Proper deletion or "Metafilter VS Reddit" bias? November 21, 2015 8:52 PM   Subscribe

This post was deleted for the following reason: Sorry, framing this as side-taking in some kind of notional Mefi vs reddit thing isn't great, the imperative at the end isn't really Mefi form, and "here are just a bunch of random good things from reddit" is too loose a net
I guess I'm not seeing the editorializing. Bad call in my opinion: I thought that this post was precisely "Best of the web". What does the community think?
posted by growabrain to Etiquette/Policy at 8:52 PM (86 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

The editorializing is in the first two sentences.
posted by Karaage at 8:56 PM on November 21, 2015 [22 favorites]


Nope.

Your post didn't work as a Metafilter post. Period.
posted by duffell at 8:58 PM on November 21, 2015 [8 favorites]


Good call.
posted by mintcake! at 9:00 PM on November 21, 2015 [8 favorites]


Reading it further, I agree with LM that it could have been much better framed - i.e. not at all discussing whether reddit gets love on mefi or not, perhaps a specific spotlight on a single subreddit with some discussion/framing as to what makes that particular subreddit great.

Your post might as well have been "here's why the new york times is great." followed by a link to 30 sections of the new york times.
posted by Karaage at 9:00 PM on November 21, 2015 [33 favorites]


I would appreciate a more focused post. Perhaps a selection of your favorites from /r/WritingPrompts, or the highlights of the /r/[Engineering|Cable|etc]Porn network, or a post about ex-Mormons that includes citations to /r/Ex-Mormons. There's just too much in your post to promote a cohesive discussion.
posted by Rangi at 9:01 PM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


I agree that there was untoward editorializing, though I hope that without it the post would have been allowed to stand, because I think it was otherwise good.
posted by threeants at 9:04 PM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


By making the common element of your links "things from reddit" (there is nothing more specific they have in common), the resulting discussion will be about reddit rather than any of the particular content. That makes the framing about reddit not getting any love even more of a problem than it may have otherwise been.

If you want to make a reddit-related post, try to find one (or two related) of the best subreddits in your list and say something about why that's cool.

Also, your post was probably really deleted because it didn't include /r/shittyrobots.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:04 PM on November 21, 2015 [7 favorites]


Posts about great individual things on reddit go well. Be more specific than a random list of subs, and it's fine.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 9:04 PM on November 21, 2015 [11 favorites]


If you're invested enough in your FPP to make a MeTa about it getting deleted, then you're too invested in your FPP to make a MeTa about it getting deleted.
posted by Etrigan at 9:14 PM on November 21, 2015 [12 favorites]


>Nope.

Your post didn't work as a Metafilter post. Period.


I agree, but damn, I'm glad the mods don't explain deletions like this.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:20 PM on November 21, 2015 [10 favorites]


Awkward...

As someone who has, once in a while, explored Reddit but found it confusing...I would have appreciated an FPP that pointed me to good stuff there...but, I see the objection to the editorializing aspect of the post...

Perhaps this could be redone in a fashion that didn't push the limits on what the norms are here...

so.. thanks for the post, don't give up on the concept...
posted by HuronBob at 9:25 PM on November 21, 2015 [5 favorites]


It came off like "Metafilter is wrong about reddit, and I'm going to prove it!" That way lies fightiness.
posted by wintersweet at 9:25 PM on November 21, 2015 [9 favorites]


I got mixed feelings on this. It seemed more best-of-web than most posts, but I tend to think of Reddit as a publisher — it's kinda like seeing a list of 30 great wikipedia pages or 30 different LiveJournal communities.
posted by klangklangston at 9:29 PM on November 21, 2015 [15 favorites]


One person's vague statement of fact is another's Op-Ed, apparently. I've seen flimsier stay up. And it did have the obligatory cats. Maybe if it had more Jar Jar...
posted by y2karl at 9:40 PM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Mod note: A few comments deleted; I assume folks mean them in a benign spirit, but probably better not to make mean obvious username jokes.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:41 PM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]


It almost seemed like a post generated by a bot.
posted by gwint at 9:41 PM on November 21, 2015


(But I'll add that I'm often a fan of growabrain's posts, fwiw)
posted by gwint at 9:43 PM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


growabrain has made a lot of good posts, lately in particular.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:44 PM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


He also has one of the cutest kid pics ever in his profile. Sincerely. It will improve your day.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:49 PM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think there's two basic problems with the post as is, one is the editorializing and the other is filtering.

