AskMe Caucuses

April 20, 2005 11:06 AM

as i wander through every bike-related askme query and see the same user names replying to each question i've started to wonder: would there be a benefit to allowing mefi users to organize themselves into caucus-like groups? would it serve the community better if, in much the same way individuals are grouped by region on their profile pages, we could somehow align ourselves by interest/expertise to make better use of our collective resources?
posted by RockyChrysler to feature requests at 11:06 AM (39 comments total)

One cool feature which I think is new is that you can now see who uses which tags most frequently. example
Is this sorta what you're talking about?
posted by dfowler at 11:12 AM on April 20, 2005

Howabout if you could select to see only posts with certain tags? Like a personalized AskMe along the lines of googlenews.

I know there are certain topics I am very interested in, but other topics I don't want to read at all. I tend to not visit AskMe as much because I don't want to wade through the volume for the subset of stuff I like.

This would allow the caucus-like groups to focus on their particular areas more closely.
posted by Mid at 11:17 AM on April 20, 2005

This is getting closer to Plastic Pals every day.
posted by mischief at 11:25 AM on April 20, 2005

Well, rather than just indicating who _assigns_ a given tag, since that only indicates FPP behavior, how about counting how many times a user comments in reply _to_ any given tag?

That'd probably be the easiest way to allow basic trends to emerge, and quickly lump together folks who _talk_ a lot about a certain topic, without necessarily _FPPing_ a lot about it.
posted by LairBob at 11:28 AM on April 20, 2005

Allow users to tag themselves.
posted by kindall at 11:32 AM on April 20, 2005

I would love to do groups some day -- let folks self-organize into "MeFi cyclists" and "MeFi photographers".

I wonder what I might want to do for each group though. Whether things should be tagged as part of the group (like how Flickr does it), so that you post a bike question to Ask Mefi and it becomes part of the Cyclists group, or if each group should be able to splinter off into their own forum so that questions/posts/etc can be much more in depth (like way beyond the typical ask mefi audience).
posted by mathowie at 11:41 AM on April 20, 2005

Matt, what if users could add a group/meme "as a contact" in the same way that we can add each other as a contact. Would that help with sorting people's interests?
posted by dfowler at 11:42 AM on April 20, 2005

Who wants to join my metafilter gang? I'm going to call it the "O.G. Disciples of Mathowie". Our colors are blue, gray, and green.
posted by naxosaxur at 11:45 AM on April 20, 2005

I love grey&green. I'm in.
posted by dabitch at 11:48 AM on April 20, 2005

What a fantastic idea!
posted by agregoli at 11:52 AM on April 20, 2005

So uh, will dhoyt be all alone in "Conservatives who voted for Kerry"?

Seriously folks, if this happens it'll get politcal way too quickly.
posted by orthogonality at 11:54 AM on April 20, 2005

...our lid will be the Detroit Tigers baseball cap...like the O.G. Magnum P.I.
posted by naxosaxur at 11:58 AM on April 20, 2005

you can already form little cliques using those relationship things in the personal profiles, can't you?
posted by andrew cooke at 12:01 PM on April 20, 2005

MEFI HORSEFUCKERS ---->

<---- PANTSFISH MEETUP
posted by quonsar at 12:17 PM on April 20, 2005

I want to start a group for people who don't join groups because they don't have anything in common with other people.
posted by jasper411 at 12:20 PM on April 20, 2005

jasper411 writes "I want to start a group for people who don't join groups because they don't have anything in common with other people."

Already done: it's called "MetaFilter.com". Here's a link.
posted by orthogonality at 12:21 PM on April 20, 2005

Allow users to tag themselves.

But if they keep doing that they'll go blind.
posted by jonmc at 12:41 PM on April 20, 2005

Allow users to tag themselves.

But if they keep doing that they'll go blind.

not to mention get banned.
posted by quonsar at 12:48 PM on April 20, 2005

free quonsar!
posted by mathowie at 1:50 PM on April 20, 2005

...and Haughey for the win.
posted by dfowler at 1:58 PM on April 20, 2005

How does tagging people or aligning as a group help practically though? If a poster comes along and wants to ask a question on bicycles, will they instead have to email one of the tribe or will anyone else other than the experts be shutout from answering? Or would it be like gold stars against the name for someone who has answered the most? But what if their answers are only 1/2 right or if the criteria is frequency of answering, what happens if they give a lot of hollow answers?

If it's the same old people giving the same old answers - perhaps that says something about search techniques/parameters or poorly worded questions that maybe ought to edited by such specialist group before they're posted to the green.

I agree with orthogonality about politics sliming up the works.

