that I'm sort of way out in left-crazyfield in desiring this, and so I meant it when I said that it's not a big deal: now that I know that the editorial decisions are indeed quite random and deliberately obscure, I can live with that.
posted by rokusan at 9:39 AM on October 24, 2008
MeTa didn't used to have both deletion and close options; it used to be that nuke from orbit was the only setting. Now we have both.
Well, heck, I'd love this one to be nuked into eternal hell so I can crawl back to my hole, now duly schooled in The History and Philosophy of MeFi Architecture.
I can stuff my craw full of bacon, STFU and the world will be sunny again.
posted by rokusan at 9:42 AM on October 24, 2008
Well, heck, I'd love this one to be nuked into eternal hell so I can crawl back to my hole, now duly schooled in The History and Philosophy of MeFi Architecture.
I can stuff my craw full of bacon, STFU and the world will be sunny again.
posted by rokusan at 9:42 AM on October 24, 2008
my original question was: why isn't there a nice, simple, "Deleted Posts" link so that we can see what was deleted, and most of all, why? It might be a good learning tool, especially if you want new posters to make higher quality FPPs sooner.
Because you won't learn to write good FPPs by looking at bad (that is, deleted) FPPs?
posted by daniel_charms at 9:59 AM on October 24, 2008
Because you won't learn to write good FPPs by looking at bad (that is, deleted) FPPs?
posted by daniel_charms at 9:59 AM on October 24, 2008
y'all have made (1) the deleted FPPs and (2) the reasons for comment deletion deliberately obscure/absent, and that's what I did not understand before. I assumed it was an accident or oversight.
This may be giving this all too close a read but I think more to the point it's that deleted posts/comments are deleted. We're not obscuring them or otherwise hiding them, we're deleting them so they are no longer part of the site except
- if you are the OP of a deleted thread, you can still see it
- other mechanisms that we've outlines.
I think the way of thinking here is that leaving them around serves more lulzy purposes than it does informative ones and people who are real rules jockeys can hang out in MeTa where we have these conversations all the time. Otherwise, it's a level of noise that I think is generally thought [by mods, by other folks on the site to not add to What MeFi Is and possibly it detracts.
Re: the "what does Obama smell like" thread, I think that was such an edge case that generalizing from anything there would be a bad plan. I almost never leave some stupid joke in a thread just so a dozen people won't make it again, but I did in that case. Otherwise we took out pretty much every other just-jokey comment there.
Again, people mostly know how this place works, there doesn't seem to be a bgi gaping user education gap that needs filling. If the place was all clueless n00bs bumping in to each other all over the place inhibiting everyone else's enjoyment of the site, we might think differently about this.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:05 AM on October 24, 2008
This may be giving this all too close a read but I think more to the point it's that deleted posts/comments are deleted. We're not obscuring them or otherwise hiding them, we're deleting them so they are no longer part of the site except
- if you are the OP of a deleted thread, you can still see it
- other mechanisms that we've outlines.
I think the way of thinking here is that leaving them around serves more lulzy purposes than it does informative ones and people who are real rules jockeys can hang out in MeTa where we have these conversations all the time. Otherwise, it's a level of noise that I think is generally thought [by mods, by other folks on the site to not add to What MeFi Is and possibly it detracts.
Re: the "what does Obama smell like" thread, I think that was such an edge case that generalizing from anything there would be a bad plan. I almost never leave some stupid joke in a thread just so a dozen people won't make it again, but I did in that case. Otherwise we took out pretty much every other just-jokey comment there.
Again, people mostly know how this place works, there doesn't seem to be a bgi gaping user education gap that needs filling. If the place was all clueless n00bs bumping in to each other all over the place inhibiting everyone else's enjoyment of the site, we might think differently about this.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:05 AM on October 24, 2008
now that I know that the editorial decisions are indeed quite random and deliberately obscure, I can live with that.
I think a better way to put this might be that they're somewhat subjective in that we don't have a "what gets removed" flow chart.
Have you not been around here when wingnutted aggrieved parties have called the moderation here random? It's sort of an unkind thing to toss around. I understand that you don't like getting your [many] jokes removed from AskMe when other jokes get to stay through our inattention or whatever, but we're as transparent as we can be to a community of 35K active members. However, we don't have a guidebook of rules that determine what stays and what goes. This is okay for most people, it seems like it is not okay for you. I guess you have to decide what to do about that but continuing to make digs at us while claiming "it's all good" gets a little tiresome. Is it all good, or no?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:11 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
I think a better way to put this might be that they're somewhat subjective in that we don't have a "what gets removed" flow chart.
Have you not been around here when wingnutted aggrieved parties have called the moderation here random? It's sort of an unkind thing to toss around. I understand that you don't like getting your [many] jokes removed from AskMe when other jokes get to stay through our inattention or whatever, but we're as transparent as we can be to a community of 35K active members. However, we don't have a guidebook of rules that determine what stays and what goes. This is okay for most people, it seems like it is not okay for you. I guess you have to decide what to do about that but continuing to make digs at us while claiming "it's all good" gets a little tiresome. Is it all good, or no?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:11 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
rokusan, thanks, that is a helpful elaboration. I'll respond to some of it here as best as I can.
