MetaTalk

There are some meta questions about Metafilter in the GDPR thread, and more are likely to come up soon given some US sites blocking EU users by default. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon on May 25, 2018 - 15 comments

The biggest change in the way that mefites participate on the blue in years has been the rise of US politics megathreads. We have had several discussions of the qualitative impact of them, but it occurred to me that it might be useful to dig into the infodump and see what quantitative picture might emerge. I think my findings are worth sharing - while a quantitative analysis on its own can't tell us whether the megathreads are a good thing or not, there are several negative trends regarding community engagement and participation that are happening in close concurrency with the rise of the megathreads. [more inside]
posted by strangely stunted trees on Mar 27, 2017 - 435 comments

My impression is that all of the infodump data is in the public domain. Is that license explicitly stated anywhere? And, if it is stated somewhere, could we get that statement reprinted on the infodump’s home page and possibly bundled with the zipped downloads. It’d be nice to have some legalese posted somewhere so that no one feels at risk of getting into trouble.
posted by Hooray For Socks! on Mar 17, 2017 - 8 comments

I have questions about the rate of increase in commenting over this year's U.S. presidential election period. [more inside]
posted by komara on Oct 14, 2016 - 48 comments

We seem to be having more of them, lately, and I stress that this is not a complaint, they're fine, but I was just wondering what that reflected regarding the userbase, and don't have the infodump skills required to figure it out. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on Jul 22, 2016 - 32 comments

Here is a collection of graphics about the evolution of user engagement (posting, commenting) on the Blue (data from the infodump, 15 June 2015). [more inside]
posted by elgilito on Jun 29, 2015 - 466 comments

If one is a habitué of AskMe who devotes himself more to satisfying his own curiosity than resolving the problems facing his fellows, one is apt to find, among the ranks of those who are more helpful, that some among us dispose over a sufficiently wide-ranging expertise, or all-encompassing benevolence, that their names recur with a frequency so apparently noticeable that one's thoughts are naturally led to the question of whether the said frequency is merely apparent or is in fact real, a question to be settled not by the comparison of anecdotes and impressions, prey as all such are to the biases afflicting all finite creatures, but by the totting up and comparison of figures, which, though they be in one manner of speaking finite, admit of another view on which Plato's placement of them in the heavens, rather than under the changeable moon with ourselves, quite appropriate—and which makes it fortunate that cortex placed several useful figures in the clouds if not the heavens, so that the curious can indeed determine who the answeringest mefites are, considering the "answeringness" of a mefite to be the ratio of the number of distinct questions posted to "the green" to which the mefite has submitted at least one answer, to the total number of distinct questions posted to "the green" following the first question the said mefite answered, that question marking the mefite's first becoming active on AskMe, and excluding, as apt to be uninformative, those participants of AskMe whose first answer was posted within the last six months. [more inside]
posted by kenko on Mar 27, 2015 - 180 comments

I was wondering if the currently available piles of data support certain metrics... [more inside]
posted by DWRoelands on Apr 4, 2013 - 20 comments

Specifically I am wondering how many users are from Canada; but I am also interested to know if there is a breakdown somewhere of users by country. [more inside]
posted by Lizard on Mar 30, 2013 - 88 comments

The recent meta post about weird tags got me playing again with the infodump, and I was finally motivated to create something I've wanted for a while: A clone of the Google Books N-Gram viewer, but for Metafilter: http://mefingram.appspot.com/. [more inside]
posted by jjwiseman on Feb 1, 2013 - 38 comments

It's been over a year since we first made the Metafilter Frequency Tables available, and now they're updated with word frequency information for all of 2011 and 2012 as well, bringing the total number of words up to six hundred and thirty-six million. Gosh! (Is a word we've collectively used 5,707 times since 1999!) [more inside]
posted by cortex on Jan 14, 2013 - 96 comments

I recently got my hands on a copy of Tableau Desktop. It's supposed to be a business intelligence app, but nevermind that. The first thing I did was hook it up to the infodump files! [more inside]
posted by aheckler on Dec 16, 2012 - 65 comments

