January 23, 2005

9:27 PM

It would seem that friend quonsar has been experimenting with tags to propel his username into Top150 glory. Harmless fun, a really good idea, or destructive to the idea of freeform tags being useful (since we can see all his posts, if we're so inclined, from his userpage already)? You decide!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to etiquette/policy at 9:27 PM (67 comments total)

Harmless fun.
posted by calwatch at 9:32 PM on January 23, 2005

It doesnt really matter. Tags have just started. Only a tiny fraction of metafilter posts have been tagged. My assumption is that Matt and others will be going back through the archives to do some tagging in which case, since quonsar has reached his limit, his effect on this system is at its height right now and will now only shrink and shrink and shrink...
posted by vacapinta at 9:33 PM on January 23, 2005

That's annoying. Posts are already "tagged" with a username, because we know who made each and every post and have since day one. So it seems it's a silly and unneccesary bit of gaming.
posted by mathowie at 9:44 PM on January 23, 2005

Can someone explain to me what makes these tags different from the hated metatags that Google so famously defeated with the introduction of it's pagerank algorithm? I don't get it.
posted by NortonDC at 9:46 PM on January 23, 2005

I don't see how this would 'propel his username into Top150 glory' unless other people started making Quonsar related FPPs and taging them as such.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:11 PM on January 23, 2005

Well, for one thing, they're not there for google, they're there for us. So that's a difference.

But I agree, the quonsar tag is annoying. Won't be surprised if there are many other users doing the exact same thing -- we just haven't spotted it because they're not as prodigious (or, at least, haven't been yet).
posted by me3dia at 10:11 PM on January 23, 2005

It's already there, Steve. Look at the page I linked.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:13 PM on January 23, 2005

(and yes, I see it is there now, but as more tags are added, it will fall out....)
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:14 PM on January 23, 2005

Also, I know it is not the intention of the Top 150 List, but it will inevitably lead to people act like it is a contest to win #1.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:18 PM on January 23, 2005

tag this one whywecan'thavenicethings
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 10:30 PM on January 23, 2005

Matt could also just edit it out certain tags as he sees fit. It would take him very little work to do so vs. the larger amount of work required to get the tag up there, so that alone should act as a disincentive.
posted by vacapinta at 10:32 PM on January 23, 2005

I have to admit, I thought of doing this off the get-go too, but balked after I'd thought it through. Clearly my testicular fortitude is simply not as blortospheric as it might be.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:34 PM on January 23, 2005

I'm confused... why is "quonsar" a tag on this post?

Incidentally, it's redundant to make your name a tag in all your posts. There's already a data object for your name that links all your posts together. If this kind of "look at me" thing becomes popular, Postroad will be bigger than Art.
posted by scarabic at 10:43 PM on January 23, 2005

Can someone explain to me what makes these tags different from the hated metatags that Google so famously defeated with the introduction of it's pagerank algorithm? I don't get it.

1) spammers are expunged from the system whenever they're detected, so the tags haven't degraded to pure bullshit spammyness as with meta/keyword

2) the keywords are hard links to a well-defined application that exists now (the links page), not raw lexical input to be interpreted and applied to various/unknown application later on.

#1 is probably the more significant difference. It's actually a good question.
posted by scarabic at 10:47 PM on January 23, 2005

tags haven't degraded to pure bullshit spammyness

That is, with the exception of the "quonsar" tag.
posted by scarabic at 10:48 PM on January 23, 2005

Cool.
posted by loquacious at 10:48 PM on January 23, 2005

Incidentally, as there is rarely a self effacing letter ever typed upon these glowing screens, it's look at me squared to gratuitously pass snap judgement upon the name of any another guy or gal here as poster child for 'look at me'. Diffidence is not anyone's strong suit among the MetaWindbags.
posted by y2karl at 11:01 PM on January 23, 2005 [1 favorite]

"its"
sigh.
posted by NortonDC at 11:04 PM on January 23, 2005

Fixed.
posted by mathowie at 11:15 PM on January 23, 2005

I'm sure it will go away quickly enough. MeFi is quite self correcting.
posted by shepd at 11:19 PM on January 23, 2005

One quonsar is worth 1,000 rulemakers in terms of pushing policy toward limitation and restriction. I'm pretty sure he's a neocon mole.
posted by taz at 11:23 PM on January 23, 2005

Quonsar asked nicely in #mefi if this could be posted in his defense. I had to oblige.

destructive to the idea of freeform tags being useful

how is indexing posts via the proffered new method destructive? why is a username not a valid tag? if usernames are not valid tags, why are they not rejected? why can tags only be added once and never edited or finessed?