So while (1) was about other people's FPPs, (2)'s shorter question would be: why aren't MY OWN deleted comments still visible to me alone, along with nice little explanations like "comment removed -- cortex thinks this blows" or whatever? I could use that. I could learn from that.
It's a legit question, but I need to separate it into two parts:
2a. Why aren't my own deleted comments still visible to me?
Matt decided a long time ago to keep deleted comments hidden rather than visible, and we've stuck with that because we haven't seen a really good reason to reverse that move. While we delete a fair number of comments in aggregate on a daily basis—largely jokey/off-topic stuff from AskMe—the number of comments an individual user has had deleted is really small on average, and a comment deletion in isolation is not something we consider to be a big problem, for the user or for the site, and so emphasizing the deletion in relatively banal cases (e.g. most of them) doesn't really strike me at least as being worth the likely extra traction that would come out of it.
Will we ever go there? I'd put money on not, but I don't think it's necessarily a closed conversation. At some point, there might be an agreeably strong argument for changing how this works, but so far we haven't seen that, and so it remains as is.
2b. Why can't I see the explanations for the deletions?
We don't make notes on comment deletions. That's a feature unique to post deletions; the explosion of repetitive busy-work that would come with having to throw together a summary for every comment removal decision we make would if anything hurt our ability to moderate threads in an efficient manner, which is bad for the thread and bad for the site.
What we do do is keep an eye out for patterns or red flags in the stuff we're seeing and removing. If someone seems to be making a habit of dropping problematic comments, we'll drop them a line directly. If someone's random comment is a real outlier, we'll write to them. If there's unusual circumstances driving the deletion, or the commenter is maybe brand new and seems genuinely confused about what's going on, or any of a number of other random flares of weirdness are involved: we'll contact them and let them know.
But if it's something more banal—typical folks-should-know-better jokey stuff in askme, or a dumb/offensive throwaway joke somewhere that's collecting a bunch of flags, and it's not from someone who has made a habit of bad behavior that needs addressing, there's a fair chance we'll just delete and keep an ear open and leave it at that, especially on a busy day where we're strapped for resources. Yesterday is a pretty good example of just that, too.
And that's overkill. I would feel even sillier e-mailing a mod over some six word joke, but that's the only way I get to find out, right? That seems silly to me when it'd be so easy to show the reason to me. No admin time-wasting needed. I can self-analyze. :)
Don't feel silly at all! Email—the contact form, particularly—is a welcome and encouraged way to deal with questions about the site, moderation, etc. It's our job; it's a big part of what we do each day. Ask away!
As you say, Metatalk for every little "what happened" is sometimes overkill, but if you're gonna engage in some potential overkill, Metatalk is the place to do it regardless.
I can survive fine with people insulting me and whatnot on the blue, and even the green. But yeah, I felt sort of ambushed here, where for some reason I expected a different kind of conversation.
The grey can be a little rough and tumble; there's both pros and cons to the long memory and sort of collective pattern recognition of long-timers and policy enthusiasts here. I'm sorry you felt ambushed; try not to take it too personally, it's to a degree just the different tone of this place—more forthright and more directly challenging at times than the rest of the site.
now that I know that the editorial decisions are indeed quite random and deliberately obscure, I can live with that.
Ack. I have no idea if there's any way to convince you that "quite random" isn't what we're aiming for or what I believe we're actually achieving, but I too can live with that. I hope this helps some, regardless.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:17 AM on October 24, 2008
So while (1) was about other people's FPPs, (2)'s shorter question would be: why aren't MY OWN deleted comments still visible to me alone, along with nice little explanations like "comment removed -- cortex thinks this blows" or whatever? I could use that. I could learn from that.
It's a legit question, but I need to separate it into two parts:
2a. Why aren't my own deleted comments still visible to me?
Matt decided a long time ago to keep deleted comments hidden rather than visible, and we've stuck with that because we haven't seen a really good reason to reverse that move. While we delete a fair number of comments in aggregate on a daily basis—largely jokey/off-topic stuff from AskMe—the number of comments an individual user has had deleted is really small on average, and a comment deletion in isolation is not something we consider to be a big problem, for the user or for the site, and so emphasizing the deletion in relatively banal cases (e.g. most of them) doesn't really strike me at least as being worth the likely extra traction that would come out of it.
Will we ever go there? I'd put money on not, but I don't think it's necessarily a closed conversation. At some point, there might be an agreeably strong argument for changing how this works, but so far we haven't seen that, and so it remains as is.
2b. Why can't I see the explanations for the deletions?
We don't make notes on comment deletions. That's a feature unique to post deletions; the explosion of repetitive busy-work that would come with having to throw together a summary for every comment removal decision we make would if anything hurt our ability to moderate threads in an efficient manner, which is bad for the thread and bad for the site.
What we do do is keep an eye out for patterns or red flags in the stuff we're seeing and removing. If someone seems to be making a habit of dropping problematic comments, we'll drop them a line directly. If someone's random comment is a real outlier, we'll write to them. If there's unusual circumstances driving the deletion, or the commenter is maybe brand new and seems genuinely confused about what's going on, or any of a number of other random flares of weirdness are involved: we'll contact them and let them know.
