There once was a man called Deceiver,I like that it's vague enough that future historians will be able to take whatever current politician/ celebrity that the public is obsessed with, and use it to vilify them.
Whose followers were true believers,
He told them some tales,
Which got him some sales,
And now we are felled by the Reaper.
animation animator architect architects architecture art arts artist artists bass bassist bassists batshitinsane black blue blues book books brooklyn brutalist building buildings color colors comic comics cyborg cyborgs cybernetic cybernetics design designer designers designs diy doom drawing drawings drum drummer drums film flash font fonts funk game games geometry guitar guitars guitarist guitarists history illustration illustrator illustrators ia info infomatics information informationarchitecture informationdesign japan japanese kyoto language linguist linguistics literature math mathematics maths metal music musician musicians noise noises newyork painting paintings photography punk redhook rhodeisland ri risd robot robots rock rockers science sciencefiction scientist scientists scifi scify sf slyt sound sounds soundtrack soundtracks tokyo type typedesign typography typographer typographers video writer writers writing youtubeThanks again. I really think this is an awesome development.
One of the things I like most about MetaFilter is that in many ways it attempts to use the internet and its associated technologies to be a version of real life. Not a better version, not the Web 2.0 version, but as close as possible to a bunch of people in a room, having a conversation, with the added bonus of being able to instantly reference the accumulated media of the internet with no extra effort.It fells like this got through backdoor-like, as a not-very-closely-examined tweak to a different request made a few days after the original implementation. I think if someone asked up-front "can I get a way to block posts with tag X from showing up on the front page," the answer would have been a firm "no," but maybe that's just me.
Well, part of real life is that ifsomeone is in the roomtopics are being discussed which you don't like, you can't delete them from your reality. There they are. Deal with it. Maybe dealing with it means ignoring them--well-adjusted people do this sort of thing all the time--but even ignoring them means acknowledging their existence to the point of making space for them, physically and mentally. You don't necessarily have to talktoabout them, or spend any time listening towhat they sayother people talk about them, but the things they say actually happen and have an effect on others (and you!), and that has to be taken into account.
This requires maturity and a certain amount of virtue (in the classical sense). Which really is the best thing about this place: the mods pretty uniformly resist the temptation to implement technical solutions to problems which boil down to failures of virtue. Sure, they delete a fewcommentsposts, but they do so on a case-by-case basis without imposing any kind of technological prior restraint. They doban peopleput a higher bar on hot-button topics, but except for things like spam and self-linking, only after going back-and-forth withthemthe community about the problematic behavior.
There are certainuserstopics on this site whose absence I would not mind at all. Some of them are pretty active. So on an almost daily basis, I have to do some version of "Dammit, that guy posted yet another [x] post," or "Hey, [y] is playing to type in going off about [z] again." Every time I see that, I have to decide whether to respond, and if so, how to do so in such a way that will benefit everyone involved. A lot of the time that means not responding. And that's good for me, because I, as a person, have the tendency to say things when I shouldn't. The rest of the time, it means I have to take my time and compose a genuine answer. And that too is good for me.
Killfiles create the illusion that we can delete certainpeopletopics from our world. But we can't. And you know what? Having to deal with thosepeople whoideas that drive us nuts makes us better people. That's right: MetaFilter is structured in such a way that participation has the possibility of improving the moral character of its user base. How many sites on the internet can say that?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:44 AM on August 22, 2011