Posts are already "tagged" with a username

no, they are not. there is no way to use it as a tag within the provided tagging system, without entering it as a tag. usernames ought to be 'auto-tags' and should be available without the effort of the poster entering them.

not as prodigious

yeah. all 90-some-odd posts. i tagged my posts, 20 thousand some users have yet to.

btw, i think the giant fonts used to represent tag usage frequency look dumb and are unneccessary, no more than the latest markup fad. how are huge tags useful? simple links to order tags by frequency, by alpha, ascending and descending would offer greater, more intuitive useability.

gee, stav, i'm real sorry that deciding to do this now has, for a short time, screwed up the neato-keen huge font display scheme (actually, it's not screwed at all and appears to be working as designed), but as deeper thinkers have already pointed out, it's a statistical anomoly that my username now appears in huge letters on the top 150 page, or even appears in the top 150 at all...

posted by shepd at 11:32 PM on January 23, 2005

no, they are not. there is no way to use it as a tag within the provided tagging system, without entering it as a tag. usernames ought to be 'auto-tags' and should be available without the effort of the poster entering them.

That's a dumb feature request. Here are all posts by quonsar. Tags were added as a way to categorize everything on the site under descriptive keywords. The poster's name doesn't really impart any info, and since you can already find every post by a username, I repeat that it's in effect already built-in and pointless to essentially state the same information twice.

There's no need to make usernames into explicit tags. I'm sure quonsar just wanted to see his name in lights on the popular page, which he did, and now is gone. Whoop-de-doo. (btw, I see he's posting by proxy because I pulled his posting rights for the umpteenth time, since it was the easiest first step to fixing any further damage he could do)
posted by mathowie at 11:37 PM on January 23, 2005

karl, really look at me - look over here. Really. Because I forgot to show you this.

[gesture]

;)
posted by scarabic at 11:47 PM on January 23, 2005

Quonsar is not necessarily a subject of his own posts, and so there shouldn't necessarily be a tag with his name in them.

He is often a subject of other people's posts, though, and so those posts should be tagged whenever appropriate.
posted by Hildago at 11:53 PM on January 23, 2005

Free quonsar
posted by seanyboy at 12:34 AM on January 24, 2005

He is often a subject of other people's posts

Comments, to be sure, but posts?
posted by scarabic at 12:50 AM on January 24, 2005

Is q banned again? Why is he speaking in such ghostly fashion?

Friend quonsar, I was asking the community what they thought, not having a go at you. Your gargantuan blortacular status in the community means that the more impressionable amongst us might wish to emulate your tagging flair, and I thought it might be timely to seek consensus (as much as ever happens here) on whether what you were doing was a good idea or not. The fact that you did it might not be destructive to anything (although you will note I said destructive to the idea), but it might pollute the waters if everyone did, doncha think?

Fixate not on the doofus-repeated 'callout' aspect of a MeTa thread, but the seeking of community agreement on best use of a cool new feature, I implore thee.

(I don't know why I'm talking like that. Too much coffee again, perhaps)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:02 AM on January 24, 2005

Is q banned again? Why is he speaking in such ghostly fashion?

Never mind. I missed mathowie's comment upthread.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:09 AM on January 24, 2005

This is just quonsar stress testing the system – and not for the first time. However:

why can tags only be added once and never edited or finessed?

Why indeed? I tagged a post with "dogs" before I noticed that some other posts were tagged "dog". Now I can't add a "dog" tag to that post. Wouldn't it be better if I could?
posted by timeistight at 1:12 AM on January 24, 2005

I'll add edit/delete/add new options later on.
posted by mathowie at 1:14 AM on January 24, 2005

Cool! Thanks Matt.
posted by timeistight at 1:28 AM on January 24, 2005

I'm constantly amazed at q's creative destructiveness.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:28 AM on January 24, 2005

He's like that kid from your grade school who kept the principal busy creating new rules, because he did things no one ever thought of forbidding.
posted by orange swan at 5:16 AM on January 24, 2005

He's like that kid from your grade school who kept the principal busy creating new rules

Except sooner or later someone beat the shit out of that kid when he broke something that didn't belong to him. Too bad that can't happen here.
posted by yerfatma at 5:23 AM on January 24, 2005

Aw, stav, just as I was beginning to really, really come around on you and embrace your contrarianism and crankiness, you go and throw quonsar under the bus like this.