But if it's something more banal—typical folks-should-know-better jokey stuff in askme, or a dumb/offensive throwaway joke somewhere that's collecting a bunch of flags, and it's not from someone who has made a habit of bad behavior that needs addressing, there's a fair chance we'll just delete and keep an ear open and leave it at that, especially on a busy day where we're strapped for resources. Yesterday is a pretty good example of just that, too.
And that's overkill. I would feel even sillier e-mailing a mod over some six word joke, but that's the only way I get to find out, right? That seems silly to me when it'd be so easy to show the reason to me. No admin time-wasting needed. I can self-analyze. :)
Don't feel silly at all! Email—the contact form, particularly—is a welcome and encouraged way to deal with questions about the site, moderation, etc. It's our job; it's a big part of what we do each day. Ask away!
As you say, Metatalk for every little "what happened" is sometimes overkill, but if you're gonna engage in some potential overkill, Metatalk is the place to do it regardless.
I can survive fine with people insulting me and whatnot on the blue, and even the green. But yeah, I felt sort of ambushed here, where for some reason I expected a different kind of conversation.
The grey can be a little rough and tumble; there's both pros and cons to the long memory and sort of collective pattern recognition of long-timers and policy enthusiasts here. I'm sorry you felt ambushed; try not to take it too personally, it's to a degree just the different tone of this place—more forthright and more directly challenging at times than the rest of the site.
now that I know that the editorial decisions are indeed quite random and deliberately obscure, I can live with that.
Ack. I have no idea if there's any way to convince you that "quite random" isn't what we're aiming for or what I believe we're actually achieving, but I too can live with that. I hope this helps some, regardless.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:17 AM on October 24, 2008
rokusan: seriously, you need to re-read this thread from the top down - then visit the deleted posts blog to see for yourself the reasons the mods deleted FPPs to begin with. Throwing up comments about it being "quite random and deliberately obscure" is simply demonstrating that you're unwilling or unable to check the provided links.
Also, reading your other comments here, I'm getting a much clearer picture of why your individual posts are being pulled. As someone who whacks up a fair share of jokey comments myself, I'm not that attached to them so much that I'm going to go to MeTa if any of them are pulled.
posted by panboi at 10:56 AM on October 24, 2008
Also, reading your other comments here, I'm getting a much clearer picture of why your individual posts are being pulled. As someone who whacks up a fair share of jokey comments myself, I'm not that attached to them so much that I'm going to go to MeTa if any of them are pulled.
posted by panboi at 10:56 AM on October 24, 2008
Are there weblogs/forums that have deleted posts sidebar/thread etc? If so, how has that worked out for them?
Whedonesque has added one recently. It's about a month old. They're still getting word out the users I think.
posted by Tehanu at 11:44 AM on October 24, 2008
Whedonesque has added one recently. It's about a month old. They're still getting word out the users I think.
posted by Tehanu at 11:44 AM on October 24, 2008
Then visit the deleted posts blog to see for yourself the reasons the mods deleted FPPs to begin with
Actually, as someone said about, the question is more often "Okay, those deletions make sense, but why are THOSE TWO all right, then?", and there's no blog for that. The top of my head cases I remember, more hammer would have made more sense to me than less, but either would at least be a kind of consistency. (Which I need to stop looking for, yes.)
As someone who whacks up a fair share of jokey comments myself, I'm not that attached to them so much that I'm going to go to MeTa if any of them are pulled.
Nor did I here. Nor would I, ever. You got that part, right?
I'd actually rather just never bother writing comments that will be pulled, it's a waste all around... but (as Jessamyn explained) there's no feedback loop unless they're extreme cases, so I'll inevitably keep doing it, someone will inevitably keep deleting them, and I'll never really know because it's not serious enough to contact me over, and that's how the mods want it all to work. Okay, fine. Not what I expected, I don't get the benefit there, but fine anyway.
I really just wanted a little flag so I'd know that they were pulled, and maybe to tell me why. Even without the why, being able to see a list of what was pulled would help me figure it out. It still seems simple and harmless to me, in that it would help both the commenter and the site overall from a quality standpoint. But if nobody else sees a value to it, screw it. I'm just a guy on the internet who really, really should be ignored. Why are you reading this far? Go outside.
quite random and deliberately obscure
I have read it all twice, and I do stand by that (but please understand, not in a nasty way.) It is deliberately obscure, as has been outlined above many times by the admins themselves above. Those two words seem perfectly accurate to me still. It's been planned on purpose, with forethought (and revisited and reaffirmed often, apparently) and it's intentionally not easy to find/view (greasemonkey hack? another entire website?) what little data is available... for various reasons also explained at length above. So, yeah. Deliberately obscure.
As for 'random', of course I accept that it's not literally random. But it certainly comes across as arbitrary sometimes, which ends up looking the same as 'random', especially when any data that could clarify the non-randomness is... sorry, but deliberately obscure. (I see others get frustrated by the apparent randomness of FPP deletes much much more than I ever have. I just happened to ask about it as a bystander, so I'm in the spotlight now.)