The editorializing is accusatory, which is likely to make people fighty -- not necessarily about Reddit itself but about the implication that it's Mefites' ignorance about Reddit that make them not like it. Many of the people on MeFi who don't like Reddit formed those opinions based on significant knowledge of Reddit.

The filtering is also kind of haphazard. Lots of posts on Metafilter are 'Here's a big thing I like, and here are a few of the things that I particularly like' so in that sense it is structurally similar to other posts, but because it's Reddit and whole subs you're linking, it's like a step removed from the good stuff. It's a bit like saying 'WordPress is a great blogging platform, and here are some WordPress blogs that I like.' It's perhaps even a touch worse than that because most subreddits are less cohesive than most blog so the quality within a given sub is likely to vary considerably. I realize you must have picked these subs at something other than random, but framing them as if you threw darts at a very large board didn't help make them seem like a good idea.

I suspect there's probably a way to make a very similar post and have it work. Or maybe a series of similar posts that gather up some of the best subs within a theme and some of the key content from those subs. I know there are a bunch of interesting crafting related subs, so I could see a post around them. Or many hobby related subs have buying guides (sewing machines, cameras, whatever), so I could see a post about them.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:53 PM on November 21, 2015 [24 favorites]


This is one of the most loaded and leading presentations i've ever seen in an FPP. Even a deleted one. And i agree you usually make quality posts, but this is a sort of "i love black licorice, and i'm gonna argue why you should too!" combined with like... the cat declawing argument.
posted by emptythought at 10:10 PM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


I mean, I don't think it's egregious, but I agree with LM's assessment.
posted by teponaztli at 11:26 PM on November 21, 2015


Good call.

I don't want to see posts on the Blue framed with a context of MeFi in-jokes. The post about the moderator layoff kept a tone of neutrality, which I've taken as a guiding standard; presentation should be neutral, even if the content is avowedly not. This prevents the poster's opinions from becoming the subject of discussion (although their aesthetic sense still plays a part) and focuses on the content.

It's not perfect - something of everybody will bleed through - but I have seen it as a good principle to aspire to, and this is out of form.

Also that post was a mess. Hardly without interest - I'd love to see an examination on the photos of Ian sleeping, for example - but I'd agree; far too loose a net.
posted by solarion at 12:11 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


This post was framed as "mefi hates Reddit: discuss, here are some jumping off points"
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:10 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think it was a good deletion.
posted by colfax at 1:32 AM on November 22, 2015


Yeah, the question at the end thing really irked me and would have been enough for a deletion on its own if it were up to me.
posted by Dysk at 1:43 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


I do think it was editorialising in a way that isn't usually allowed here. And also as someone who doesn't like reddit because I find it kind of confusing (leaving out the other issues with it) this didn't really help me as there were just far too many random links.

But I have to say even if it was a good deletion I'm gutted for you, because the post must have taken you ages and you obviously put a lot of thought into it so to have it nuked immediately must have felt really shitty. You've been making really good posts recently so I hope it doesn't put you off. Can't win 'em all...
posted by billiebee at 2:23 AM on November 22, 2015 [11 favorites]


Because of this thread I have found /r/shittyrobots, thank you Jpfed.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:38 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


It seems that you wanted it to become a thread where people added their own links of good reddit sub-sites, which I personally think would actually would be pretty cool to see (having never waded into reddit and having no idea where to start). But I think you'd get a better result if you posted a question to AskMe asking for people to share their favourite sub-reddits. The tighter moderation would ensure that any opinions (good or bad) on reddit would be deleted.

