AskMe Turnover

November 24, 2004 12:42 PM

By my perhaps innacurate counting yesterday, November 23, 41 questions were posted to AskMe. Currently, the AskMe home displays the most recent 40, which means that yesterday's questions appeared on AskMe for less than 24 hours. For daily readers I guess this isn't a huge deal assuming you read AskMe around the same time each day, but for others perhaps a smaller font and a bigger query is in order?
posted by ChasFile to Etiquette/Policy at 12:42 PM (31 comments total)

It may just be that this is a function of all the new users asking the questions they've had saved up for months now all at the same time, but I think 24 hours is too little time for many questions to get serious or good answers to. While technology/web-related questions tend to get answered pretty quickly, oftentimes its a casual reader joining the discussion late who provides the best answers to some of the more esoteric (and for me more interesting) questions.
posted by ChasFile at 12:44 PM on November 24, 2004

Ask fewer questions everyone. Seriously.
posted by y6y6y6 at 12:49 PM on November 24, 2004

re: fewer q's

Seems reasonable to me -- tho I must admit to the intrigue of folded shirts.
posted by undule at 12:57 PM on November 24, 2004

I think the idea was tossed around awhile ago re: limiting the space for questions -- a couple of lines to boil down the issue to its essentials, as it were, therefore forcing more inside as needed to keep some questions from being 10, 20, 30 or more lines long. This wouldn't cut down on the number of questions being asked, of course, but it would at least keep more on the page overall. Did I hallucinate this? Or is there really such a pony in the works?
posted by scody at 1:02 PM on November 24, 2004

I have to draw a balance, and at some point I'm happy with the interface discouraging more questions. I set 40 as an insanely high number and it looks like we filled that up. I won't be making it longer, and will be adding the limit on # of questions per week soon.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:03 PM on November 24, 2004

AskMe is a victim of its own success. Perhaps and hopefully this rush of questions will subside a little when the new users get the 'shiny and new' aspect of AskMe out of their system.
posted by Arch Stanton at 1:09 PM on November 24, 2004

Use a feed reader.
posted by adampsyche at 1:30 PM on November 24, 2004

Ask fewer questions everyone. Seriously.

Stop telling everyone what to do. Seriously.
posted by jpoulos at 1:33 PM on November 24, 2004

Stop telling everyone what to do. Seriously.

OMFG THAT'S SO META.
posted by esch at 1:41 PM on November 24, 2004

i wish i could think of retorts like that. :o(
posted by andrew cooke at 1:44 PM on November 24, 2004

Logged-in users can choose how many days of posts they can see on the front page of MetaFilter. Why not make the number of AskMe questions user-definable instead of a one-size-is-supposed-to-fit-all limit?
posted by mcwetboy at 1:45 PM on November 24, 2004

Matt,

Limiting the # of questions to encourage quality seems like a really good idea, but without a voting and preview won't it just become a race to get your question in first?

Plus, with all of us new users, you would imagine that even if the # quality of questions a week/per user went down, you could still end up with more questions than before the re-opening.

AskMe is awesome, I mean really awesome. With some good searching ability and a couple more years, it could become one of the web's greatest obscure, eccentric, useful information repositories. I don't know if that was your vision, buts it almost happening organically. Sorta a grumpy alcoholic wikipedia.

So please be gentle.

In conclusion, send all ponies to:
PissOnYourParade
posted by PissOnYourParade at 1:50 PM on November 24, 2004

maybe if people post followup questions in their own thread? there seem to be a lot of questions where folks ask "hey, well now that you've told me this, i need to know this" -- kinda like that one girl from the environmental sciences department won't shut up at that lecture about genetic engineering ("OH WAIT OK FOLLOWUP QUESTION')

i know you personally seem to be better served if you post it as a new question and everyone gets to see it even if they didn't click on your original question, but you know, we have to SHARE OUR TOYS>

remember when you were at the nature preserve and you wanted to take home that really cool rock you found and the park ranger was like "WELL IF EVERYONE TOOK A ROCK THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY LEFT"?

well, he was full of shit (come on! there's tons of rocks! we have too many rocks! an overabundance of rocks! take them!), but it's still a worthwhile sentiment.

oh and maybe if people didn't do that you guys could like, yell at them? because people here seem to like doing that.
posted by fishfucker at 1:50 PM on November 24, 2004

OMG a useful tool becomes popular! Quick, gut it!
posted by rushmc at 3:29 PM on November 24, 2004

What rushmc said.

I would personally like to have a "today's questions" link, and a "yesterday's questions" link on every daily page. You know, view the archive of questions by day rather than by the current archive by month. It would really help when I miss a day or two.
posted by SpecialK at 3:37 PM on November 24, 2004

will be adding the limit on # of questions per week soon.