But rather than "good idea" or "bad idea, here's why"... the biggest thing I actually learned from this train wreck that this is how the site is supposed to work when it comes to mods deleting things. And overall the site definitely works, so okay, I'm wrong on this being a good idea, even if I don't quite understand why. I don't need to understand why, since I'm actually okay with it now that I understand it is deliberate... which, again... I learned in this thread.
And Jessamyn: Yes, it really is fine. Sure, I think it's a bad (or at least, strange) decision to hide your reasons for things as a matter of process. Your word "[many]", for example, w/r/t jokey comments is the first clue that I have that there's a number more than three involved, but why are clues even needed? The real number, list, reasons for deletions... unavailable to me. Why doesn't a user see their own history in this way? It seems weird to me that it is absent, still... but no, I don't really care, in that I won't be arguing about it. I'll just adapt and live with it. Yes, it's a small annoyance to me that there's a black box aspect to the process in this particular area... but I'll deal by just assuming any/everything could be deleted for reasons I won't be told, and it's probably a lot easier if I just roll with it and don't even attempt to guess why. Again, I don't see how the fog helps anyone, but it's also not a big issue to me, despite this loooong discussion.
Similarly, I see you dealing with a small annoyance of your own, here, with a reasonable amount of patience. At least, I hope it's a small annoyance. Again, no data available. :)
posted by rokusan at 11:45 AM on October 24, 2008
Actually, as someone said about, the question is more often "Okay, those deletions make sense, but why are THOSE TWO all right, then?", and there's no blog for that. The top of my head cases I remember, more hammer would have made more sense to me than less, but either would at least be a kind of consistency. (Which I need to stop looking for, yes.)
As someone who whacks up a fair share of jokey comments myself, I'm not that attached to them so much that I'm going to go to MeTa if any of them are pulled.
Nor did I here. Nor would I, ever. You got that part, right?
I'd actually rather just never bother writing comments that will be pulled, it's a waste all around... but (as Jessamyn explained) there's no feedback loop unless they're extreme cases, so I'll inevitably keep doing it, someone will inevitably keep deleting them, and I'll never really know because it's not serious enough to contact me over, and that's how the mods want it all to work. Okay, fine. Not what I expected, I don't get the benefit there, but fine anyway.
I really just wanted a little flag so I'd know that they were pulled, and maybe to tell me why. Even without the why, being able to see a list of what was pulled would help me figure it out. It still seems simple and harmless to me, in that it would help both the commenter and the site overall from a quality standpoint. But if nobody else sees a value to it, screw it. I'm just a guy on the internet who really, really should be ignored. Why are you reading this far? Go outside.
quite random and deliberately obscure
I have read it all twice, and I do stand by that (but please understand, not in a nasty way.) It is deliberately obscure, as has been outlined above many times by the admins themselves above. Those two words seem perfectly accurate to me still. It's been planned on purpose, with forethought (and revisited and reaffirmed often, apparently) and it's intentionally not easy to find/view (greasemonkey hack? another entire website?) what little data is available... for various reasons also explained at length above. So, yeah. Deliberately obscure.
As for 'random', of course I accept that it's not literally random. But it certainly comes across as arbitrary sometimes, which ends up looking the same as 'random', especially when any data that could clarify the non-randomness is... sorry, but deliberately obscure. (I see others get frustrated by the apparent randomness of FPP deletes much much more than I ever have. I just happened to ask about it as a bystander, so I'm in the spotlight now.)
But rather than "good idea" or "bad idea, here's why"... the biggest thing I actually learned from this train wreck that this is how the site is supposed to work when it comes to mods deleting things. And overall the site definitely works, so okay, I'm wrong on this being a good idea, even if I don't quite understand why. I don't need to understand why, since I'm actually okay with it now that I understand it is deliberate... which, again... I learned in this thread.
And Jessamyn: Yes, it really is fine. Sure, I think it's a bad (or at least, strange) decision to hide your reasons for things as a matter of process. Your word "[many]", for example, w/r/t jokey comments is the first clue that I have that there's a number more than three involved, but why are clues even needed? The real number, list, reasons for deletions... unavailable to me. Why doesn't a user see their own history in this way? It seems weird to me that it is absent, still... but no, I don't really care, in that I won't be arguing about it. I'll just adapt and live with it. Yes, it's a small annoyance to me that there's a black box aspect to the process in this particular area... but I'll deal by just assuming any/everything could be deleted for reasons I won't be told, and it's probably a lot easier if I just roll with it and don't even attempt to guess why. Again, I don't see how the fog helps anyone, but it's also not a big issue to me, despite this loooong discussion.
Similarly, I see you dealing with a small annoyance of your own, here, with a reasonable amount of patience. At least, I hope it's a small annoyance. Again, no data available. :)
posted by rokusan at 11:45 AM on October 24, 2008
Also, reading your other comments here, I'm getting a much clearer picture of why your individual posts are being pulled.
I have never had a post pulled, panboi. I started out by suggesting it might be useful to see why historical posts, in general, had been pulled... that's all. I regret asking, mainly because of the assumptions people keep leaping to in response. :/
posted by rokusan at 11:47 AM on October 24, 2008
I have never had a post pulled, panboi. I started out by suggesting it might be useful to see why historical posts, in general, had been pulled... that's all. I regret asking, mainly because of the assumptions people keep leaping to in response. :/
posted by rokusan at 11:47 AM on October 24, 2008
Have you not been around here when wingnutted aggrieved parties have called the moderation here random? It's sort of an unkind thing to toss around.