Tsk.

Not that you would care, of course.
posted by trharlan at 5:43 AM on January 24, 2005

Free Quonsar

(when you buy two or more Quonsar's of equal or greater value)
posted by briank at 5:49 AM on January 24, 2005 [2 favorites]

For those who wish to bring humility to Mefi as a counter balance, I'll repeat that I've created a "terrible" tag for posts that you have since rethought.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 6:29 AM on January 24, 2005

*curtsies to rushmc*
posted by iconomy at 6:42 AM on January 24, 2005

heh.. quonsar is god.
posted by LouReedsSon at 8:23 AM on January 24, 2005

I'm constantly amazed at q's creative destructiveness.

To create,
you must destroy
Smash a glass and cry
'Too Much Joy'
posted by soyjoy at 8:33 AM on January 24, 2005

would it kill ya to forget to reinstate him, Matt?
posted by norm at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2005

I don't see much of a problem with tagging your own posts with your user name. It seems that q is being unfairly singled out because (a) he was the first one to think of it, and (b) because most posts haven't been tagged yet, his name-tag was able to rise into the top 150. I don't think it was a stunt.

Tagging at MeFi is obviously new, and the functionality still limited. I would expect, however, that eventually we will be able to search for tag combinations and the like, à la del.icio.us. It would be useful to be able to search for a combination of a user and a tag, like "monju_bosatsu+law", for example. There are two ways to do this, it seems to me: either allow user names as tags, which would enable searching and browsing in combination like any other tag, or code specific functions which would allow user's tags to be search or browsed from their member page. The first approach seems easier to me. Indeed, there might be value in q's suggestion that a user's name automatically get appended as a tag to his or her posts. But hey, it's not my site.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:00 AM on January 24, 2005 [1 favorite]

Am I being a rebellious butthead if I don't feel like tagging anything?

I don't know why I feel so negative about it, it makes no cognitive sense whatsoever, but I just don't want to do it.
posted by konolia at 10:09 AM on January 24, 2005

Me neither.
posted by greasy_skillet at 10:15 AM on January 24, 2005

I can't add a "dog" tag to that post.

There's a military joke here somewhere...
posted by kindall at 10:40 AM on January 24, 2005

I don't know why I feel so negative about it, it makes no cognitive sense whatsoever, but I just don't want to do it.

I don't know why you feel so negative about it either, is it because it is a new thing?

You just make up a handful of keywords for your post, so that people can find other posts that share your keywords.

For example konolia, in this post you made, you might put in keywords as "nuclear bomb ICBM war" so that when someone looks for every post about nuclear stuff, yours fits in there.

Also, as you can see, it lets us make a quick list of related posts, like I just showed with the nuclear tag.
posted by mathowie at 11:20 AM on January 24, 2005

Man, some of you people sure are anti-quonsar. The man's a giant, bloated corpuscle on the face of MeFi. Free Quonsar!
posted by graventy at 11:36 AM on January 24, 2005

Well, intellectually I can see where this works, Matt...I just have this irrational irritation about it. Probably a good example of my chemical imbalance talking, but let me see if I can explain.

I can't understand why people would need to find every Art post on Metafilter, for example. Isn't that what Google is for? I mean, do people really want to do this?

I guess the best way to give an example is I feel about this like a normal person would feel about a spouse who wanted to alphabetize EVERYTHING in the pantry, not just the spices.
posted by konolia at 11:52 AM on January 24, 2005

Free Quonsar?

You mean some people were actually PAYING before?
posted by konolia at 11:52 AM on January 24, 2005

pssst, Matt, there's a straggler .

I'm sorry to hear Q's banned. He adds a certain something-or-other.
posted by theora55 at 12:30 PM on January 24, 2005

Am I being a rebellious butthead if I don't feel like tagging anything?