I'm not sure, but I think this means number of questions a given user can ask per week, not a set limit of questions that AskMe can handle per week, right Matt?
posted by jessamyn at 3:40 PM on November 24, 2004

Yep, Jess, a user/week limit. Some people like me take advantage of AxMe. :-P (Although I try to give more in answers than I take in questions.)
posted by SpecialK at 4:31 PM on November 24, 2004

I agree with rushmc's sentiment. The fact that there are so many questions and conversations that they quickly scroll off the front page points out one of the weaknesses of the weblog format.

There's something to be said for the alternative models such as where a thread gets bumped to the top after someone makes a comment- that is, using the 'recent comments' as the default view.

I'm not suggesting that thats the ideal solution but that there is no real "problem" with ask.mefi except a mismatch between content and presentation.
posted by vacapinta at 4:52 PM on November 24, 2004

Some of you Mefites are curious enough to be posting at that other blog.
posted by Kleptophoria! at 6:21 PM on November 24, 2004

Perhaps the ask me posts could be ranked by reply? That is, a new answer shoots it to the top of the page?

I dono, jus' ramblin'.
posted by undule at 6:43 PM on November 24, 2004

You might be right about the rush of new users posting saved up questions. 11 of the 40 questions on the homepage as I write this are from new users (of which I'm one). Some of the questions seem less like questions that need to be answered and more like chatroom introductions. In only a week of reading the AskMeFi section I've seen at least a few inquiries that are just a Google-search away from being answered.
posted by HifiToaster at 7:16 PM on November 24, 2004

I would personally like to have a "today's questions" link, and a "yesterday's questions" link on every daily page. You know, view the archive of questions by day rather than by the current archive by month. It would really help when I miss a day or two.
posted by SpecialK at 3:37 PM PST on November 24

Sla***ot has this, and I thinks it's pretty useful.
posted by orange clock at 8:00 PM on November 24, 2004

I try not to abuse the system, but god damn if I don't do it when I'm drunk. I've posted about 3 threads around here that were completely pointless. Maybe these question-posters are just really really drunk all the time.

I did have a question I was going to ask about smoking catnip and the effects of. It doesn't do anything, btw.
posted by bob sarabia at 8:05 PM on November 24, 2004

There are a few comments from folks about having recent responses "bump" a post up, but I think that's antithetical to AskMefi. The point of AskMefi isn't discussion, but answers, so the question that isn't getting answered is the question that should be at the top. It's a PITA coding, but something whereby the question asker could "close" their question if they're satisfied with the answers, at which point it drops off the page to the archives? And, I guess, a timer that automatically closes questions after a period of inactivity, to prevent Ask from getting cluttered by questions that the askers can't be arsed to close?
posted by Bugbread at 8:27 PM on November 24, 2004

i like the user-config questions per page thing. or the archive by day rather than set # of questions thing. both are pretty good and would help stop people from asking every few days why questions disappear so quickly from the front page of AskMe. as the first option is already in use on MeFi maybe that would be easier to implement. or hell, how about combine them and have a user option "number of days of AskMe to show on first page"? gee, i could have it load a week at a time...
posted by caution live frogs at 10:24 PM on November 24, 2004

It's a PITA coding, but something whereby the question asker could "close" their question if they're satisfied with the answers, at which point it drops off the page to the archives?

I like that.
posted by rushmc at 10:59 PM on November 24, 2004

Stop telling everyone what to do. Seriously.

OMFG THAT'S SO META.

the word is "ironic," people.

This whole concept of "meta" doesn't exist, as it's used, in my humble opinion. The word is either "circular" or "reflexive" or "redundant" or "ironic," but plizzity please give up on "ah so meta" because there's NO SUCH THING!! Self-referential isn't remarkable anymore, so let's not pretend we have to invent a new word for it.

/grumpa-sore-ass
posted by scarabic at 12:10 AM on November 25, 2004

Yeah, but Self-referentialCircularReflexiveRedundantIronicFilter is so unwieldy...
posted by Bugbread at 12:33 AM on November 25, 2004

On the other hand, Self-referentialCircularReflexiveRedundantIronicTalk does seem to fit better than MetaTalk...
posted by louigi at 8:36 AM on November 25, 2004

This is hardly a new problem. I've had a AskMe last a whole 20 hours on the main page.

As to the assorted bumping/reprioritizing schemes being floated lets not. Once Matt gets the internal bookmark thing up any questions you want to monitor can be handled that way and we won't be poluting the main page with old posts. If you think things are scrolling off fast now wait till some newbie posts responses to 50 questions from the last month under a bumping scheme. All new posts would be off the main page.
posted by Mitheral at 9:23 AM on November 25, 2004

Once Matt gets the internal bookmark thing up any questions you want to monitor can be handled that way

Tracking them is hardly the point, though. It's keeping them in front of eyes long enough to get answered that matters.
posted by rushmc at 12:43 PM on November 25, 2004