Sorry, another term loaded from history I missed. No, I haven't seen that.
I should have said "apparently random" throughout, though, because it's actually the appearance that's frustrating, since there's nothing else to check against. I'm sure it's not actually random.
posted by rokusan at 11:51 AM on October 24, 2008
Sorry, another term loaded from history I missed. No, I haven't seen that.
I should have said "apparently random" throughout, though, because it's actually the appearance that's frustrating, since there's nothing else to check against. I'm sure it's not actually random.
posted by rokusan at 11:51 AM on October 24, 2008
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
posted by blue_beetle at 12:13 PM on October 24, 2008
posted by blue_beetle at 12:13 PM on October 24, 2008
I know, Blue_Beetle. I know. I was done and outta here three times, but I can't ignore questions from Jessamyn and Cortex, can I?
If I ever dare brave the gray pages again, I'll definitely be heeding your advice.
posted by rokusan at 12:19 PM on October 24, 2008
If I ever dare brave the gray pages again, I'll definitely be heeding your advice.
posted by rokusan at 12:19 PM on October 24, 2008
But if deleted posts were any less obscure they wouldn't be very deleted, would they?
posted by Rock Steady at 12:42 PM on October 24, 2008
posted by Rock Steady at 12:42 PM on October 24, 2008
"I have never had a post pulled, panboi. I started out by suggesting it might be useful to see why historical posts, in general, had been pulled... that's all. I regret asking, mainly because of the assumptions people keep leaping to in response. :/"
Up-thread you've stated: "In the middle of this thread, a random comment of mine was deleted from another thread without explanation or apparent sense". I'm not referring to FPP's but comments.
As for the assumptions, no one here has accused you of anything that you haven't already stated.
Your issue appears to boil down to a desire to have a link to deleted posts on the front page of the site. Matt and the team seem unwilling to do so - and for very good reasons as also stated earlier.
That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
Your secondary issue of having every deleted comment tagged with feedback from a moderator is IMO taking micro management a step too far.
posted by panboi at 12:57 PM on October 24, 2008
Up-thread you've stated: "In the middle of this thread, a random comment of mine was deleted from another thread without explanation or apparent sense". I'm not referring to FPP's but comments.
As for the assumptions, no one here has accused you of anything that you haven't already stated.
Your issue appears to boil down to a desire to have a link to deleted posts on the front page of the site. Matt and the team seem unwilling to do so - and for very good reasons as also stated earlier.
That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
Your secondary issue of having every deleted comment tagged with feedback from a moderator is IMO taking micro management a step too far.
posted by panboi at 12:57 PM on October 24, 2008
Your secondary issue of having every deleted comment tagged with feedback from a moderator is IMO taking micro management a step too far.
Plus, as cortex said, this is a level of attention we don't currently give to comment deletion. Writing an explanation for every comment deletion would take time we don't have and result in very little added benefit. If you want to know why a comment was deleted, you can always ask us via the comment form and come to MetaTalk if you have further concerns. If you don't remember that you had a comment that was removed, I'd suggest that you're not that attached to them in the first place -- I probably make five times as many comments as you do and I think I'd notice if one went away. If you want to have an overall discussion about how you could have fewer comments removed from AskMe/MeTa generally, feel free to ask here or over email.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:02 PM on October 24, 2008
Plus, as cortex said, this is a level of attention we don't currently give to comment deletion. Writing an explanation for every comment deletion would take time we don't have and result in very little added benefit. If you want to know why a comment was deleted, you can always ask us via the comment form and come to MetaTalk if you have further concerns. If you don't remember that you had a comment that was removed, I'd suggest that you're not that attached to them in the first place -- I probably make five times as many comments as you do and I think I'd notice if one went away. If you want to have an overall discussion about how you could have fewer comments removed from AskMe/MeTa generally, feel free to ask here or over email.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:02 PM on October 24, 2008
Am I the only person who finds the deletion decision to be pretty easy to grok? (Do you have to be the sort of person who finds grok to be a useful word to have this apparent insight?)
posted by desuetude at 1:04 PM on October 24, 2008
posted by desuetude at 1:04 PM on October 24, 2008
Jesus Christ.
All I know is that after many years and thousands of comments, I still really have no clue why some posts are deleted and others are not, especially the shallow single-link ones.
And yet you've seen a lot of deletion reasons. What makes you think that if everybody saw every deletion reason, they'd Understand, and nobody would complain about deletion? Answer: it wouldn't make any goddam difference. I'm sorry you're so attached to your bad idea that you refuse to accept that it's bad or understand what everyone is trying so patiently to explain to you, but man, you sure are wasting everyone's time, including your own.
Many posts and comments get deleted. The reasons are briefly explained for posts and not at all for comments; the original poster can go to the post and see the reason, and hopefully learn from it. This system works fine. Your idea that it would work better if it were more "transparent" is wrong. And that's the way it is.
posted by languagehat at 1:08 PM on October 24, 2008
All I know is that after many years and thousands of comments, I still really have no clue why some posts are deleted and others are not, especially the shallow single-link ones.
