wank wank wank. ignore and move on.

November 7, 2000 4:51 PM

There seems to be a lot of bickering going on lately, and it's getting worse all the time. Too many people are starting to complain about other peoples posting habits, style whatever you want to call it. I'm Australian and don't care about Americas elections, yet i haven't complained about all the posts, about the election. I choose to ignore them as should other people with any posts they don't like or don't want to talk about.
posted by Zool to Etiquette/Policy at 4:51 PM (1 comment total)

It seems to me that with a hot medium like TV (I realize I'm reversing McLuhan's designation) you can reasonably expect the content to be relatively safe: no breasts in the shower on a soap commercial, undergarments don't come off in soap opera sex scenes, comedians don't let loose with motherfucks and goddamns -- in the case of election results, it's fair to demand that they be withheld from broadcast. You (as a viewer) don't have much control over the content of the television -- you can only turn it off or change the channel, and if you're doing so in response to some objectionable experience it's already too late.

The internet however is quite cool, and most of us are strongly opposed to the idea of restricting content on the net. We'd rather leave it up to the individual to find his or her way to www.whitehouse.com one time and then, most likely, never again. From experience, I've come to treat MetaFilter as a wildcard -- the only thing I'm sure about when I load it up each morning is that I'll have a fair number of "oddly enough" news posts to skip over as I look for some thought-provoking discussion to participate in.

While I agree that it would have been *far* more polite to stick those early exit poll results into a thread rather than up on the main mefi page, an argument can also be made from a usability standpoint for posting the info straight -- some people (Jorn of robotwisdom.com perhaps most famously) still surf the web on 33.6 modems.

The post in question was certainly appropriate. The outraged response probably ought to have been a link to a new thread on MetaTalk, which is where this post belongs as well. In any case, as long as the MetaFilter community continues to grow steadily (kudos, Matt!) and as long as the posting guidelines continue to be so broadly and gently worded (IMO, only the note about "4 or 5" comments needs to be updated :) then one will do better to recognize the nature of MetaFilter and use it accordingly rather than to rail against those aspects of this vibrant community which
one doesn't care for.

(what the hell does he mean about hot and cool media?)
posted by sudama at 6:12 PM on November 7, 2000