Looking for a better way to find things.

December 17, 2007 2:55 PM

It's getting increasingly harder to find stuff. Especially favorite stuff. There have been a few great suggestions and observations so far, especially in this thread.

Rather than posting a metatalk post about the thread I am looking for and can't find (the one about the Teddy Bear named Muhammed), I figured it'd be better to seek out ways to search more efficiently. What I'm doing is not working so great.

I find that stuff I've favorited is especially difficult to sort and find. For example, I was searching for something I favorited a while back. I couldn't remember who wrote it, or which site (green, blue, gray) I had originally found it on. I just remembered it was a really insightful comment about men and women in relationships, and it involved ball-peen hammers. Except that I don't know how to spell ball-peen hammer, and I don't know how the commenter spelled it. Long story short, I painstakingly had to flip through ~30 pages of favorited comments, reading the truncated versions of each one, only relying on roughly *when* I had favorited it (approx. 6 months ago). I thought to myself, there has got to be a better way! Suggestions? Help?

I feel pestery bringing it up again, but the other thread (linked above) didn't receive much response, especially from mods. I'm curious if this is as big a challenge or issue for others, or if others have found ingenious ways of searching and organizing (without saving and tagging every favorite to another site).

Thanks!

posted by iamkimiam to Feature Requests at 2:55 PM (28 comments total)

I gave up using favorites as bookmarks; it just doesn't work. I use del.icio.us instead, where I have the benefit of proper timestamps, tags, and descriptions.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 2:58 PM on December 17, 2007

(As an aside: here's the Teddy thread.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:01 PM on December 17, 2007

I gave up using favorites as bookmarks; it just doesn't work.

But how will Avenger50 grow big and strong without getting favorited!?
posted by Avenger50 at 3:04 PM on December 17, 2007

Thanks. No wonder I couldn't find it–it got deleted! I *knew* I should have favorited it when I saw it the first time. Now I can't. But thank goodness it's a double. Haha.

(but it is interesting that neither thread came up in my search)
posted by iamkimiam at 3:06 PM on December 17, 2007

If you *only* use favorites as a bookmarking system, and you're choosy, I find it works very well. I'm usually pretty harsh with myself about how I use the favorites system -- I try to make sure I'll only favorite something that I really think I'll want to look up again in the future because it's unusually funny or insightful or informative or simply covers links I want to find in the future (though a cursory review of my favorites page shows I often fall short of this standard, at least regarding comments).

If you use it as a "hot or not" voting system or use it in place of commenting "what _____ said" or simply favorite everything that grabs your notice, all of which a lot of users do, then yeah, you're going to get bogged down in your own archive quite quickly.

But if you're really looking for a full-featured bookmarking system for Metafilter, I'd say setting up a good tagging system in del.icio.us would be a better option -- more power, less code for Matt's servers to run. Tagging favorites or having a search box for just your favorites would work well, but essentially then you'd just have the same thing as del.icio.us, only built in to Metafilter itself.

In fact, now I've half-convinced myself to stop using favorites entirely. :)
posted by middleclasstool at 3:17 PM on December 17, 2007

I also now see that the del.icio.us option's been brought up previously. Maybe reading your links before I comment would help.
posted by middleclasstool at 3:19 PM on December 17, 2007

We're working on being able to search just your past favorites and optionally add tags to them. We have to get a bunch of other stuff in place first though for that to happen.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:22 PM on December 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I don't understand why each thread can't have two sets of flags...one for visible "favorites" to call attention to the comment, and another used as a bookmarking system. It seems quite obvious that the favoriting function at this point serves two purposes. Why not just break it up, so that favorites can truly act as bookmarks and people can "+1" comments as they see fit?

FWIW, I've always been against calling attention to comments by popular vote, but now that there are so many, many members here, the noise is getting ridiculous, and some sort of comment rating system may be nice.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 3:50 PM on December 17, 2007

(Although I'm still against "negative" voting. We're all special, unique people, who shouldn't be told our comments suck. Let the individual reader decide whether a comment sucks.)
posted by SeizeTheDay at 3:53 PM on December 17, 2007

Your comment sucks.
posted by klangklangston at 4:18 PM on December 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

"We're working on being able to search just your past favorites and optionally add tags to them. We have to get a bunch of other stuff in place first though for that to happen."
posted by mathowie at 9:22 AM on December 18

Cool. But poor tehloki will have a lot of back tagging to do...
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:25 PM on December 17, 2007