And yet you've seen a lot of deletion reasons. What makes you think that if everybody saw every deletion reason, they'd Understand, and nobody would complain about deletion? Answer: it wouldn't make any goddam difference. I'm sorry you're so attached to your bad idea that you refuse to accept that it's bad or understand what everyone is trying so patiently to explain to you, but man, you sure are wasting everyone's time, including your own.
Many posts and comments get deleted. The reasons are briefly explained for posts and not at all for comments; the original poster can go to the post and see the reason, and hopefully learn from it. This system works fine. Your idea that it would work better if it were more "transparent" is wrong. And that's the way it is.
posted by languagehat at 1:08 PM on October 24, 2008
Up-thread you've stated: "In the middle of this thread, a random comment of mine was deleted from another thread without explanation or apparent sense". I'm not referring to FPP's but comments.
Ah. You said "posts" so I thought you were jumping to another "stop whining yer post got deleted" assumption.
I thought that actual comment-deletion was a joke, actually... and by that I mean I quite literally thought it was one of the admins here joking around. But then I realized the fact I don't know for sure, and that there is no quick way for me to tell why it went away... is sort of the same weirdness as the original question... and so on, and so on.
Your issue appears to boil down to a desire to have a link to deleted posts on the front page of the site. That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
I didn't really have an "issue" until the response was so quick and defensive without any attempt at dialog. It was a question/suggestion that I figured would be good for all. (Very very very bad idea to post it here, of course, I see that.)
As I started out saying, it was actually just a simple (?) question/suggestion that I thought might help everyone make better FPPs. I do think that 100 bad examples is a useful tool. The conversation never got far on that, but if it had, I would have said that I'd think that just the front page portion of the post and delete-reason would have been enough, not the entire page of comments and so on. (For that matter, I don't know why the comments for deleted posts stay now.) That Whedonesque example above looks about right... but yes, my thought that this might be useful is clearly not a popular notion, and it was swatted down as such. Fine.
That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
I guess it must sound like splitting hairs to you, but no, that doesn't help at all in determining the "Why X but not Y?" problem that was the original premise... as I said, more often in practice the question would most often end with "...but then these others were left intact?"
The more involved methods suggested for going out to deliberately find and read deleted posts would not be of any use to the more casual users I was actually thinking of.
Your secondary issue of having every deleted comment tagged with feedback from a moderator is IMO taking micro management a step too far.
I wish I hadn't mentioned that because it's muddied things. I actually presumed that when any comment was killed, it was already tagged internally anyway (users can "flag" every comment with tags already, after all... what are mods doing?) and that users simply were not privy to viewing the info... so again, I guessed it was a simple thing that everyone might benefit from, though I based THAT on how much I'd appreciate it sometimes, yup.
Hell, even without an explanation, a simple list of deleted comments (from the Profile page, for the user's view alone?) could be of some value, I figured.
But I got the picture: not how it works, not how it's supposed to work, not how we want it to work, never mind. Okay!
posted by rokusan at 1:26 PM on October 24, 2008
Ah. You said "posts" so I thought you were jumping to another "stop whining yer post got deleted" assumption.
I thought that actual comment-deletion was a joke, actually... and by that I mean I quite literally thought it was one of the admins here joking around. But then I realized the fact I don't know for sure, and that there is no quick way for me to tell why it went away... is sort of the same weirdness as the original question... and so on, and so on.
Your issue appears to boil down to a desire to have a link to deleted posts on the front page of the site. That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
I didn't really have an "issue" until the response was so quick and defensive without any attempt at dialog. It was a question/suggestion that I figured would be good for all. (Very very very bad idea to post it here, of course, I see that.)
As I started out saying, it was actually just a simple (?) question/suggestion that I thought might help everyone make better FPPs. I do think that 100 bad examples is a useful tool. The conversation never got far on that, but if it had, I would have said that I'd think that just the front page portion of the post and delete-reason would have been enough, not the entire page of comments and so on. (For that matter, I don't know why the comments for deleted posts stay now.) That Whedonesque example above looks about right... but yes, my thought that this might be useful is clearly not a popular notion, and it was swatted down as such. Fine.
That said, you have links to view deleted threads - and also the reasons why they're deleted - at hand.
I guess it must sound like splitting hairs to you, but no, that doesn't help at all in determining the "Why X but not Y?" problem that was the original premise... as I said, more often in practice the question would most often end with "...but then these others were left intact?"
The more involved methods suggested for going out to deliberately find and read deleted posts would not be of any use to the more casual users I was actually thinking of.
Your secondary issue of having every deleted comment tagged with feedback from a moderator is IMO taking micro management a step too far.
I wish I hadn't mentioned that because it's muddied things. I actually presumed that when any comment was killed, it was already tagged internally anyway (users can "flag" every comment with tags already, after all... what are mods doing?) and that users simply were not privy to viewing the info... so again, I guessed it was a simple thing that everyone might benefit from, though I based THAT on how much I'd appreciate it sometimes, yup.
