Signal-to-noise ratio declines

September 19, 2001 10:34 AM

Signal-to-noise ratio declines. Especially in the Falwell and dead-or-alive threads, but elsewhere too.
posted by dhartung to Etiquette/Policy at 10:34 AM (15 comments total)

Now, perhaps the Falwell stuff had already been argued over in the Rush-condemns-him thread, but it was exceptionally clear in both that we had posters essentially firing back at each other, "He said X", "No he didn't", "Yes he did", without anyone (hardly) bothering to post supporting information.

For Falwell, in fact he had apologized on Monday, but many people had only heard his less apologetic statement on Sunday. In the case of Bush, it was absolutely clear that Bush meant what he said at the end of that same day because Ari Fleischer said so in a press conference. So why, days later, were we arguing over it? Waste of time. The administration position was clear, and could certainly be debated in its own right, but we on Metafilter ought to be smart enough to be able to find this crap instead of having pointless debates about that which is not in dispute, especially given the heavy traffic situation we're in.

There are numerous other examples lately. Of course there's been a lot of thread overlap, redundancy, and outright repetition (I've seen links to that London Times graphic at least three times, twice on the front page), so the least we can do is try to make the threads out there better (and probably, in some cases, shorter).
posted by dhartung at 10:40 AM on September 19, 2001

dhartung:

I think the key to your rant is that posting supporting information is key. This is why we are here on MetaFilter-- this is a space for hyperlinks, this is a space for web-centric people to discuss issues and utilize the resources of the web as they do that. I urge my fellow Mefites to post supporting links whenever possible.
posted by cell divide at 11:16 AM on September 19, 2001

And to make sure they've closed their tags. Whoops. Pancakes for everybody!
posted by lia at 11:21 AM on September 19, 2001

Tricky, lia, while the search box is somewhat fux0red.
posted by holgate at 11:38 AM on September 19, 2001

If only everybody who disagreed with me would just go to hell in a rotten pine box, we wouldn't have this problem. Is this so hard to accept?

Hey, did you guys hear? Something happened at the World Trade Center!
posted by Skot at 12:05 PM on September 19, 2001

Skot, that wasn't nearly as funny as usual. Normally, you're like a 4.3 on a scale of 3 to 7, with 5 being the highest, but that was a 6 if I ever heard one.
posted by sylloge at 3:18 PM on September 19, 2001

Sorry, Sylloge, it was a crummy day. Next time, I hope to score at least an eleventy.
posted by Skot at 4:01 PM on September 19, 2001

If we could just somehow ban religion as a subject...

sigh.
posted by norm at 4:28 PM on September 19, 2001

If we could just somehow ban religion....period. :-)
posted by jpoulos at 4:44 PM on September 19, 2001

but Skot's got a good beat and I can dance to him.

I give him a 6.8, Dick.
posted by Kafkaesque at 5:00 PM on September 19, 2001

I give him a 6.8, Dick.

Must...not...tagline....
posted by rodii at 7:32 PM on September 19, 2001

Tricky, lia, while the search box is somewhat fux0red.

Ah, but Google's still up.
posted by lia at 7:24 AM on September 20, 2001

tagline? what's that?

and can you change punctuation on taglines?
posted by anildash at 10:11 AM on September 20, 2001

It's been a while since we had pancakes, though I suppose they don't really make them like they used to.
posted by johnny novak at 4:15 PM on September 20, 2001