This prevents the poster's opinions from becoming the subject of discussion
Required reading.
posted by kisch mokusch at 3:52 AM on November 22, 2015 [11 favorites]


Just post /shittyrobots by itself that junx is one of the funniest things on earth.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:04 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Pop tart or knife weildng tentacle...I love them both equally. I have never really done Reddit. I had no idea there was anything nice there. Delighted to see there is. Thank you. Will check it out further.
posted by taff at 4:08 AM on November 22, 2015


I was as a bit disappointed it was deleted. I had planned to come back to it later and explore, and was looking fowrard to other people's favotite subs too.
posted by forforf at 4:29 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I question the premise of your complaint. MetaFilter has had literally dozens of threads about subreddits—I know this because I just went back and found them all for convenience's sake. (Just yesterday I was debating creating a bunch of Reddit RSS feeds to look at subs I find interesting without feeling guilty for making money for a company that harbors borderline child pornographers and not-even-borderline hate groups.) Here they all are:

/r/gonwild (and other GIF-related subs). /r/me_irl (created by a MeFite?!!?). /r/subredditsimulator. /r/blep, /r/blop, /r/blup. /r/startledcats. /r/behindthegifs. /r/twitchplayspokemon. /r/slowtv. /r/etymologymaps. /r/fullmoviegifs. /r/boop. /r/colorizedhistory. /r/mspaintbattles and /r/photoshopbattles. /r/gaybros. /r/iama. /r/britishproblems. /r/mildlyinteresting. /r/perfecttiming. /r/waterporn. /r/architectureporn. /r/earthporn. /r/iwanttolearn. /r/fifthworldproblems. /r/carlhprogramming.

What I find striking, interesting, and even relieving — after a lot of MeTa threads in a row dealing with people sharing how they now feel this site is maybe too quick to pile on judgments — is that each of these Reddit threads consists mostly of discussion about the subs in question. There are twice as many threads, don't get me wrong, about how Reddit is a cesspit, and I think that's pretty appropriate seeing as Reddit is a pretty enormous cesspit, but when people post about interesting things on Reddit, those posts are allowed to be about what they are about, and I appreciate that.

The problem with the framing of your post, for me, as a guy who's written both a number of posts about subreddits and a number of posts about cesspit Reddit, is that there are inevitably people who jump into the discussions about Reddit's making money off virulent racists and misogynists, Reddit using free speech to defend nearly-illegal activity, Reddit putting up with literal child pornographers in order to avoid paying moderators, and say:

"None of that is really Reddit, though. You've got to avoid the homepage. Stick to a carefully-cultivated list of subs. Hating Reddit is like hating Usenet: it's not a community, it's a launching pad for hundreds of other communities. It's such a wonderful site—really it is! I wish MetaFilter knew what it was complaining about, because it's clearly ignorant about what it's hating on today."

At this point, messages like that have become a frustrating derail. The arguments have been made, repeatedly, that if you have to avoid the incredibly popular homepage to avoid casual sexism, perhaps you are the one whose interests aren't the focus of the site; that Reddit, unlike Usenet, is a privately-owned company, and injects advertising right next to threads in which people talk about how they'll harass and terrify random women or black people or whoever else across the Internet; that many, many, many MeFites continue to use Reddit, uneasily, and in fact know quite a lot about it, enough that certain MeFites had a hand in creating /r/ShitRedditSays, which has been responsible for forcing Reddit employees to take action re: some of the murkiest and awfullest patches of their site.

I don't think anybody likes how terrible Reddit's become. It's not a point of smug satisfaction. I don't like hearing people I've just met start talking about Reddit's culture, because it makes me incapable of wondering just how much they agree with the icky nonsense. I don't like that threads on otherwise-enjoyable subreddits about technology or TV or Internet culture can, without warning, become homophobic trash heaps or abruptly become about how women (never the word used) are out to destroy all men with their fake rape threats and their refusal to let men have sex. No part of me enjoys that I find Reddit squicky and uncomfortable. But it's pretty undeniably a shady enterprise, to the point where I'm flat-out uncomfortable with having it be a part of my Internet.