Perhaps when you choose 'work & money' or 'computers & internet' a 2nd subset choice needs tweaking. So if you choose 'sports, hobbies & recreation' then you can choose bicycling and perhaps the last 10 posts on bicycling come up before they post. It's just a matter of subcategorizing. Tagging is a useful thing but it isn't the beall and endall of locating information.
posted by peacay at 2:29 PM on April 20, 2005

imagine the meetups if this feature could be enabled. mefi cyclists group rides for my cohorts and me. mefi "horse lovers" group rides for quonsar and his friends...

could it be a simple tag-related flag? for example: say i somehow select to be notified when a bike related question is asked, and at login, i get a notice that a question has asked/tagged "bike" since my last login. likewise, i could then, perhaps, search who else has identified this tag as a subject of interest. no exclusivity, just a better means of identifying ourselves by individual interest on this forum.
posted by RockyChrysler at 2:32 PM on April 20, 2005

free quonsar!

It's like you really get the web or something...
posted by Dreamghost at 2:47 PM on April 20, 2005

I'm sorry, I'm a compulsive bike-question-answerer. I'll stop now.
posted by fixedgear at 4:00 PM on April 20, 2005

Allow users to tag themselves.

But if they keep doing that they'll go blind.

not to mention get banned.
posted by quonsar at 12:48 PM PST on April 20 [!]


free quonsar!
posted by mathowie at 1:50 PM PST on April 20 [!]


Y'all had to have set that up.
posted by deborah at 4:20 PM on April 20, 2005

Then flag it FAAAAaahhhbulous, darling! Faaaaahhhbulous!
posted by [!] at 4:42 PM on April 20, 2005

not to mention get banned.

Sorry 'bout that one, q.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:43 PM on April 20, 2005

This proposal sounds like that damned Kos site or something.

Organize ? Why would any reasonable person want to do that ?
posted by troutfishing at 9:01 PM on April 20, 2005

Anarchists uni--

ah, f*** it.
posted by namespan at 9:48 PM on April 20, 2005

I agree with the notion of letting folks tag themselves. But perhaps there should be a pool of common tags to choose from, so that "cinema" fans and "movie" fans don't get divided.
posted by squirrel at 11:56 PM on April 20, 2005

I like movies but I don't want to be in a group with people who tag themselves "cinema."
posted by grouse at 12:22 AM on April 21, 2005

Perhaps a "popcorn" tag would be better then?
posted by sebas at 1:04 AM on April 21, 2005

How does tagging people or aligning as a group help practically though?

If you let people tag themselves then you could have a link at the top of the page to correspondingly tagged askme threads (which haven't yet had a best answer marked) saying "there are x unresolved questions in your area of expertise", kind of like a bat-signal?
posted by juv3nal at 3:05 AM on April 21, 2005

There are [0] members in the Apathetic Metafiltarians Group.
posted by seanyboy at 3:07 AM on April 21, 2005

I like the idea of tag alerts. It could work this way:

(1) Limit the number of tags. If someone wants a new tag, they have to propose it by tagging "other" and then filling in a blank. Matt or someone else approves new tags. The power to approve new tags is not all that abusable, so maybe a bunch of people can do it. Also, since AxMe has been running a while, we probably have 95% of the tags we are going to need. Most new ones are likely duplicative or needlessly specific: i.e., "poodles" instead of "dogs."

(2) Allow users to tag themselves. When someone tags a category you like, you get message at login: "__ many posts have been tagged 'horses' since you last logged in." This would work even without (1), but probably not as well.

(3) I have no idea how much work this would take; I assume a lot. If it is impractical, I take it all back.
posted by Mid at 6:56 AM on April 21, 2005

If AskMe suddenly had a very large increase in the number of questions being asked--to the point where it was unreasonable to even read all the questions asked in a day--it would make sense to organize into tribes, so that you'd elect to see questions tagged as "bikes" or "photography" or whatever. And if there were going to be semi-closed side-discussions just within each of these tribes, then something like this would make sense.

But until one of those things happens, I don't see what problem would be solved.

The idea of allowing us to tag our own profiles is a good one and should be relatively low-overhead. If we could find people with similar tags in our geographic areas, that would certainly be helpful for organizing offline meetings.
posted by adamrice at 10:25 AM on April 21, 2005

friends and neighbors in the tennessee valley are more than welcome to join my bicycle gang, The Spokesmen.
posted by mcsweetie at 11:33 AM on April 21, 2005

Allow users to tag themselves.

I love this idea. I'd also still love to eventually see a list of a user's most used tags on his or her user page.
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:08 PM on April 21, 2005

It would also be "neat" if your comments inherited tags from the post they were attached to.
posted by smackfu at 2:54 PM on April 21, 2005