AskMe answer makes it to reddit.

November 4, 2009 5:49 AM

The best AskMe answer ever recently made it to reddit. It was, of course, upvoted as the best answer.
posted by taumeson to MetaFilter-related at 5:49 AM (58 comments total)

Nice of him to post scarabic's answer verbatim and only link him as "source" in another reply.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 5:57 AM on November 4 [8 favorites]

From that same thread:

jesus christ can I just dump the body in a tub of acid ala Breaking bad?

Clearly the author of this comment didn't even watch the episode fully, because the acid ate through the porcelain tub as well and dumped the (now mostly dissolved) corpse straight down through the floor.
posted by explosion at 6:21 AM on November 4 [3 favorites]

AskMe answer makes it to reddit.

Is this some sort of feat that I'm unaware of?
posted by gman at 6:29 AM on November 4 [2 favorites]

This thread also got some love from Reddit last year. We talked about it then too.
posted by creeky at 6:29 AM on November 4

Mefi and Reddit need to... GET A ROOM.
posted by jmnugent at 6:32 AM on November 4 [4 favorites]

Blogger writes about other blog, film at 11.
posted by grouse at 6:42 AM on November 4

Chatfilter... flagged.
posted by not_on_display at 6:50 AM on November 4

I wonder how many favourites Scarabic's post has? Guess I'll have to click to find out, but I'm not sure I want to go there. I may never be seen again.
posted by Elmore at 7:01 AM on November 4 [2 favorites]

I see reddit turning up a lot in the mefi referrer logs. It's a big site and enough of its readers either participate or (more often) read mefi that we tend to get pulled into threads on a regular basis.

What's interesting, beyond seeing reddit chatter about some specific bit of mefi content, is watching the perceived "mefi vs. reddit" dynamic play out half the time, especially if someone on reddit chooses to not just link to but explicitly praise mefi. There's a few former-mefites who are happy for the opportunity to complain, a few dual-citizens who make fairly clear-eyed defenses of either site, and a lot of the sort of predictable un-self-reflecting My Place Is Better Than Other Place stuff.

It'd be an interesting project to track down all the mefi-discusses-reddit and reddit-discusses-conversations that have gone down and try and make some sense of them. Tremendous amount of local perspective in evidence in both cases, obviously, but aside from that it be interesting to look carefully at how local values and wants are expressed through contrasts with and complaints about an outside community.
posted by cortex at 7:04 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]

It's actually kind of a terrible answer because it's predicated on being able to keep a corpse around in your house for a good length of time. The idea is to dispose it quickly while leaving as few traces as possible so you're not living with a pile of evidence.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:14 AM on November 4

cortex, when you mention referrer logs, you really mean Google Analytics, right?
posted by Pronoiac at 7:31 AM on November 4

cortex, when you mention referrer logs, you really mean Google Analytics, right?

We crunch logs using analog in addition to GA type stuff.
posted by jessamyn at 7:36 AM on November 4

We crunch logs...

Thanks for letting us know.
posted by gman at 7:41 AM on November 4 [4 favorites]

Clearly the author of this comment didn't even watch the episode fully, because the acid ate through the porcelain tub as well and dumped the (now mostly dissolved) corpse straight down through the floor.

IIRC This only happened because Jesse either couldn't be bothered to get the correct container (lime-proof) or chop the body to fit one...
posted by i_cola at 7:48 AM on November 4

Metafilter filtered. Film at 11!
posted by blue_beetle at 7:50 AM on November 4

"Let the police deal with it" is by far the best advice. Kill far away from home, kill from a distance, and then get far away from there. Never go back.
posted by Meatbomb at 7:58 AM on November 4

That's hard to do if you're trying to dispose of someone you regularly are in contact with, though.

I mean, sure, if I want to kill a random person I can travel and snipe and return home without too much danger. But if I want to take out Bob from Accounting, it'd be tougher.

Maybe if I follow him on his vacation...
posted by graventy at 8:08 AM on November 4 [2 favorites]

The idea is to dispose it quickly while leaving as few traces as possible so you're not living with a pile of evidence.

THAT'S NO PILE OF EVIDENCE, THAT'S MY WIFE
posted by Greg Nog at 8:10 AM on November 4 [9 favorites]

Not anymore, Greg.
posted by flatluigi at 8:23 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]

"Let the police deal with it" is by far the best advice. Kill far away from home, kill from a distance, and then get far away from there. Never go back.

Says the guy that spent a year or so traveling the world.... HMMMM....
posted by empath at 8:29 AM on November 4

I don't like the idea of this information being in Reddit's hands.
posted by The Whelk at 8:30 AM on November 4 [5 favorites]

Still chilling, after all these years.
posted by anniecat at 8:51 AM on November 4

cortex, when you mention referrer logs, you really mean Google Analytics, right?

