what is specific to metafilter?

October 12, 2001 12:27 PM

What does "topics specific to metafilter" mean, exactly? Specific to "metafilter, the codebase and website" or "metafilter, the group of people who use the mefi codebase"? Reason inside...
posted by jeb to Etiquette/Policy at 12:27 PM (3 comments total)

Every so often, someone has some sort of question that they want to ask metafilter, or some topic they just want comments on. It seems, as far as front page links go, there are two ways they deal with this:

One is not putting any link at all, and saying something like, "no link, just a question".

The other is googling words related to your topic and posting either a link to the google results or a page somehow related.

Inevitably, these threads are filled with comments like, "Front page posts are for interesting things found on the web. That's what metafilter is for", "Take it to metatalk", and so on.

It seems pretty clear though, that in a sense, metafilter has become quite a bit more than a list of links to interesting things on the web. With links regularly getting, 50, 100, or more comments, it seems like a lot of people are pretty interested in the conversation aspect.

The "Take it to metatalk" response, though, seems like it might be inappropriate (and I've seen people post that it is). Metatalk is...talk about metafilter, right?

So let's say someone has some question they just want to ask metafilter and get comments on. Does that have any place on metafilter? Is that wanted? If so, where should it be posted?
posted by jeb at 12:34 PM on October 12, 2001

So let's say someone has some question they just want to ask metafilter and get comments on. Does that have any place on metafilter? Is that wanted?

nope. not currently.

If so, where should it be posted?

Like it says in the guidelines (somewhere), stuff like that is more at home on a mailing list devoted to pure discussion.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:41 PM on October 12, 2001

The "Ask MetaFilter" idea has been debated on these pages before, jeb. You might try to take a look through the back catalog. My sense is that no one has come up with a way to do such a thing that Matt really feels is in keeping with the spirit of MeFi, the idea isn't totally without merit and people are kind of keeping it alive in their heads for future discussion.
posted by rodii at 1:55 PM on October 12, 2001