Yep.
posted by stet at 12:33 PM on January 24, 2005

But thank you for helping me bring the word "butthead" back into wide circulation.
posted by COBRA! at 12:44 PM on January 24, 2005

I can't understand why people would need to find every Art post on Metafilter, for example.

I can't understand why people would need to create a list of "virtual friends" so they can follow each other around the site, but I don't keep braying about it. If you don't want to use the feature, then just don't.
posted by Dean King at 1:17 PM on January 24, 2005

I can't understand why people would need to create a list of "virtual friends" so they can follow each other around the site, but I don't keep braying about it

I think you just did.
posted by konolia at 1:32 PM on January 24, 2005

oh, SNAP!
posted by jpoulos at 2:13 PM on January 24, 2005

q is being unfairly singled out because (a) he was the first one to think of it

Point of clarification -- q was the first one to think of it (and likely consider the potential response from Matt and others) and then actually put the plan into motion.
posted by cortex at 3:07 PM on January 24, 2005

you go and throw quonsar under the bus like this.

Nonsense. You either didn't read what I've written upthread, or you're one of these idiots who thinks that every single thread in Metatalk is a sophomoric 'callout' where dullards duel with duller blades to the textual death while the onlookers cheer and jerk off and post image macros they've stolen from the SA forums, or both.

quonsar did it so we'd look at him, it seems pretty clear. That's fair enough. I looked at him, then I decided to ask what everyone else thought about this envelope-pushing of the new feature he was doing, in as fair a way as I could. It's a shame Matt banned him again, I guess, but I certainly didn't think that would be the outcome, and in any case, quonsar's a big old boy and he can adequately deal with the consequences of his own fucking around, methinks.

Still like my cranky contrarianness, there, trharlan?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:29 PM on January 24, 2005

Comments, to be sure, but posts?

I guess I meant "threads", you're right. But, ironically, if you could tag metatalk threads (can you?), his name should appear in this one.
posted by Hildago at 4:23 PM on January 24, 2005

MetaFilter: where dullards duel with duller blades to the textual death

oh, bravo brave Canuck! A soju on me!
posted by mwhybark at 4:40 PM on January 24, 2005

Nonsense. You either didn't read what I've written upthread, or you're one of these idiots who thinks that every single thread in Metatalk is a sophomoric 'callout' ...

Or, maybe I did read what you wrote, and I am one of these idiots who realizes that many threads in MeTa are sophomoric callouts.

I know getting q booted wasn't your stated intent, and maybe you were merely trying to inspire a measured and reasonable discussion. But when it comes down to it, quonsar was naughty, you tattled on him (ostensibly to ask what everyone else thought about this envelope-pushing of the new feature), and now he's gone. I'm not saying you weren't within your rights, I'm saying that you're a snitch.

Still like my cranky contrarianness, there, trharlan?

It's certainly endearing.
posted by trharlan at 5:04 PM on January 24, 2005

Free quonsar
posted by seanyboy at 12:34 AM PST on January 24

Fuck quonsar.
posted by orange clock at 5:35 PM on January 24, 2005

Fuck kitschy css.
posted by angry modem at 5:43 PM on January 24, 2005

Fuck quonsar.
posted by orange clock at 5:35 PM PST on January 24

A PERSON OF TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY FUCKED QUONSAR

I can feel the love.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 5:44 PM on January 24, 2005

Fuck quonsar.
posted by orange clock at 5:35 PM PST on January 24

Oh dont tease ;)

Now go back in your corner & come up with some more lame insults about the midwest...
posted by Dreamghost at 7:35 PM on January 24, 2005

quonsar is back already thanks to Matt's patience and forbearance, and has apologized with what seems to be true contrition and class, and so that end of things is moot.

As was said in the other, closed thread : 'when it counts, quonsar always proves he has all of his marbles and a heart too'.

I love the q. He's always been good to me, both on MeFi and not. This thread wasn't meant to be about him, at least by my lights.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:58 PM on January 24, 2005

I'm saying that you're a snitch.

That's ungracious, but you're entitled to your opinion.

Also, for posterity, here's q's apology. Raised his stature in my eyes.

I'm still not too sure about his fans, though.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:16 PM on January 24, 2005