Infodump update! 1. We've relocated the data files for the Infodump to the mefi.us file server, to better manage load with large file transfers. If you retrieve Infodump files automatically, note the change and update your process accordingly. 2. New data files: postlengths for Mefi, Askme, Meta and Music. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Jan 30, 2012 - 35 comments

The contacts section allows us to indicate who we've actually met. Would the infodump be able to tell us who among us has met the most MeFites? I know it's dependent on people selecting the "met" box when listing a contact, but I'm curious about the number.
posted by ambrosia on Dec 20, 2011 - 99 comments

A few years back I posted some stream graph visualizations of MeFi user activity. cortex pointed out that these had fallen off of the web at some point, so I took the opportunity to update the images through 2011. [more inside]
posted by Galvatron on Oct 6, 2011 - 62 comments

Is there anyway to get a chart of my comments over time, using the Infodump and Excel (or any other tool suitable for the job). [more inside]
posted by geoff. on Jun 15, 2011 - 10 comments

I'm a geek in need of a spare-time project. I love metafilter, and numbers can make me kinda giddy at times, so the infodump sounds like a great place to start. Plus, this pony reminded me that I've been meaning to do something for a while. I just lack ideas. [more inside]
posted by cgg on Apr 14, 2011 - 117 comments

Hello everyone! I got bored today and wanted to read some witty, short comments, so I used the infodump to sort every short comment on MeFi by its favorites. [more inside]
posted by archagon on Feb 17, 2011 - 108 comments

How many FPPs have more favorites than comments? [more inside]
posted by vidur on Feb 7, 2011 - 51 comments

The perfect gift for the computational linguist in your life: Metafilter Frequency Tables! Finally you can know definitively how many times words such as "metafilter", "fucknozzle", or "mctootypoots" have been used on the site. (A: 127,484 times, 28 times, and once.) [more inside]
posted by cortex on Jan 4, 2011 - 55 comments

How can I search/filter for comments of a certain length? Is there a way to filter comments via word count using infodump data? [more inside]
posted by Devils Rancher on Jul 30, 2010 - 10 comments

InfoDump Analysis Request. Who asks the most interesting questions in AskMe? [more inside]
posted by marsha56 on Jul 28, 2010 - 41 comments

Just gotta have the last word or are you a conversation killer? [more inside]
posted by turbodog on Jul 16, 2010 - 725 comments

Infodump fun with the fabulous Fishbike! [more inside]
posted by new brand day on Jul 14, 2010 - 127 comments

Some specific MeFi info-mashing about favorites I haven't seen. [more inside]
posted by cmoj on Mar 1, 2010 - 33 comments

Is it possible to look at your own favourites in an info-dumpish way? [more inside]
posted by taff on Jan 26, 2010 - 87 comments

Favorites and You*
*For Values of You <> [more inside]
posted by Babblesort on Jan 26, 2010 - 156 comments

Is there any way to view tags that have only been used once? [more inside]
posted by Rinku on Dec 14, 2009 - 38 comments

Infodump update: we've added a few new features. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Dec 14, 2009 - 151 comments

A thread for discussing November Experiment data, stats, graphs, and other datawankery. [more inside]
posted by FishBike on Dec 1, 2009 - 97 comments

The Metafilter Infodump is back, and moderately better than ever! Statistics nerds rejoice! [more inside]
posted by cortex on Aug 13, 2009 - 502 comments

So, what happened to the infodump? [more inside]
posted by localhuman on May 21, 2009 - 65 comments

I'm assuming this got lost in the Great Server Disaster of 2009, but is the Infodump ever coming back?
posted by desjardins on Feb 17, 2009 - 24 comments

stuff.metafilter.com? [more inside]
posted by Flunkie on Sep 27, 2008 - 47 comments

How do I hack a MeFi URL if I only have the post number and not the title? For example, metafilter.com/68665/ does not work, but metafilter.com/68665/Back-to-the-Future does. [more inside]
posted by desjardins on Jan 31, 2008 - 14 comments

Nerds, start your engines: it's the new Metafilter Infodump. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Jan 22, 2008 - 271 comments