How do I keep up with long political threads?

September 1, 2017 6:54 AM

As a Brit I find the recent US political threads compelling but it is difficult to keep up with the volume of posts. Is there a way to filter such threads by the amount of favorites each post has? Or is there another good way to skim the best of such high volume threads without it being a full time job?
posted by epo to Feature Requests at 6:54 AM (14 comments total)

You could try the Metafilter MultiFavorited Multiwidth extension for Chrome. It "highlights multifavorited comments with bars whose width indicates the number of favorites."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:55 AM on September 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Possibly useful, easily overlooked: "add to activity" allows you to follow threads in Recent Activity without commenting in them. Also, the wiki has a page on the politics megathreads.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 7:11 AM on September 1, 2017

I use graphfi.
posted by phunniemee at 7:12 AM on September 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Reading until your eyes are blurry with tears of rage then stopping also cuts things to a more manageable level.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:41 AM on September 1, 2017 [15 favorites]

I use the MultiFavorited script as well (a hacked up version of the original Greasemonkey user script on Firefox) but I also find MetaFilter Per-User Display Customizations useful for highlighting the contributions of some folks that tend to post interesting comments. In a long thread that I'm behind on, I'll generally scan through comment-by-comment, trying to read everything for context, but making sure to stop for the ones that have been highly-faved or are from users I've chosen to highlight the contributions of.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:43 AM on September 1, 2017

The chrome MultiFavourited script just let me highlight scan the recent thread in about 10-15 minutes, brilliant. Highly recommended as someone who's been skipping the political threads for the same reasons. I use two browsers so keeping the political threads on browser only and regular metafilter on the other already is fine.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:56 AM on September 1, 2017

There's also, under POPULAR on the front page, the Popular Favorites page, which collects all highly-favorited comments and posts from across the main site.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:16 AM on September 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Reading until your eyes are blurry with tears of rage then stopping also cuts things to a more manageable level.

When I do that it usually gets me to about comment 3 so I feel like I'm missing a lot of nuance but maybe not
posted by billiebee at 10:13 AM on September 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Just read my comments, that's the cream of the crop right there.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:45 PM on September 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

More seriously, you might want to start paying attention to the commenters, for what you want. My comments are usually either straight news items, or one liners, I don't do a whole ton of analysis. zachlipton has a lot of news, Excommunicated Cardinal has good historical background, You Can't Tip A Buick will tell you how this fits into the Hegelian dialectic, etc.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:59 PM on September 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Always rotate your ammuntion.
posted by clavdivs at 1:05 PM on September 1, 2017

I copy the last post I've read into a Word document; a few hours / days later I skip back to that point and start scanning the first sentence of longer posts. If I stay within 24 hours, I'm good. Otherwise, I'm with the "read until my eyes blur / ears steam" team. Long walks and being outdoors are restorative. Reading every post in real time -- not so much. I did that during the election as much as possible, and spent too much time yelling at my computer to no effect.
posted by free f_ cat at 1:49 PM on September 1, 2017

When I get way behind at a fast-moving time, I split into two tabs of the same page. One I skip to the end and follow new comments. The other I just scan from where I left off reading the titles of offsite links. Sometimes I'll right-click a post timestamp and 'open in new tab' so I can come back to that spot and read more thoroughly later. If I have time and I'm still following the conversation in real-time, I go back and read every comment in the other tab because I do feel like I lose a lot by skimming. But aint nobody got time for that EVERY day.
posted by ctmf at 11:14 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Reading until your eyes are blurry with tears of rage then stopping also cuts things to a more manageable level.

I tend to go for a similar rig work x-on-y-off schedule.

But with toggle points based on how cringe inducing the memory of my own last comments are the next morning (as a self timeout) and how immediate the need is for a long-form reasoned commentary on the week's latest sea-change in world politics (as opposed to the never ending epigrams of antagonism and despair from the twitters).
posted by Buntix at 4:27 PM on September 16, 2017