Wired on Metafilter

October 5, 2011 7:11 AM

So yesterday there were three separate FPPs linking to this month's Wired magazine. I'm not criticizing the posts (the discussions were interesting, the additional links in one of them were informative, etc.), I just find it odd. Was there any relation between the posts, or was it just random?

Did someone hit the website and see something else and go "that's a neat idea!" or was it just three posts that were planned in advance?

Either way, I think I like it more than the counting themed day last month. (First MeTa post. Weirdly enough, I'm more nervous about this than my first FPP.)

posted by Hactar to MetaFilter-Related at 7:11 AM (35 comments total)

confirmation bias ? It happens, you'll see metas about too many lady gaga posts, the awl, hairpin, etc regularly.
posted by k5.user at 7:14 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

I see this sometimes with Salon posts, or I think I do. I get the feeling that sometimes these sites accidentally just sort of dial-in to the MeFi frequency and when people are over there reading a link from a post they may see something else and say "Oh hey that sure is neat" and since the topics are really different, people don't give as much attention to the fact that the baseline URLs are the same.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:15 AM on October 5, 2011

Somebody at Wired is all like, 'Three Metafilter FPP's in one day? We're BACK, baby!'
posted by kaibutsu at 7:27 AM on October 5, 2011 [11 favorites]

It may also be that Wired just has a lot of interesting stuff. I've heard from several people in the tech industry now that when a big story broke, Wired was the only publication that called them to do basic fact-checking. Maybe that says something good about the quality of what they publish, that makes it more likely we'll want to link to it?
posted by FishBike at 7:29 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

First MeTa post. Weirdly enough, I'm more nervous about this than my first FPP.

I'd consider you a fool if you weren't.
posted by Trurl at 7:38 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Half the links that get posted here are directly from Kottke.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:39 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Somebody at Wired is all like, 'Three Metafilter FPP's in one day? We're BACK, baby!'

LONG BOOM!
posted by Artw at 7:40 AM on October 5, 2011 [4 favorites]

"Half the links that get posted here are directly from Kottke."

Who?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:42 AM on October 5, 2011

He used to be on Welcome Back Kottke but mainly plays poker now.
posted by mintcake! at 7:50 AM on October 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

From one of the recent Wired threads:

Also, is it just me or has Wired really come into it's own the past few years?
posted by nathancaswell at 3:25 PM on October 4 [5 favorites +] [!]

Wired was alwas good, they had good articles on Id atricles by Neal Stephenson and a million others I don't remember.
posted by Ad hominem at 3:45 PM on October 4 [+] [!]


Lately anyway, Wired is the sort of thing MeFi will like, if MeFi likes that sort of thing.
posted by gauche at 7:53 AM on October 5, 2011

Yesterday was a pretty big day in Tech, so a lot of people were following Wired and Ars Technica and the like.
posted by spitbull at 7:54 AM on October 5, 2011

All on the same day is odd, since they were apparently posted to the web last week.

Being posted at all is not surprising. It's like how most interesting articles from the Atlantic or New York get posted here: magazine articles are the best of the web.
posted by smackfu at 8:04 AM on October 5, 2011

I would much rather see a Wired link than one to Cracked....
posted by pretzel at 8:18 AM on October 5, 2011

Metafilter: Oh hey that sure is neat.
posted by ceribus peribus at 8:35 AM on October 5, 2011

Gauche: please don't do that.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 8:37 AM on October 5, 2011

Gauche: please don't do that.

Huh? Why not?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:48 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Half the links that get posted here are directly from Kottke.

The other half are all from Reddit. Obviously.
posted by kmz at 9:00 AM on October 5, 2011

I found that thing about the kilogram via my all-consuming crush on Dan Harmon.
posted by Zozo at 9:01 AM on October 5, 2011

Half the links that get posted here are directly from Kottke.

No. I did a little bit of an experiment a month or so back. I set up half a dozen browsers - one for tech bookmarks (wired, ars, register etc); one for cool but mostly short stuff (kottke, boingboing, slate, awl etc); one for journalism and longer reads (guardian, nyt, browser, longreads, longform, etc); one for video (youtube, vimeo, etc) and so on. Then flicked through them each day and reposted the most interesting thing I found here.

Sometimes I gave the repost a bit of extra research and padding, sometimes I didn't. And, to be bluntly honest with myself, the results weren't all that special in terms of post quality.

But one interesting thing did come out of it. I found out that generally it takes Kottke a day or two to pick up on stuff that gets posted here. Sometimes significantly longer.