Like Jess said, we use analog as well for a filtered look at referrer traffic. pb put it together for me a few months ago, I don't really look at the GA stuff myself and my primary interest was local spikes in referrers rather than the big pictures (which contains a great dwarfing pile of search traffic for example).

So when we get, say, a few hundred or a few thousand clicks from some random blog or another site, I can tell that easily at a glance the next morning and follow it back if I'm curious. reddit is one of the sites that tends to show up on a regular basis in that capacity, either because someone submitted a mefi or askme thread or because someone linked to mefi in the ensuing comments.
posted by cortex at 8:59 AM on November 4

It frightens me to think I once had breakfast with scarabic.
posted by orange swan at 9:14 AM on November 4

Balloon Boy (or Box Boy if you prefer) was prefigured in that thread:

What if you took a person, tied him up or whatever, and just tied a bunch of balloons, like, 300, to HIM? And sent him up up and away to watch the balloons pop, until eventually, he just plummets to the earth?

What a horrible way to die, could you imagine?

It was a murder plot all along!
posted by morganw at 9:15 AM on November 4

It frightens me to think I once had breakfast with scarabic.

I hope he didn't cook it. You may never know what was in that hash....
posted by dersins at 9:16 AM on November 4

Man, you can dispose of the body, but that question STILL WILL NOT DIE!

Though that is probably because it is acknowledgedly one of the greatest uses of the internet of all time.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 9:34 AM on November 4

explosion writes "because the acid ate through the porcelain tub as well and dumped the (now mostly dissolved) corpse straight down through the floor."

What kind of consumer available acid can eat through a porcelain tub?

cortex writes "So when we get, say, a few hundred or a few thousand clicks from some random blog or another site, I can tell that easily at a glance the next morning and follow it back if I'm curious. reddit is one of the sites that tends to show up on a regular basis in that capacity, either because someone submitted a mefi or askme thread or because someone linked to mefi in the ensuing comments."

I know this is probably a corporate secret but if not it would be great if it was public facing.
posted by Mitheral at 9:42 AM on November 4

What kind of consumer available acid can eat through a porcelain tub?

The kind that characters on a TV can buy?
posted by dersins at 9:48 AM on November 4

Er, TV show.
posted by dersins at 9:48 AM on November 4

Metafilter: We crunch logs...
posted by elmer benson at 9:50 AM on November 4

I know this is probably a corporate secret but if not it would be great if it was public facing.

My take on it is that a lot of it is pretty dull, low-traffic recurring stuff. There are occasional highlights and I'll sometimes mention 'em on metatalk or twitter where it's relevant.

I'd break down the contents of even the filtered logs I see as:

- 90% shit no one care about (including spam and tiny bits of traffic from medium-trafficked personal blogs that include a mefi feed in their sidebar, that sort of thing);
- 9% stuff probably only me and a few other mefiana junkies would care about (really small/incidental mentions, like in a random forum on topic x with a link to an askme question but no real discussion of that);
- 1% actually interesting substantial stuff that a lot of mefites might like to see (something substantively referencing or responding to mefi content).

That 1% actually tends to show up on Metatalk, as per this thread. The 9% is kind of fiddly whether it's worth going out of our way to make it visible, but I could as an experiment try keeping track of those little mentions and toss out a quick weekly digest some time.

The 90% isn't really worth wading through, which isn't a big counterargument by itself because I can respect the desire to wade through stuff that I personally find boring, but it's also chock full of referrer spam and so making it public feels like aiding and abetting shitheads. So I'm not really interested in going there.
posted by cortex at 10:05 AM on November 4

It'd be an interesting project to track down all the mefi-discusses-reddit and reddit-discusses-conversations that have gone down and try and make some sense of them.

Paging lewistate. Paging lewistate.
posted by barrett caulk at 10:11 AM on November 4

Seems like an obvious result of the interest in the Anthony Sowell case. Does he happen to be a MeFi member?
posted by infinitefloatingbrains at 10:12 AM on November 4

Is there any way of finding a list of the most popular Comments ever?

Apologies if this is right in front of my face.
posted by jefficator at 10:22 AM on November 4

Plutor did some (now very out of date) analysis of that here, jefficator. Thus a bunch more miscellaneous analysis on the wiki, and if you're feeling like rolling your own you can take a look at the Infodump.
posted by cortex at 10:30 AM on November 4

What kind of consumer available acid can eat through a porcelain tub?