It's funny. The reason I was debating all of this just yesterday, growabrain, is because I came across a bunch of your threads, lost a couple hours poring through /r/perfecttiming, and went, "Man, Reddit really is drastically better than Tumblr at organizing certain kinds of things. I should figure out a way of putting more of that in my life." And, to Reddit's credit, they legitimately do seem to care about the open web and about open standards, enough so that creating an RSS feed out of precisely the Reddit content you want to consume is absurdly easy. (Meanwhile, my Google Script that converts Twitter feeds into RSS just borked out, also yesterday, and an hour of troubleshooting didn't help things any. So now I get to look for another janky solution to a problem that has no good reason for existing in the first place.)

So please don't think that this is a complaint about you, or about posts about Reddit in general. It's just that the editorial stance you took is one that, whether you're aware of it or not, has been used to derail genuine discussions about how terrible a place Reddit can undoubtedly be, down to a level that's so systemic it makes even casually browsing subreddits feel like a sort of compromise. It has had a tendency, in the past, of trivializing people's complaints about Reddit's racism and misogyny, or of questioning their (perfectly sound) decisions to avoid patronizing a site that makes a good deal of money off people who traffic in hate speech and nearly-illegal wares. I'd have been uncomfortable with that post staying up, and I say this as a literally-yesterday convert to being a fan of your subreddit posts in general.
posted by rorgy at 4:38 AM on November 22, 2015 [24 favorites]


I have had a post about great things on reddit I found deleted in the past so I sympathise. But many people here rightly or wrongly think of metafilter as everything good about the internet and reddit as everything bad. You are going to really struggle to break people out of that mindset and produce a good comment section that talks about anything except reddit. So I understand why they mods feel the need to delete "great things on the internet found on reddit" posts. Lots of posts here are stuff freebooted from reddit anyway - but you get a much better conversation if you pretend reddit does not exist and post it as a direct link.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 5:28 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


In for 'good deletion.'
posted by box at 5:36 AM on November 22, 2015


I hope y'all are cool with it, I just put a post focused only on /r/shittyrobots up on the Blue.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:41 AM on November 22, 2015


Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory: So I understand why they mods feel the need to delete "great things on the internet found on reddit" posts.

That's not the point. Please try again.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:01 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


Editorial comments about how MetaFilter as a whole feels about (X) don't belong in a FPP. An even better way to have framed it would be something like "in honor of reddit's xxth birthday (or some other reddit news), here are 40 subreddits that are making waves!" That way it could have stood as well as a random cat video or a megapost with 50+ individual episode links of one TV show.

...goes back to watching the 'hot glass spiral' gif...
posted by kimberussell at 6:15 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


That thread would have gone about as well as the "Scott Alexander is great: here are a big list of his best essays" one.

Sure, there are lots of fantastic little subreddits, but unfortunately a post about "here are some great bits of reddit" isn’t going to get a lot of discussion of all of those individual little highlights, because they’re too disparate and disconnected - the only people who were going to comment were those with their hate on for reddit & anyone who wanted to have a fight with them.

Reddit has great bits, but this post wasn’t the way to highlight them on metafilter.
posted by pharm at 6:19 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


So I understand why they mods feel the need to delete "great things on the internet found on reddit" posts

This isn't factual. Looking really quickly we have something like 7 currently open threads that include links to Reddit. Last month it looks like we had around 15 (though a couple of those were just "hat tip" links). We've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts with links to Reddit.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:25 AM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


So I understand why they mods feel the need to delete "great things on the internet found on reddit" posts

They totally do not do this. Here is my comment (from back when I worked here) about why think Reddit is like broccoli.tl;dr it's not so much the taste, it's the people hollering at you about how good it is for you and you should like it.

