Doubleposts? April 21, 2002 8:34 PM   Subscribe

Why not a Metatalk category for double posts. Apparently, some people get off on recognizing them; refering to a post being a double shouldn't be on Metafilter ever.
posted by ParisParamus to Bugs at 8:34 PM (17 comments total)

The pong thread was actually a tripple post (1, 2). The problem isn't with pointing them out. The problem is with the people that get bent out of shape because somebody points them out, or the people that won't let it drop (usually prompted by the first type of problem) once somebody has added a referral to the previous thread.
posted by willnot at 9:02 PM on April 21, 2002


i wasn't 'bent out of shape' i was just being funny.

sorry i failed. that's not the problem....

anyways. yes, double posts are kinda obnoxious sometimes, but screaming "DOUBLE POST" is even more so, and all the time without fail, really obnoxious. it's pretentious, and it's no better than screaming 'first post'.

it's matt's site. and he's doing a damn fine job running it. don't assume he needs help. if he does, he'll e-mail whom he wants help from.

as for the pong link, hey, it didn't come up in the search, so i posted it. and you know what, a bunch of people really liked it.

that accounts for something. and obviously so, being as matt hasn't removed it.

the tagline for mefi anon is "let go, let matt."

so there.
posted by jcterminal at 9:23 PM on April 21, 2002


I think a double post category would be bad because it would would give the archivists their own province within MeTa.

It would be the beginning of the end.
posted by insomnyuk at 9:37 PM on April 21, 2002


Yeesh jcterminal, I hope you aren't serious. I screamed something? It's pretentious? Matt hasn't removed it? Let Matt take care of it? Shut the hell up, man...

I didn't "scream" anything. I pointed it out. The first time I saw the pong site was on MeFi and after I googled "pong" I found it.

It's not pretentious. Pretentious would require you to perceive an emotion I do not emit. If you believe it's pretentious, that's your problem, not mine. If I waved my hands in the air and said, "Hey moron, that's a double post!!"...that's pretentious.

As Matt has yelled at me before about, he's not always around. He doesn't frequent the site as much as some of us. *giggle* I think he has a life. It's not his job to regulate us 24/7, that's our job. Self-policing, not Matt-policing. And stop fucking using his name in vain. He's not God. He maintains this site when he has time; we should be able to maintain ourselves and save him some hassle.
posted by BlueTrain at 9:40 PM on April 21, 2002


jcterminal - I thought that part of the point of MetaTalk was that Matt actually wanted feedback on how to improve the site.

I think a double post area would be good. If I was interested in a subject I could go there and find out what posts contained related information, or maybe there could even be links to other sites that contained stuff of interest. That area of the site could be great for research purposes, and provide people who want to point out double-posts a place to post links to them. In this way multiple double posts could meld.

I don't think one should stop people from mentioning that something is a double-post. I don't think that people should be prevented from posting double-posts if the subjects merits it either.

This site could be a real a fountain of knowledge concerning this or that, but at present I find it difficult to search and unwieldy. I want my Meta-MetaFilter.
posted by xammerboy at 10:14 PM on April 21, 2002


People can complain about a double post within the thread. It usually does not merit more action unless it is something ridiculous, like a triple post. Special cases can always be brought up. What we need is a really nice schema. I mean, a really nice one. That would allow for categorical searches, perhaps helping prevent future double posts.

MetaTalk-style categories for metafilter threads. With subcategories which would follow.

For example:
Technology > Computers > Apple > OS X
Politics > British > Tony Blair
Humor > Comics > Calvin and Hobbes
Music > Obituaries > Alice and Chains Singer

Users could even create the third and fourth category degrees, instead of having to program it in. General categories would be a good way to start, and only new ones would be added as necessary.

That would seem to me to be a cool way to organize all the thousands of MeFi posts into handy categories.

And it wouldn't be required, it would be voluntary, I think. People who didn't follow the system could be branded as black sheep, and we could then whine about them not co-operating, in MetaTalk.
and then maybe we could ask for a place to be made just for whining about people who didn't follow the category system, and then we could make a place in MetaTalk to whine about the whiners, who would in turn have people griping about them...
posted by insomnyuk at 10:39 PM on April 21, 2002


insomnyuk - it would be hard enough for a team of well trained information architects to come up with an inclusive category breakdown for something as general and unpredictable as MeFi. I can't even imagine the mess that 14k monkeys with 14k typewriters would make out of it.