Which you might read as the simple fact that one (or two) posters are never going to beat the mob, even when he/they has an army of fans suggesting links.

Or you might take as the merest suggestion that half the links Kottke posts come directly from here..
posted by Ahab at 9:13 AM on October 5, 2011

Huh? Why not?

Methinks Crabby is just living up to Crabby's name.
posted by inturnaround at 9:31 AM on October 5, 2011

Half the links that get posted here are directly from Kottke.

Is it that shocking to people that people on different link aggregating blogs will find the same types of things interesting and often post the same material independently? This goes for all you "saw this on Reddit first" people, too.
posted by auto-correct at 9:32 AM on October 5, 2011

accidentally just sort of dial-in to the MeFi frequency

that would be 4625 kHz
posted by exogenous at 9:38 AM on October 5, 2011

The other half are all from Reddit. Obviously.

Oh, I beg to differ. I usually read the dead tree New York Times in the morning and listen to NPR from time to time throughout the day.

Which is a day that rarely passes without seeing a post derived from one or the other.

I have made posts from both from time to time but made it a point to research the topic and added supporting links to give substance. Single link NewYorkTimesfilter or NPRfilter posts -- those I can find annoying.
posted by y2karl at 9:43 AM on October 5, 2011

I thought the Kottke thing was a joke, because there was a time back in like 2001 or 2002 when, in fact, links reposted from Kottke were debated in the same way as links from Reddit are today.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:46 AM on October 5, 2011

I'd like to see the weekly RadioLab thing take a hiatus.
posted by spitbull at 10:23 AM on October 5, 2011

I tend to get my posts from either: Andrew Sullivan, Rock Paper Shotgun, various reddit sub-reddits (but I usually avoid posting stuff that hits the front page), random stuff that gets to me via email, im or g+ (which all probably came from reddit), and every once in a while i go down a wikipedia/google rabbit hole and don't come back until i have a big FPP ready to go on some random topic that interests me.

I'm fairly sure I have made FPPs of stuff I found while looking at another FPP, which probably explains the Wired posts.

In fact, I have opened tabs from metafilter links, forgot that I opened it, read it an hour or so later, and thought "Man, this would be a great post for metafilter!", gotten the post already to go and then smacked myself when I realized my mistake.
posted by empath at 10:41 AM on October 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

What weekly radiolab thing? Everytime I've seen RL mentioned, there's a whole Thread O' Hate to follow --- a lot of people at mefi despise the artsy fartsy audio collage thing.
posted by Diablevert at 11:13 AM on October 5, 2011

Huh? Why not?

I don't know. Just being Crabby.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 1:55 PM on October 5, 2011

I think my posts are pretty much 100% products of trips to the rabbit-hole.Often I'll go down the rabbit hole, find something cool, and then a week later realize that, oh yeah, that would probably be a good mefi post. OTOH, I don't make all that many posts. 44 in ten years, apparently.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:55 PM on October 5, 2011

I got a pointer to the Wired article in my FPP in e-mail. In my case, it was just this "hmm, fellow mefites might want to read this" feeling.
posted by vidur at 2:56 PM on October 5, 2011

exogenous: "accidentally just sort of dial-in to the MeFi frequency

that would be 4625 kHz"

I thought it was 456.
posted by arcticseal at 4:04 PM on October 5, 2011

The Metafilter wiki says

"Many times, newcomers will be rebuked around for linking to websites that are assumed everybody reads, are old hat, or cheap knock-offs of MeFi and not considered part of What Is A Good Post. The sites that seem to have this effect are: The Onion, Salon, Slashdot, Goatse, Fark and Wired, among others. "

Evidently this is not so.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:44 PM on October 5, 2011

Seems like not too long ago, most references to Wired on MeFi were derisive.

"They're not as good as they used to be. It's ruined."

"They've become Maxim for nerds."

That sort of thing. Although maybe that was confirmation bias on the part of someone who likes Wired and was secretly worried about being insufficiently jaded.
posted by brundlefly at 6:33 PM on October 5, 2011

The sites that seem to have this effect are: The Onion, Salon, Slashdot, Goatse, Fark and Wired, among others. "

?
posted by empath at 11:12 PM on October 5, 2011

Is the hum I hear as I read this thread just my hard drive (though its flash) or is it the 'Ommmmm' accompanying the communal navel gazing?
posted by infini at 12:26 PM on October 6, 2011