This post would have likely been AOK with different framing. You may not see how much the mods keep the Reddit fighting down here because they do a pretty good job but there is a total knee-jerk "Reddit yay/nay" thing here which makes the "reddit gets no love here" specious. Reddit gets a lot of love here, it also gets its share of pushback, often for totally decent reasons. People have different moral compasses about how to prioritize what is good and bad about Reddit (see also: Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, guns) but it's not something likely able to be worked out by One More Good Conversation About It.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 7:10 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


As others have said, it's a little sad for the obvious work put into sampling the links, but,

"40 Random samples" seems, well, random; the non-selectivity sort of turns it into a "whatever of the web" item.

And this: "Please add your own favorite sub/r below."

The for me most interesting (difficult, too) feature of the blue is the general understanding that a post is not "owned" by the OP and that we're supposed to be relaxed about what others make of it. So, I guess, directives like this aren't really in style.
posted by Namlit at 7:44 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm a huge fan of your posting history, growabrain. I hope you're not discouraged by this, because I think I get basically where you were coming from and the actual heart and soul aspect of the post's content roundup seems like a very you kind of thing, in terms of aggregating a bunch of cool things you like from a place you like. I can understand why it would feel like a "but I've done this sort of thing before and it's been fine" thing, and how frustrating that probably is.

For all that, though, I do very much agree with LM's reasoning on this on both points (and several folks' elaborations thereon), with the framing issue the more important one (without that—if it was literally just "here's a bunch of neat stuff I found on Reddit"—I'd have probably thought it was sort of scattered but just shrugged it by and hoped for a good outcome vs. the non-focused discussion about reddit that people have rightly seen as a likelihood given the grab-bag nature). And it sucks to see some unworkable framing sink a post that someone has put a bunch of effort into, but it's going to happen now and then unfortunately.

I have had a post about great things on reddit I found deleted in the past so I sympathise.

Another Fine Product, I appreciate that post deletions are kind of vexing, but the post you had deleted wasn't just neutrally "about great things on reddit", it was actually a pretty close analogue to the deleted post here in that it was explicitly and needlessly framed as a kind of counterargument to recent bad press the site had gotten. And, like here, that framing was more of a problem than "here's some neat stuff from reddit" would have been without it. The lesson to take from that is not "mods delete posts about great stuff on reddit", which as folks have noted is flatly wrong; it's "don't make posts about cool stuff on another site but then frame them up with rhetorical posturing about people's opinions of that site".
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:55 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


I never got into Reddit, and now I actively avoid it, so presumably I'm the imagined audience for that post, and my first thought on looking at it was, "Yikes. No. This weird long indecipherable list is exactly why I never got into Reddit in the first place."
posted by jaguar at 7:56 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


... Which is to say, my reaction was about Reddit as a whole, because that was the only way I could parse that list.
posted by jaguar at 7:58 AM on November 22, 2015


shit post. glad it was deleted.
posted by terrapin at 8:03 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


In the spirit of posting neat little subreddits though, I'd like to mention/r/geisha which is a subreddit dedicated to posting the careers of geisha. I think it's really interesting to see how the internet mixes with the very traditional culture.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:03 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


In the spirit of posting neat little subreddits ...

Yeah, here are a few low-traffic book subs that I've enjoyed (and in at least two cases, re-posted from): /r/printSF, /r/literature, /r/AskLiteraryStudies, /r/WeirdLit, /r/trekbooks, and /r/CriticalTheory.

For the folks above who find Reddit confusing, I used to as well. I forget whose MeFi profile had instructions that cleared it up for me, but basically, the idea is to unsubscribe from all the default groups, subscribe to just a few you like, and install the Reddit Enhancement Suite.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 8:26 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


i'm on reddit every day. i thought the framing on the post was not good and, i think accidentally?, it mimicked exactly how tedious reddit fights get started here. as a redditor and a mefite one of the things that annoys me about champions of reddit is how they present it like people just don't know how diverse and vast reddit is - for all the time i've spent talking to people who don't go on reddit, that's never a misconception i've come across. people who love it or hate it or don't care about it all seem to understand that it's huge and that there are good things that happen there - the disagreement is about whether the work to find the good stuff is worth it and if the overall cultivated culture of reddit permeates too much even in the good spots.

