Method for tracking interesting slow-burn threads?

July 10, 2013 6:33 AM

Most posts in the blue or green seem to be active for a day or two before contributions trail off. However some continue to grow over a much longer period (or are resurrected by a new flurry of activity). I am thinking of this Edward Snowden thread which is still going strong after a month, for example. Those who have posted to such threads can normally maintain awareness of them via "Recent Activity". Is there any way of doing so for the rest of us? If not then could this be considered as a feature?

Apologies if this has been discussed before or if it is just a feature I am unaware of. I am aware, also, that not all long-lived threads are interesting.

Apart from just tracking longevity, I guess a mechanism to allow readers to "bump" interesting older threads (as opposed to just add them as favorites) might achieve a similar end.

posted by rongorongo to Feature Requests at 6:33 AM (32 comments total)

If you add it to your favorites, it will show up in Recent Activity on its own tab.

For a more general view there's this cool 3rd-party thing made by jjwiseman.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:37 AM on July 10, 2013 [5 favorites]

if you favorite a thread, under recent activity there's a "my favorites" tab where you can follow along even if you haven't commented.

which doesn't help with discovery, but does help the maintaining awareness without commenting thing.
posted by nadawi at 6:37 AM on July 10, 2013

beat by mere seconds!
posted by nadawi at 6:38 AM on July 10, 2013

I wish there was an option to combine those tabs.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:38 AM on July 10, 2013

Also that was basically that Snowden thread's swan song, as MeFi threads close after 30 days.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:38 AM on July 10, 2013

I often catch these threads on the Recent Comments page. The Snowden thread is all the way down to page 5 now, but it's definitely been popping up on page one at lot recently.

I often wish AskMe had recent comments view.
posted by 0 at 6:59 AM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Drinky Die: "I wish there was an option to combine those tabs."

Me too, as it happens. But it would require a complete overhaul of how Recent Activity works and I understand it's simply not in the cards right now.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 7:04 AM on July 10, 2013

Each post has a subscribe link under the title, next to the date. It will push all updates to your news reader.
posted by QuakerMel at 7:27 AM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

There are all these mentions of what is "in the cards," and I can't help but imagine that those cards are similar to cards against humanity, but just a bit more polite.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:27 AM on July 10, 2013

Apart from just tracking longevity, I guess a mechanism to allow readers to "bump" interesting older threads (as opposed to just add them as favorites) might achieve a similar end.

Unless this is just a personal bump, please no. Metafilter can get soapboxy enough as it is, and allowing people to push stories back up to the front page would make it worse.
posted by zabuni at 7:31 AM on July 10, 2013

I'm just going to say 'Secret MetaFilter' here because it was linked above under a 'this' link, which led to the MetaTalk thread about it which, in turn, doesn't mention the website by name until you go below the fold.
posted by carsonb at 7:42 AM on July 10, 2013

There are all these mentions of what is "in the cards," and I can't help but imagine that those cards are similar to cards against humanity, but just a bit more polite.

This is basically correct except for the part about being more polite, e.g.


posted by cortex (staff) at 8:13 AM on July 10, 2013 [28 favorites]

Show off.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:19 AM on July 10, 2013 [7 favorites]

jjwiseman's "Secret MetaFiler" link goodnewsfortheinsane posted is pretty much what I had in mind. My only criticisms of it are:

1)It is a long scroll through each of the 35 or so thread tails
2)Metafilter threads only.

I guess what I have in mind is a sort of " slow burn interestingness" thread index to complement the relatively straightforward "popularly favorited" count. That index might be determined by
1. Number of recent posts made past a threshold of, say, two days after thread creation.
2. Number of different contributors making those posts.
3. Number of new links being added.
4. Number of new favourited comments
5. Number of new favourites to the thread.
posted by rongorongo at 8:19 AM on July 10, 2013

Secret Metafilter for those of you who don't want to go on the tour.
posted by adamvasco at 8:36 AM on July 10, 2013

I've wished for a convention like "." - maybe ":" to say that I have nothing to add but I'm interested in following along. But that would just add clutter to the thread if 50 people did the same thing, so...

An "Add to Activity" button!

Why yes, I would give up a cane made from Hitler's jawbone for that pony.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:34 AM on July 10, 2013

Also that was basically that Snowden thread's swan song, as MeFi threads close after 30 days.

I think "30 days after the most recent comment" would be nice. Or if that's thought to be too long, maybe even something like "At least 30 days, and not within five days of the most recent comment" or whatever.

This isn't just theoretical; it's been rare, but I have seen multiple actual threads which made me disappointed in the 30 day rule.

Maybe it could be abused for some strange reason, but I can't imagine that it would be abused frequently, and in any case I imagine a "knock it off" would solve the problem.
posted by Flunkie at 10:06 AM on July 10, 2013

If it is indeed a problem, that is.
posted by Flunkie at 10:07 AM on July 10, 2013

> Maybe it could be abused for some strange reason, but I can't imagine that it would be abused frequently

You might want to investigate why the rule was instituted in the first place, though that would require feeding Cerberus a soporific, pulling up the stone tablet in the center of the Cabal Room floor, and having a very quiet conversation with Paphnuty, if he still has the power of speech after all these years chained to the wall.

I may have said too much.
posted by languagehat at 10:19 AM on July 10, 2013 [7 favorites]

Also that was basically that Snowden thread's swan song, as MeFi threads close after 30 days.