The character in the TV show had access to HF via professional connections.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:47 AM on November 4

so, it took over five years to make it there?

i guess that's why it's called reddit.
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:37 AM on November 4

I was a dual-citizen for a while, when Reddit was small, then gradually lost interest as it grew larger in users and nastier in tone. I still sub to the high volume RSS feed so that lulzy meme/outrage filter stuff that wouldn't last five minutes here is still on my radar, but every time I click on the comments page I really regret it. I don't want to rant about the site here though, to each their own.

I did, however, get into a defense-of-mefi kerfuffle in one of the threads there (where I was mercilessly downvoted of course) and I can say their general feeling is that metafilter is "snobby" and "thinks they're all that" and "elitist". I am not sure how much of this is comes from viewing the site themselves and coming to that conclusion vs. a reaction to dual citizen types saying the conversation is a lot less stupid and viciously sexist here.
posted by cj_ at 12:00 PM on November 4

Let me check the logs.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:02 PM on November 4

Sometimes I think other people on the internet think we're snobby because we tend to do things like punctuate properly and use capitalization.

nyah nyah we're better than you!
posted by backseatpilot at 12:18 PM on November 4 [1 favorite]

tend to
posted by UbuRoivas at 12:29 PM on November 4

It has favorites!
posted by roll truck roll at 1:03 PM on November 4

the conversation is a lot less stupid and viciously sexist here

The conversation is a lot less stupid and viciously sexist here.

My occasional visits to Reddit are occasional for just that reason.
posted by Karmakaze at 2:16 PM on November 4

It was a murder plot all along!

Shhhhhhhh! Don't let Gawker know I was involved!
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 4:12 PM on November 4

Metafilter: We crunch logs...

So you're suggesting that tree shredder thingy that they used in Fargo is the way to go then? Must call those nice Coen boys.
posted by Nick Verstayne at 4:45 PM on November 4

When you do data analysis, you really want to crunch the numbers, trends, and modes. Forcing a bit-level test to establish identity (if it ever comes to that) might introduce the mathematical/statistical hurdle that saves your ass down the line.
posted by plinth at 7:29 PM on November 4

The conversation is a lot less stupid and viciously sexist here.

Agree, just sayin' they don't like to be told that (although they have no problem putting down Digg). And some of them, when told "metafilter is better because of ____" will immediately come here and look for counter-examples -- which they'll find easily -- making it a discussion no one who values their sanity should get into.
posted by cj_ at 8:18 PM on November 4

ah good, that will keep them distracted while we sit here planning our own murder .. of reddit
posted by mannequito at 8:45 PM on November 4

A friend of mine reads reddit obsessively. She sees things before I do, but I don't spend all day refreshing reddit. I get things... filtered, you might say.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:47 PM on November 4

Nothing pisses them off more than saying, "Reddit is turning into Digg."
posted by amuseDetachment at 10:46 PM on November 4

There's more than one blog?! When did this happen?

Why would someone use hydrofluoric acid in a porcelain tub? HF eats right through glass. My vote is for cutting up body and feeding the pieces into your small homemade arc furnace. Of course, you will have laid the groundwork as the neighborhood metal sculptor who does lots of welding already.
posted by double block and bleed at 3:41 AM on November 5

Breaking Bad's main character is a genius chemist (American meaning) who ended up, for whatever reason, teaching high school chemistry. He has a sidekick of sorts in a former student who flunked chemistry.

They had a corpse to dispose of, the plan was to dissolve it. The sidekick was given specific orders to buy a HDPE storage bin that they'd use to hold the body when dissolving. It was explained as "important," but not explicitly why. When none of the bins in the store were large enough (funny scene with a 20-something drug dealer sitting in bins trying to size them up), the drug-dealer sidekick decides to just use the upstairs bathtub. Cue disaster, and too-late explanation that HF can't dissolve HDPE plastic.
posted by explosion at 4:15 AM on November 5

Oh, I was asking about the server log analysis because I thought logs weren't kept at all, for reasons of immunity to legal requests & problems due to running out of disk space & such.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:37 AM on November 5

You can delete the raw logs after analog parses them.
posted by cj_ at 12:24 PM on November 5

I would think the best way to dispose of a body would be to never need to dispose of a body in the first place, i.e. find an alternative to murder (counseling? long lunch where you work out your problems? Ask.Mefi?) or an untraceable sniper rifle and some patience.
posted by mecran01 at 1:14 PM on November 5

Actually, if there's been some log analysis: any idea what happened in March 2008 that caused so many incomplete signups?
posted by Pronoiac at 7:29 PM on November 10

Man, that's a big spike. I wonder.
posted by cortex at 7:45 PM on November 10