i've made lots of comments about the parts of reddit i like and to my memory i've never had one of them deleted (i might have had something deleted that linked to reddit that strayed too far into doxing or "look at these assholes" territory). i've never seen an anti-reddit bias from the mods, just an anti-fighting-about-reddit stance.

if you wanted to make another reddit post, i think focusing on a few subreddits and what connects them and makes them great is a better way to go.
posted by nadawi at 8:32 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


As someone who has, once in a while, explored Reddit but found it confusing...I would have appreciated an FPP that pointed me to good stuff there...but

yeah, appropriate deletion for all the reasons mentioned, but save your links for the next time a friendly Reddit vs Metafilter debate happens, then drop a few of them in the thread

In the spirit of posting neat little subreddits ...

as people are already doing here.
posted by philip-random at 8:35 AM on November 22, 2015


A few comments deleted; I assume folks mean them in a benign spirit, but probably better not to make mean obvious username jokes.

What happened to that policy of not deleting comments on metatalk unless they were really egregious? Did that just go by the wayside? Was there a discussion about this change in site policy that I missed?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:52 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


What happened to that policy of not deleting comments on metatalk unless they were really egregious?

Over the last few years and the last couple in particular we've been nudging that formerly especially high bar down a little bit to just still pretty high, in the interest of trying to help MetaTalk be more of a useful place and less of a Place Where Everybody's Shitty To Each Other. Responding to someone's good faith question by taking a terse potshot at their username isn't nuclear grade stuff but it's also totally pointlessly mean and adds nothing to the conversation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:02 AM on November 22, 2015 [30 favorites]


This was a good deletion. I message the mods probably too frequently about editorializing (and they're very nice about that, which I appreciate), if this post had stood I would have probably used the contact form about it.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:18 AM on November 22, 2015


The explict randomness of the featured subs is why I think this post should have been deleted. An aggregation like that should be curated to make an acceptable post.
posted by Mitheral at 9:39 AM on November 22, 2015


I really appreciate that y'all are deleting the pointlessly mean.

SECONDED. Man, the last week or two have been bumpy ones on the gray, but I remember November being the traditional month wherein reading MetaTalk usually made me want to flee civilization and live in a monastery. MetaTalk deletions are awesome.
posted by rorgy at 9:45 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


Thirded. I think deleting pointlessly mean comments makes it easier for people to not feel defensive when there's conflict about their actions on the grey--or when there's straight up normal disagreements when strong feelings are behind them. And they make it easier and less upsetting for people to try and find points of commonality, too.
posted by sciatrix at 10:23 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you're invested enough in your FPP to make a MeTa about it getting deleted, then you're too invested in your FPP to make a MeTa about it getting deleted.

... and in that instant, the disciple achieved enlightenment...
posted by Sebmojo at 10:26 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


When's the pub quiz rematch?
posted by michaelh at 10:46 AM on November 22, 2015


Is there an /r/ in the month?
posted by clavdivs at 11:08 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm the one who made the comment that got deleted and I am totally cool with that deletion. It wasn't a legit attempt to be mean at all, just intended as goofing, but I had actually high tailed it back to the keyboard intending to retract because I realized too late how it actually sounded.

Deletions aren't always the stony fist of censorship. Sometimes, they're just saving us from ourselves.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:13 PM on November 22, 2015 [28 favorites]


terrapin: shit post. glad it was deleted.

Shit comment. Not helping anything.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:39 PM on November 22, 2015 [14 favorites]


And, yeah, let's maybe acknowledge that lowering the bar on comment deletions from Very High Indeed to Still Moderately High means that not everything that would get deleted in a similar context elsewhere on the site will get deleted here, but that that doesn't make that not-deleted stuff automatically great. A terse "shit post" type comment is something I think of as just plain doing a bad job of MetaTalk commenting, even if it's notionally in the realm of community feedback to a question about whether or not people thought a post was good or bad. "I think it was bad" would suffice instead; "I think it was bad and here's my non-aggro explanation of why" is generally a lot better.