It really doesn't solve the problem if we break up the favorites into favorites and bookmarks—although that'd be a nice feature. No matter one's reasons for favoriting, or the quantity of one's favorites...there's still not any sane way to FIND them. But it's great to hear that there's something in the works. Thanks Matt!

btw, adding and tagging 700+ favorite comments to delicious is RIDICULOUS. Especially since it presupposes/necessitates several things:
1. being logged into both Metafilter AND delicious (which I don't always want to do since I jump around on different computers at different offices each day).
2. Installing the delicious toolbar button on every computer...and removing it at end of day.
3. Logging into delicious to find the links (because they will be saved as "Do not share"/private links, so that they don't end up cluttering my delicious list (for mine and other users' benefit), as well as showing up in places where the delicious list auto-updates (sidebar of blog or daily feed post).
4. Requires me to stop what I'm doing/reading to tag and/or write a metacomment about the favorited comment–really disruptive to the whole idea of light reading.
5. Reduplicates and transfers content from one site into another=redundancy!
6. Also, not knowing exactly what I will want to refer back to in the future, I must either save and tag EVERYTHING to delicious, or draw up some imaginary line/system by asking myself "Is this something I suspect I'll want to be able to find again?" for every single dingle comment I favorite. And hope that nothing slips through the cracks (because how annoying would it be to skip a few here and there, and then spend X amount of time searching both delicious and metafilter for some damn comment).
7. I just want to keep my meta, meta.

I could go on, but I won't.
/rant
posted by iamkimiam at 4:25 PM on December 17, 2007

I *knew* I should have favorited it when I saw it the first time. Now I can't.
Wouldn't have made any difference. All favorites are removed from deleted posts.
posted by tellurian at 6:24 PM on December 17, 2007

I dunno, I was holding out and taking the same tack as middleclasstool, but favorites really don't work well as bookmarks. And when it comes to improving the search it's not the favorites that should take priority. I would really like to be able to search comments by user (you know, for stalking). And a date range for the search would be another big advance. But back to the favorites, I think bookmarking is the only way to go. It's definitely the practical solution if you ever want to find it again, and besides we treat favorites like some kind of mark of validation anyway. It's like a watered down version of reddit for comments. Shit, I wanna take part. From now on, I'm gonna favorite like tehloki.
posted by BigSky at 7:19 PM on December 17, 2007

BigSky, when the things we need to have in place for favorites searching are in place, we'll be able to do comment search as well, per user, per date range, etc.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:17 PM on December 17, 2007

Wouldn't have made any difference. All favorites are removed from deleted posts.
Wrong; I can see mine.
posted by adamvasco at 3:35 AM on December 18, 2007

in the future, you'll be able to search for things you never said about things that don't exist.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:44 AM on December 18, 2007

I'm pretty sure I didn't ask for that pony. Let me check my archives.
posted by Plutor at 8:04 AM on December 18, 2007

mathowie : when the things we need to have in place for favorites searching are in place, we'll be able to do comment search as well, per user, per date range, etc.

♪♫ These are a few of my favorite things...♫♪
posted by quin at 8:45 AM on December 18, 2007

Someone, during the death of James Brown period, wrote an incredibly poetic comment about him. The gist was that he was continually in the process of reinventing James Brown.

If someone would provide me that link I would be most appreciative.
posted by Meatbomb at 9:01 AM on December 18, 2007

And if someone would provide Meatbomb that link like seven fucking times, I would be deeply amused.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:15 AM on December 18, 2007

Just Say No, kids!
posted by Meatbomb at 10:36 AM on December 18, 2007

>>Wouldn't have made any difference. All favorites are removed from deleted posts.
>Wrong; I can see mine.
You can see your what? If you go to your favorites it has deleted posts listed there? I don't think so.
posted by tellurian at 2:29 PM on December 18, 2007

If you go to your favorites it has deleted posts listed there? I don't think so.

Mine does. Take a closer look at that cum-eating monkey.
posted by BigSky at 3:20 PM on December 18, 2007

Fave-stripping (and fave-blocking) on deletions came along a good ways after favorites themselves, possibly in a couple stages, and wasn't retroactive as far as I know.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:21 PM on December 18, 2007

Fave-stripping (and fave-blocking) on deletions came along a good ways after favorites themselves
Oh, for shitting in the sink! That would be why I don't have any in my favorites.
posted by tellurian at 6:02 PM on December 18, 2007

Oh, for shitting in the sink!

Hey wait a second....
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:24 AM on December 19, 2007

My dad's favorite is "Well, I'll kiss your ass for a peach."
posted by middleclasstool at 6:14 AM on December 19, 2007