However, if somebody wants to get a sampling of MeFi posts and MeFi posters and have them do some card sorting, I'd certainly be interested in seeing the results.

On a side note, it must be a real treat for Matt to come to his site and see his every action or inaction forced into everybody's individual views of what the site should be. Or, maybe it's just me who thinks that would be a huge drag and a heavy responsibility.
posted by willnot at 11:37 PM on April 21, 2002


It's not linking to doubleposts that's wrong. It's the whining about it. When someone brings it to everyone's attention as if they're gonna cry home to Mommy, that's when people freak out about it.

What annoys me about doublepost announcements is often the way it's done. It is honestly helpful to post a link to a previous MeFi thread if it is complimentary to the present thread. However sometimes it's done in an insulting way. This one was meant in jest and I personally thought it was funny, but some might have taken offense to it. For me, humor's a good way to alleviate potential offense, but if it's too dry it can backfire. WillNot did this doublepost announcement in a very classy way. Short, simple, and it got the point across without doing any "nya nyah gotcha!" childishness. Linking to recent similar threads is helpful. Doing so as if you just caught someone cheating at Monopoly is juvenile.
posted by ZachsMind at 1:25 AM on April 22, 2002


Matt’s policy works best for the double post callout, but it would work better if everyone agreed to then not discuss the callout itself.
posted by Gary at 2:16 AM on April 22, 2002


If everyone would search for key words in addition to (or even instead of) the url (because, as surprising as it may seem, some things are actually mentioned or mirrored on more than one site!) then there would hardly be any more double posts.

Look, some people don't even bother to search. Nothing we can do about them, but to use the pong post as an example, if jcterminal had just put the word pong in as the google/metafilter keyword, the pong post from last month would have been the very first return. Not picking on you, jcterminal, it's just that your double post was mentioned here and so it's fresh in my mind.

I've caught 2 would-be double posts of my own by using keywords after the url didn't return any results. Maybe Matt should add a suggestion along these lines to the search page.
posted by iconomy at 3:02 AM on April 22, 2002


whatever discussion is appropriate, just get it off metafilter. It's really annoying to read; it belongs of metatalk, if anywhere.

(thread not intended to be posted to bugs)
posted by ParisParamus at 4:08 AM on April 22, 2002


well, the pong post is gone, so there's my answer, fishbulb.

thank god the image still lives on, in my user account.
posted by jcterminal at 4:12 AM on April 22, 2002


I searched for what I posted last night in both the MeFi search and the Google search (like a good little egg - it was such a cool link I figured it might've already been posted). It didn't turn up with a couple different keywords. I was looking for threads that might've led to it, also.

But then again, I was mostly looking for front-page posts that would lead to it. Is it a double post when it's posted in a comment thread, then to the front page? Also, I thought the link in the post was vetted for a front-page match automatically (sure looked like it to me).

I liked the way it was mentioned - I felt pretty dumb when the thread linked was only a couple weeks old, but hey. I would've gotten pretty nerve-wracked if someone jumped on me about it. It's cool that a similar discussion was linked - it gave me new links to follow up on a subject that interested me.

Categories might be a good idea at this point tho, like there are categories in MeTa, because IMO, MeFi is full of so many links as to be a bit unwieldy to search (a couple of my searches timed out). But that would be a LOT of work, wouldn't it?
posted by Melinika at 8:30 AM on April 22, 2002


Double posting is fixable in software via session keys, MD5 hashing or both. If MeFi "debounced" duplicate posts, either at the time of form-submit or periodically in a pass over the thread, there would be no need to discuss how people are reacting to them, because they wouldn't exist.
posted by anser at 3:34 PM on April 23, 2002


anser, you're talking about the other kind of "double post."
posted by rodii at 4:19 PM on April 23, 2002


anser: To elaborate, the double post being discussed in this thread is a front page post (FPP) which refers to something that has already been referred to or discussed before on metafilter. The one you're referring to is also being discussed though.
posted by jaden at 4:29 PM on April 23, 2002


ok, i wasn't sure which definition applied here because i've seen both kinds.

what this thread calls double posts, I just call old news. :) sure happens all the time on slashdot!

as someone who can't even post here, it does bug me to see people contribute FP items without apparently having done a simple search of MeFi for the same topic.

on the other hand, once the redundant deed is done, linking to the previous post (together with all the followup comments and resources people already worked to write and look up previously) seems useful.
posted by anser at 4:43 PM on April 23, 2002


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