It's the sort of thing that ideally we wouldn't have to even have a conversation about moving the bar lower for because people would collectively make the effort to raise their own "should I be typing this" bar higher instead. But insofar as drawing a line can leave people dancing up to the line, this feels like one of those situations a bit and I'd rather people not do that.

That said, tit-for-tat escalating kind of sucks too, so I'd rather we skip that kind of thing too.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:46 PM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Shit flag button. It was out of order.
posted by Namlit at 2:48 PM on November 22, 2015


I should have flagged and moved on, or just moved on.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:54 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Sounds like the episode of "Lost" we never saw, the double just-move-on.
posted by Namlit at 3:22 PM on November 22, 2015


Yeah I liked that show but damn ole Lindelof with his "WE HAVE TO GO BACK" bearded version of Jack, just move on buddy
posted by dogwalker at 6:13 PM on November 22, 2015


I've seen worse editorialising, but especially the second and third sentences and the last line request really do push it over into unworkable territory. Combined with it being a random, lengthy list with no cohesion or purpose, it did come across as overly messy.

The arguments about reddit have been had in so many forms on MetaFilter that I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fight song about it in MeFi Music. It feels like the two positions are pretty clearly marked out along the 'too much bad'/'enough pockets of disparate good' axis, and given such a vague premise and the expected tendency for users, especially first commenters, to have not read the links, it was very likely to become a reiteration of a very, very dull argument.

So chop out the contentious framing, do a little more curating of the links, maybe grouping a few different subreddits under 'humour', 'support', etc., and you'd be golden.

And I'm always glad when comments which are nothing but aggro-makers are deleted. It's long been recognised that 'I like it!' and 'I hate it!' are not evenly weighted in how they either go down or are perceived by people reading them, and knocking out brusque negativity is, I think, a net gain for the mental health of users and mods alike.
posted by gadge emeritus at 6:35 PM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


Over the last few years and the last couple in particular we've been nudging that formerly especially high bar down a little bit to just still pretty high, in the interest of trying to help MetaTalk be more of a useful place and less of a Place Where Everybody's Shitty To Each Other. Responding to someone's good faith question by taking a terse potshot at their username isn't nuclear grade stuff but it's also totally pointlessly mean and adds nothing to the conversation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:02 AM on November 22 [22 favorites +] [!]


The explicitly different moderation policies on the different subsites is a beautiful, ripe area of research for folks interested in online communities. AskMe's "Relevant Answers Only" is so amazing and kind of revolutionary and it's cool to see how the success of that has shaped moderation on the blue (especially when refining what's considered relevant) and now in Metatalk. It's such a cool demonstration of how limiting speech in an online venue paradoxically allows for greater freedom of expression.
posted by one_bean at 7:22 PM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


PeterMcDermott: "Was there a discussion about this change in site policy that I missed?"

Yes, several.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:27 AM on November 23, 2015


There is definitely an anti-Reddit bias and it's pretty hilarious as I follow some of the most vocal anti-Reddit people on Tumblr where they reblog memes, jokes, and pictures that came from Reddit...

That said, it was an unnecessarily editorializing take on a good idea.
posted by bgal81 at 10:55 AM on November 23, 2015


and a lot of people on reddit who hate tumblr like the content stolen from tumblr when it ends up on reddit - so?
posted by nadawi at 11:28 AM on November 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


came from reddit
stolen from tumblr
Unless they are staff/admin posts, neither of these websites own the content just because it was originally posted there. People made those things and the people should be credited, not the websites.
posted by soelo at 11:34 AM on November 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


that was pretty much my point -t hat content moves from community to community (although by and large reddit is awful at crediting anything to anybody) and that not liking a site/community doesn't have a bearing on if you might like content that first posted on that site if it shows up elsewhere...
posted by nadawi at 11:42 AM on November 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


reddit gets no love here

The anti-reddit people on the blue may outnumber the pro-reddit people, but sheesh, that's simply wrong.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:28 PM on November 23, 2015


reddit gets no love here

I'm doing an AMA tomorrow (just regular one, not like fancy famous-person one), so we'll see...
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 12:32 PM on November 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