SecretMetafilter reveals no fewer than five NSA/Snowden related threads [1 (July 1st), 2 (June 9th), 3 (June 13th), 4 (June 30th), 5 (July 3rd)] - all of these are still amassing comments. They all seem to have largely different sets of contributors (meaning, one might conclude, that those posting and reading each one are not also tracking the others). Snowden's saga is exactly the kind of gradually unfolding, complex, case that would make it compelling to raise the profile of slow accumulating posts (I also would be a supporter of not automatically closing them after 30 days)
posted by rongorongo at 10:55 AM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

i thought the closing happened because of abuse (i know there have been mentions of spammers dropping shit in old questions to up their google ranks).
posted by nadawi at 11:03 AM on July 10, 2013

It wouldn't be a terrible imposition on the mods to keep all posts open forever, right? All they would have to do is a quick scan through all ten million comments every day.
posted by double block and bleed at 12:13 PM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Metafilter can get soapboxy enough as it is, and allowing people to push stories back up to the front page would make it worse.

I'm guessing you don't want to hear my suggestion for a floating

☛ ♨ "Hot Threads!" ♨ Mindlessly amusing myself with curiosity ♨ What do you bring to work for lunch? ♨ What Luck Have You Had With Subscription Boxes? ♨ "Hot Threads!" ♨ ☚

banner that would sit on the top of all pages, indicating ⚡ exciting topics ⚡.

(NOTE: I just found the UTF8 test page for misc. symbols, which has hot springs but apparently no "fire" symbol. That page makes me ☻happy☺, but I'm ☹sad☹ this computer doesn't display all of the symbols.)
posted by filthy light thief at 12:39 PM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

It wouldn't be a terrible imposition on the mods to keep all posts open forever, right? All they would have to do is a quick scan through all ten million comments every day.

I don't think my suggestion would come anywhere close to this.

I just took a quick look at the posts for July 10, 2012 (one year ago today). Maybe that particular day isn't representative of the typical day, but for what it's worth, none of the posts from that day would've been kept open any longer than they actually were. None. Zero. And the vast majority of them wouldn't have come even remotely close.

There were 28 posts. The average post had its last comment about three days after the post was made. None at all made it to even three weeks, let alone a month. All but two were a week or less, and a majority -- an actual majority -- were one day or less.

20 days: 1 post.
14 days: 1 post.
7 days: 1 post.
6 days: 1 post.
5 days: 2 posts.
3 days: 4 posts.
2 days: 3 posts.
1 day: 14 posts.
0 days: 1 post.

So, again, it seems like my suggestion wouldn't have had any effect at all on the threads from a year ago today, and in fact it wouldn't have even come close to having an effect.

Meanwhile, like I said, there have been rare (but multiple) instances in real life where I've been disappointed by in-progress conversation being arbitrarily cut off for no apparent reason by the 30 day rule. I don't really see why in-progress conversation should be arbitrarily cut off after 30 days.

Maybe there's a reason why in-progress conversation should be arbitrarily cut off after 30 days, and "infinite work for the mods" certainly would be a good reason, but I'm not so sure that it actually would be a lot of extra work. Would it? Either for some other reason, or because the posts of July 10, 2012 are atypically brief?

Maybe some infodump wizard could run a query to get a larger, more inclusive version of my quick count. Say, maybe, over the last two years (or whatever) to account for the fact(?) that the site has grown. I'd be interested in seeing the results regardless of whether or not there's some other reason why it would cause a lot of extra work.
posted by Flunkie at 6:31 PM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

If the by-far standard outcome with threads is to die off in way less than a month, and the most common thing we see as threads stay open longer is spam we have to clean up, that's mostly a pretty compelling argument for leaving threads to close up as they do and acknowledging that it's a rare bummer when a marathon thread closes before its time.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:31 PM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

It is? Why? That doesn't really make sense to me.

Again, none of those threads would have been extended at all, and thus wouldn't have had any more spam than they actually did (however much that was). And is it actually true that in the "rare marathon thread" that would have been extended, you would see more spam than actual comments, given that the fact is that actual comments were actually happening?

As opposed to the vast majority of threads, which (if July 10, 2012 is any indication) you apparently see more spam than actual comments because zero actual comments happen.
posted by Flunkie at 8:15 PM on July 10, 2013

Sorry, I slipped the context there and forgot you'd been arguing specifically for the hybrid month-past-last-comment system. I agree that that'd have less effect on the longevity of threads and the spam thing's not an issue, but it'd also be complicating the otherwise straightforward "when does a thread close" question for the sake of a tiny, tiny minority of threads, which from a user-education standpoint doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to me.

Practically speaking, the rare "this thread's still going after a month" situations are ones where (a) there's likely been ongoing developments to prompt the continued discussion and (b) there are likely to be multiple posts to which the conversation can move or a tactical New Post aimed for the the end of the original's life-cycle.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:39 PM on July 10, 2013

Minor derail, but how tall are you cortex? And how big was Hitler's jaw? It seems that a cane made from Hitler's jawbone wouldn't be very tall, unless the jawbone is only part of a larger cane.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:13 AM on July 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

His jawbone would clearly be the primary material from which the handle of the cane was fashioned. Any reasonable canesmith would understand the length of the item to come from e.g. femurs.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:50 AM on July 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Is there a reason the "Recent Activity" view of MetaTalk doesn't have "staff" tags?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 11:26 AM on July 11, 2013

Or flagging buttons
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 11:49 AM on July 11, 2013

Glad I saw the answer about the favorites.

I am desperate to know what happens in the crazy roommate / gun thread on ask.me, but have no useful advice, so it won't show up in my recent activity.
posted by bunderful at 8:47 AM on July 13, 2013