Hell, even without an explanation, a simple list of deleted comments (from the Profile page, for the user's view alone?) could be of some value, I figured.
But I got the picture: not how it works, not how it's supposed to work, not how we want it to work, never mind. Okay!
posted by rokusan at 1:26 PM on October 24, 2008
you sure are wasting everyone's time, including your own... And that's the way it is.
That's how I felt before Cortex and Jessamyn solicited more response.
I'm sorry my idea was so bad, languagehat. Bye.
posted by rokusan at 1:28 PM on October 24, 2008
That's how I felt before Cortex and Jessamyn solicited more response.
I'm sorry my idea was so bad, languagehat. Bye.
posted by rokusan at 1:28 PM on October 24, 2008
I thought that actual comment-deletion was a joke, actually... and by that I mean I quite literally thought it was one of the admins here joking around.
To be clear, for rokusan and anyone else wondering: I can't think of any circumstance wherein we would delete a comment as a joke. It doesn't happen; it's not something we do for laughs, and we don't consider fucking with users in that capacity an acceptable part of our jobs here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:33 PM on October 24, 2008
To be clear, for rokusan and anyone else wondering: I can't think of any circumstance wherein we would delete a comment as a joke. It doesn't happen; it's not something we do for laughs, and we don't consider fucking with users in that capacity an acceptable part of our jobs here.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:33 PM on October 24, 2008
This isn't a dialogue? You were forced to comment? Wha?
posted by desuetude at 1:34 PM on October 24, 2008
posted by desuetude at 1:34 PM on October 24, 2008
Hell, even without an explanation, a simple list of deleted comments (from the Profile page, for the user's view alone?) could be of some value, I figured.
I'm in support of this idea, just because it would clear up some "didn't I comment in this thread?" confusion.
posted by smackfu at 1:56 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
I'm in support of this idea, just because it would clear up some "didn't I comment in this thread?" confusion.
posted by smackfu at 1:56 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
Oh, but not as a list of comments, just include them in your normal activity list and mark them deleted.
posted by smackfu at 1:56 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by smackfu at 1:56 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
If you want the poster to learn from their mistakes maybe u should send the reason of deletion to their mefi mail.
posted by Pseudology at 4:22 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by Pseudology at 4:22 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
If you make so many comments that you can't keep track of the ones that are deleted, either those comments were too unimportant to remember, or you're making too many poorly-considered comments in the first place. If the general feeling of "hey, I think I might have had a bunch of comments deleted but I don't know what they were or why!" doesn't illuminate something about the quality and applicability of your comments, I'm not sure what you would get by an itemized list other than more specific examples of deletion to dissect.
I have had dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of comments deleted... or maybe it was just three comments. I don't really know, because I don't think there's any way to tell, and so for each rare time I notice (by reading an old thread and remembering... hey, I said something there and it's gone!), I assume there must be ten other comments that were silently vanished, too.
This is just plain weird.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:22 PM on October 24, 2008
I have had dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of comments deleted... or maybe it was just three comments. I don't really know, because I don't think there's any way to tell, and so for each rare time I notice (by reading an old thread and remembering... hey, I said something there and it's gone!), I assume there must be ten other comments that were silently vanished, too.
This is just plain weird.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:22 PM on October 24, 2008
Either I'm getting older and more crochety, or the userbase here is getting more obtuse. The deleted threads are visible to the person who posted it (now) along with the reason - even if the reasons are sometimes a bit jokey, they all seem pretty clear to me. if you don't understand the deletion reasons, you don't understand this place and need to spend some time using your eyes here instead of your fingers. If you are getting so many comments deleted that you can't keep track, or are making so many that you can't remember where they are, you have a problem that we can't solve.
Plus, Pseudology - txt-speak is for 12 year-olds that don't know any better. Unless you are 12, please write in your native language otherwise you'll end up on The List. If you are 12, tell your parents this is not a good place for you to be.
I'm sorry my idea was so bad, languagehat. Bye.
Typical of young people today - out with a whimper when a bang would be far more fun.
posted by dg at 6:14 PM on October 24, 2008
Plus, Pseudology - txt-speak is for 12 year-olds that don't know any better. Unless you are 12, please write in your native language otherwise you'll end up on The List. If you are 12, tell your parents this is not a good place for you to be.
I'm sorry my idea was so bad, languagehat. Bye.
Typical of young people today - out with a whimper when a bang would be far more fun.
posted by dg at 6:14 PM on October 24, 2008
Typical of young people today - out with a whimper when a bang would be far more fun.
BANG.
and I'm out
how ya like me now?
posted by davejay at 8:27 PM on October 24, 2008
BANG.
and I'm out
how ya like me now?
posted by davejay at 8:27 PM on October 24, 2008
** break-dances suggestively **
posted by blue_beetle at 8:51 PM on October 24, 2008
posted by blue_beetle at 8:51 PM on October 24, 2008
how ya like me now?
About the same as I liked you before.
posted by dg at 9:24 PM on October 24, 2008
About the same as I liked you before.
posted by dg at 9:24 PM on October 24, 2008
Possible advantage of an easily accessible 'deleted posts' link:
people might look at it and learn.
Possible disadvantages of an easily accessible 'deleted posts' link:
new(ish) members who made a bad post in good faith might prefer to have minimum visibility, especially if the conversation went badly, and to them inclusion in an easily accessible list of deleted posts might even come across as 'naming and shaming';
it might encourage some people to make joke posts that they know in advance will be deleted;
it increases the visibility of posts by self-linkers and spammers.
I believe the disadvantages outweigh the advantages here, especially since those people who are willing to study deleted posts in order to understand what doesn't work on MeFi will probably be aware of the 'deleted posts' blog and LoFi.
posted by rjs at 11:52 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
people might look at it and learn.
Possible disadvantages of an easily accessible 'deleted posts' link:
new(ish) members who made a bad post in good faith might prefer to have minimum visibility, especially if the conversation went badly, and to them inclusion in an easily accessible list of deleted posts might even come across as 'naming and shaming';
it might encourage some people to make joke posts that they know in advance will be deleted;
it increases the visibility of posts by self-linkers and spammers.
I believe the disadvantages outweigh the advantages here, especially since those people who are willing to study deleted posts in order to understand what doesn't work on MeFi will probably be aware of the 'deleted posts' blog and LoFi.
posted by rjs at 11:52 PM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite]
** break-dances suggestively **
Get off my lawn!
The lighting's better by the garage.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:00 AM on October 25, 2008
Get off my lawn!
The lighting's better by the garage.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:00 AM on October 25, 2008
I think that the people who come on and make a crappy post/self-link first time around are stupid/crazy enough that no FAQ on this earth is going to help them, much less a list of deleted posts.
posted by dunkadunc at 5:48 AM on October 25, 2008
posted by dunkadunc at 5:48 AM on October 25, 2008
We're human. We're moderators. We're adults. We can take a few news, political, and election-related threads before it all gets to be too much, and then we remove redundant, minor, antagonistic, or otherwise craptacular posts. You will likely not agree with every deletion and every one kept, but we're all working within the community norms and the ebb and flow of comments, favorites, and flags to see what people really, really don't like and what they don't mind having around.
posted by mathowie at 9:56 PM on October 23
and so the argument why a human being can never be replaced by an algorithm or system or whathave you, regardless of its speed etc. when it comes to dealing with other human beings or a community
and no, personally I don't think the singularity will be wholly technological no matter what bruce believes, its kinda already here with the number of brains communicating together etc (and other such places, i.e. the web that now allows humanity to connect adn communicate)
posted by infini at 8:35 AM on October 25, 2008
posted by mathowie at 9:56 PM on October 23
and so the argument why a human being can never be replaced by an algorithm or system or whathave you, regardless of its speed etc. when it comes to dealing with other human beings or a community
and no, personally I don't think the singularity will be wholly technological no matter what bruce believes, its kinda already here with the number of brains communicating together etc (and other such places, i.e. the web that now allows humanity to connect adn communicate)
posted by infini at 8:35 AM on October 25, 2008
Did you know?
OMG, you guys! The deleted FPPs are posted to sites linked to in the first three comments! It's like the answer was in front of us the whole time! Below you will find a helpful one-stop shopping resource for all of your this-thread needs. I wrote it myself!
THE DELETED FPPS ARE POSTED TO SITES LINKED TO IN THE FIRST THREE COMMENTS
HERE IS A LINK TO A SITE WHERE YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
HERE IS A LINK TO ANOTHER SITE WHERE YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
Bonus!
HERE IS RICK ASTLEY
THESE ARE LOLCATS
THIS IS SARAH PALIN
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT MAY JUST SEEM EERILY FAMILIAR
You're welcome!
The More You Know ~*
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:27 AM on October 25, 2008 [1 favorite]
OMG, you guys! The deleted FPPs are posted to sites linked to in the first three comments! It's like the answer was in front of us the whole time! Below you will find a helpful one-stop shopping resource for all of your this-thread needs. I wrote it myself!
THE DELETED FPPS ARE POSTED TO SITES LINKED TO IN THE FIRST THREE COMMENTS
HERE IS A LINK TO A SITE WHERE YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
HERE IS A LINK TO ANOTHER SITE WHERE YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
Bonus!
HERE IS RICK ASTLEY
THESE ARE LOLCATS
THIS IS SARAH PALIN
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT MAY JUST SEEM EERILY FAMILIAR
You're welcome!
The More You Know ~*
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:27 AM on October 25, 2008 [1 favorite]
Geez, kittens, information is supposed to go on Ask MeFi.
On MetaTalk, please limit comments to snark or help in finding snark. Answers don't help people find snark. Thanks.
posted by lukemeister at 2:11 PM on October 25, 2008 [2 favorites]
On MetaTalk, please limit comments to snark or help in finding snark. Answers don't help people find snark. Thanks.
posted by lukemeister at 2:11 PM on October 25, 2008 [2 favorites]
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT MAY JUST SEEM EERILY FAMILIAR
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT MAY JUST SEEM EERILY FAMILIAR
posted by carsonb at 7:22 PM on October 25, 2008
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT MAY JUST SEEM EERILY FAMILIAR
posted by carsonb at 7:22 PM on October 25, 2008
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by netbros at 8:22 PM on October 23, 2008