As someone who doesn't really look at Reddit or Tumblr, I'm always amazed by the certainty with which users of those sites assert ownership over links. It's a hyperlink. It's what the web is made of. If someone doesn't tell you where they first saw the link, there's no reason to assume Reddit over Tumblr over Twitter over Facebook over some really good professional blog over some friend's Blogspot blog over fucking Google.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:19 PM on November 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


I rather liked the etiquette in Ye Olden Blogosphere Dayes, when people would say something like, "Here's an interesting article by Jane Smith in the Guardian (via kottke.org)" where both the person creating the thing of interest is credited as well as the person who propagated it.

Clearly, though, Jane Smith takes precedence over Jason Kottke.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:29 PM on November 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


I liked that etiquette, too. But then, these days, I see something on FB or Twitter, ignore it because I'm busy, see it again from another source, like the content but not the source, and so I find a better one before I make an FPP out of it. I wouldn't even know how to source that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:41 PM on November 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


(source: just the general zeitgeist, man)
posted by Chrysostom at 1:58 PM on November 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


fwiw, i wasn't talking about links or crediting where people first saw something that's being widely passed around - because i totally agree there - i was talking about original content that was posted first at reddit or tumblr. both sites function as a place to pass things around and as a place for content creators. i feel like when people say something like "you hate reddit/tumblr, but you'll pass around content first posted on reddit/tumblr in a another community/site..." i'm like, well, yeah - taking something interesting and discussing it in a community someone likes more is how the sausage gets made. it doesn't seem like the gotcha point some people try to make it.
posted by nadawi at 4:21 PM on November 23, 2015


It just seems naive at best and hypocritical at worst. Someone who does that clearly does like some aspects of Reddit and by reblogging their content it's helping making Reddit more popular. It's the world's most ineffective boycott which makes the posturing seem funny.

Same thing with Reddit and Tumblr though watching their outrage is often genuinely hilarious and not just in the "isn't that odd?" way.
posted by bgal81 at 8:11 AM on November 24, 2015


Stuff that's on reddit is not the same as reddit, any more than links to YouTube or the New York Times are metafilter. Sharing stuff posted on reddit does not increase reddit's popularity any more than sharing YouTube links from Mefi FPPs increases metafilter's popularity.
posted by Dysk at 8:15 AM on November 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


i don't see anything hypocritical about "this is a cool thing that i want to discuss in another community." i mean, the same link about syria can be shared here and on facebook and i promise you i'd rather read the conversation here. makes sense that the same sort of thing could happen with tumblr and reddit.
posted by nadawi at 11:16 AM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah. It's not like websites have physical boundaries containing their own unique usership. The same person or people actually do upload the same content to more than one site, too. Ignoring this is just more facile tribalism.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:39 PM on November 24, 2015


Metafilter: More facile tribalism.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:17 AM on November 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


I rather liked the etiquette in Ye Olden Blogosphere Dayes, when people would say something like, "Here's an interesting article by Jane Smith in the Guardian (via kottke.org)" where both the person creating the thing of interest is credited as well as the person who propagated it.

Tumblr keeps track of both the original person who shared a link and the person whose direct post you're reblogging. Not the same as crediting the author of a post, but I at least am glad that they attempted to insert some form of lingering credit into their model.

(Of course, they then go and screw it up by making reblog "chains" impossible to follow. If a person reblogs a post, Tumblr links to the person and they link to the original post, but not to the actual reblog itself. It's bafflingly useless, and pretty hideous to boot.)
posted by rorgy at 6:30 AM on November 27, 2015


« Older Happy $5 noob day   |   MetaTalk Love-In No. 3 Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments