Finding the articles only

August 25, 2011 3:28 PM

I read metafilter for the articles and would love a way of filtering posts which contain mainly articles. Maybe a tag is the answer. There is a great 'givemesomethingtoread' site hidden in metafilter. Any suggestions on the easiest way to get at it.
posted by therubettes to Feature Requests at 3:28 PM (41 comments total)

Having users self-identify their own or others' posts that contain articles [what sort of articles?] is unlikely to be super-useful or likely to happen. That said, you could create a custom My MeFi page (yes, it's new) and add tags that correspond to stuff that is likely to have articles as part of it. Maybe stuff like economist, vanityfair, rollingstone, I'm not sure what sort of articles you'd be interested in, but that's how I'd approach this.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:31 PM on August 25, 2011 [7 favorites]

You probably already know this, but longform.org is a pretty neat article aggregator that's kind of like Metafilter for articles only (and without conversations).
posted by koeselitz at 3:34 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I had to read your post five times before I was even halfway certain you weren't actually talking about porn.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 3:35 PM on August 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

A metafilter powered long reads type thing would indeed be awesome, but I can't think of any way to automate such a thing.

(fetch linked sites, if # of words in story > 1000, and it has 20+ favorites, then add to read later pile)
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:38 PM on August 25, 2011

therubettes: "I read metafilter for the articles"

Suuuuure you do. That's what they all say.
posted by brundlefly at 3:39 PM on August 25, 2011 [8 favorites]

I've just found out about My MeFi and it works well.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:44 PM on August 25, 2011

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posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:45 PM on August 25, 2011 [12 favorites]

I 2nd Longform.org. That combined with Instapaper and you can read long time GI.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 3:45 PM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

And since curation is all the rage lately, this is something we could do on the site if we set our mind to it. At this point only mods can add tags to anyone's posts, but an awful lot of people can add tags to contacts' posts. Would a tag page of only goodreads sorts of stuff be okay, or do you think it's so likely to be not used properly that it becomes less-useful? I don't know when our pintern's tenure is up but we could easily have a week of "send links to Dom" to start one of these things going if it seemed like something people would want.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:52 PM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

what's the p in pintern stand for again?
posted by desjardins at 3:57 PM on August 25, 2011

Well, a goodread or longform tag combined with My Mefi would be useful to me
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 3:58 PM on August 25, 2011

what's the p in pintern stand for again?

Plushie?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:01 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks for all the suggestions..My interest is partly prompted by my new android phone and the eradicated app I have recently installed and am loving. A tag like instead would be great.
.if only there were a way to have it widely used.
posted by therubettes at 4:04 PM on August 25, 2011

I am willing to curate. Give me the power to tag.
posted by reenum at 4:07 PM on August 25, 2011

There are a bunch of collected AskMes at The Wiki. (See the list under "Interesting Topics" on the right side of the page.) The Wiki might be a good space for collecting MetaFilter posts that include long articles.

One problem is that posts can contain many links. So the "longform" or "goodread" tag might apply to one of the links in the post, but not the half dozen YouTube videos also linked.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:10 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Shouldn't the tag essay be the standard one? It's already attached to a 148 posts, so it's already in use. Both "longform" and "goodread" seem kinda jargony to me and not obvious if you don't know what they mean.
posted by Kattullus at 4:45 PM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Honestly? Do a search in the comments for "tl;dr". ;)
posted by Rube R. Nekker at 5:18 PM on August 25, 2011 [4 favorites]

Shouldn't the tag essay be the standard one? It's already attached to a 148 posts, so it's already in use.

And 97 for "essays."

See, it's really hard to get people to follow a uniform tagging nomenclature. Even if there were some big announcement that we're all going to use the "essay" tag, people would forget if it's supposed to be plural or singular. They'd even forget if it's supposed to be "essay" or "article."

Many articles wouldn't be considered "essays."
posted by John Cohen at 5:31 PM on August 25, 2011

You probably already know this, but longform.org is a pretty neat article aggregator that's kind of like Metafilter for articles only (and without conversations).

I just came across it by accident a day or two ago. And of course I thought, "If no one else has FPP-ed this, I am about to get big-ass favorites."

No one had. But it also had been via-ed enough that I figured there wouldn't be much scoop value.

Still, it deserves one. And I figure if I had missed it until now, with as much internetting as I get up to, it can't be IMDb-level famous yet.
posted by Trurl at 6:27 PM on August 25, 2011

Trurl: " No one had. But it also had been via-ed enough that I figured there wouldn't be much scoop value."

I've probably via'd at least 5 or 6 fpp's from longform and longreads. They're fantastic sites. And longform is now producing roundups for slate, which is even cooler.
posted by zarq at 6:32 PM on August 25, 2011

Metafilter: I only read it for the articles.
posted by beagle at 6:36 PM on August 25, 2011

pb: "There are a bunch of collected AskMes at The Wiki. (See the list under "Interesting Topics" on the right side of the page.) The Wiki might be a good space for collecting MetaFilter posts that include long articles."

Interesting idea. I would think that would be harder to compile than obits or askmes on a specific topic though.
posted by zarq at 6:40 PM on August 25, 2011

I read Metafilter for the articles.

There are articles? All I see is porn.
posted by axiom at 8:50 PM on August 25, 2011

Please don't use goodread as a tag unless you're talking about the website for books. I'd get too confused.
posted by IndigoRain at 10:29 PM on August 25, 2011

Thanks for all the suggestions..My interest is partly prompted by my new android phone and the eradicated app I have recently installed and am loving.

Of course eradicated should be 'readitlater'..dam phone...
posted by therubettes at 10:31 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I was about to search Android market for eradicated. The results probably wouldn't have been helpful.
posted by deadwax at 12:20 AM on August 26, 2011

I also read MetaFilter for the articles - and the sub-articles, paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, annexes and schedules! HA HA HA HA HA!

A little corporate contract law humour there. Yeah, I know - you think we're all "square" and "unhip" in our grey suits and expensive cufflinks, but here at Hooke, Lyon and Cinquer LLP we're not too rigid for the odd guffaw!

-- that's when where not ruthlessly crushing beauty and freedom with our lies, greed and bland, corporate tyranny, of course.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 2:02 AM on August 26, 2011 [2 favorites]

Give Me Something to Read.
posted by WalterMitty at 4:35 AM on August 26, 2011

That said, you could create a custom My MeFi page (yes, it's new)

Woot!

Suggestions: music politics photography art rock obama texas history youtube books video apple film science batshitinsane food economy usa design Bush Religion space blog teaparty beatles

I guess that just about covers it 100%
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:07 AM on August 26, 2011

And since curation is all the rage lately, this is something we could do on the site if we set our mind to it.

Weird, I was just thinking about this last night after discovering My Mefi, and before seeing this thread; It seems like a natural progression of the way things work here will be people using the shared-contacts-can-tag feature to make sure that any post is tagged as completely as possible.

We do tend to gravitate towards indexability to facilitate finding stuff.
posted by quin at 7:28 AM on August 26, 2011

My suggested tags were Wisconsin gay sex.
posted by desjardins at 7:58 AM on August 26, 2011

Mine are books reading libraries rape. You know, just to make sure things go okay.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:49 AM on August 26, 2011

So, I work on longform.org and we've been wanting to get some kind of feed of metafilter's article-centric posts going for a while. I've recently been doing a lot of work on an ipad reading app we're building that will filter longform stories from various curators, and metafilter is one of the more difficult sources to parse, given the free-form nature of the FPPs.

There are some other issues to consider if you want to hook the feed of stories up to something like instapaper, such as isolating the "main story" from any backgrounder links, but those can probably be addressed by different people in different ways if there were a feed (or feeds) of longformish links somewhere on the site.

(Apologies if this comes off self-promotiony, I'm only jumping in because other folks mentioned our site.)
posted by wam at 9:59 AM on August 26, 2011

Great idea!

What if there were a field for specific longform articles on the post page? Just let the poster choose one or two (or make it Ajax-y for as many links as necessary) of their links to isolate as the essay, kind of like it currently has a section for your main link. Then do a feed just of the "essay" links....
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:39 AM on August 26, 2011

Another option would be to allow "tagging" the individual links in a post with set of whitelisted css classes or data- attributes to identify them. Basically a little microformat. That would allow users or 3rd parties to do some slightly more sophisticated best-guess filtering to create lists of long articles and send them to reading services.

This gets back to Jessamyn's original point, though: it hinges on self-identification of longform content by the poster, a process which is unlikely to produce something comprehensive. It also introduces a controlled vocabulary problem, with inevitable disagreements about what constitutes "good long reads." The former problem is trickier since there will be a tendency for things to be left out that many people would like to see included. The latter problem is easier, since it can be solved by people doing additional filtering of articles they don't want to send to their kindle, or whatever.

A Meta Filter question indeed...
posted by wam at 11:46 AM on August 26, 2011

My suggested tags were Wisconsin gay sex.
posted by desjardins at 7:58 AM on August 26 [+] [!]


Mine are books reading libraries rape. You know, just to make sure things go okay.
posted by jessamyn ★ at 9:49 AM on August 26 [+] [!]

I just checked mine, and I feel like I'm winning some kind of really socially awkward variant of Bingo.
posted by Stagger Lee at 11:49 AM on August 26, 2011 [2 favorites]

My suggested tags start off good : Art, science, politics, religion
(Wow. I look interesting and well-rounded!!)
Then rapidly go downhill : Dating, drinking, drinkinggame, liquor, drunk

You know, I think it could work like fortune cookies where you put "In bed" at the end of all of them.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 2:15 PM on August 26, 2011

I've just been checking out the my mefi thing, and it strikes me that I'd much rather be able to filter by excluding than including stuff.

Would it be possible to have tags like !comics !games !uspolitics and this exclude posts on those topics?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:44 PM on August 26, 2011

I'd like a tag that alerts me whenever there's a limerick about art, history, or literature in the comments of a thread. I'd also like more limericks about art, history, or literature, please.
posted by .kobayashi. at 4:59 PM on August 27, 2011

Did someone light the Katt-signal? Sorry, I'm awfully late to the scene of the crime... that I'm about to commit against art, history and literature:

There is no debauchery like Matisse's
Who sucks the filling out of Reese's
Peanut Butter cups
And rubs his pup's
Belly while collaging his friezes.
posted by Kattullus at 7:25 PM on August 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

Kattullus, I'm a couple of days late to this (blame Irene), but I'll see your Matisse limerick and add one about Thoreau:

Thoreau wrote a book about Walden,
The critical lauds he then hauled in.
So, you think he'd be fond,
But he hated that pond
Ever since the day that he fall'd in.
posted by .kobayashi. at 9:39 AM on August 29, 2011 [2 favorites]