EpiMetaFilter view pony

January 6, 2018 6:56 AM

Could there be a view of all of the posts across all of the sites, MetaFilter, AskMetaFilter, MetaTalk, FanFare, FanFareTalk (???), Projects, IRL, etc.? I love the unique feel of the different sites, but I would love one place to see the flow of activity. Maybe CircuMetaFilter? Would this have a homogenizing effect? Impossible in Cold Fusion? Already attempted and failed miserably?
posted by mumblelard to Feature Requests at 6:56 AM (15 comments total)

Hasn't been tried before as far as I know; I don't really have a good picture of the how or why for doing it now, though I agree with you that just as an idea it sounds sorta neat.

But in practice, getting past the basic "is this a good idea" and "is this a strain on the server" questions, it'd also require more work to present the different subsites' content clearly in a mixed stream than it requires to present each subsite's content in isolation. The different parts of the site do slightly different things, with different framing and assumptions and metadata, so a collated view would be wrestling with tone and presentation issues along with everything else.

That said, it's the sort of thing someone could hack together experimentally from RSS, if they wanted to see how it looked. Not the same as the site serving a fresh page, but it'd be able to get most of the way there without adding strain to the site beyond the period pinging of the RSS feeds.

One thing I think would stand out: it'd mostly be the blue and the green and everything else would just occasionally be peppered throughout. We see a whole bunch of posts on the front page every day, and more on Ask, but the rest of the subsites operate more at the rate of days-per-post rather than posts-per-day, hitting maybe a post a day on the busy side, because how different the "a concrete thing is happening/has been made" nature of a Jobs or IRL or Music or Projects etc post is from the much lower-threshold impetus of "I found a neat thing" or "I have a question about something".
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:02 AM on January 6, 2018

It'd be an interesting experiment for sure. I do not have the technical/programming knowledge to attempt such a thing, but I wouldn't be opposed to a catch-all page that has a bunch of the subsites curated in one place.

I'd love to see someone try it.
posted by Fizz at 7:41 AM on January 6, 2018

I kind of love this idea. More opportunity for discovery.

I love how it recreates the old notion of a print newspaper's front page.
posted by Miko at 8:11 AM on January 6, 2018 [5 favorites]

Wow. I want this so much.
posted by Night_owl at 8:17 AM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

I pretty much have this because of the way I organize my RSS Feeds, and it's not that entertaining. I still mostly end up drilling down and reading things separately, because otherwise I miss things I care about in the subsites other than Ask and the blue.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:13 AM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Same here -- my RSS reader has "folders," and one could add all the MeFi feeds to a single folder to get the effect OP is looking for.

In a similar vein, when I get obsessed on given topics, I can get RSS feeds of posts relatedly tagged. So, for example, I'm ramping up to begin learning drawing and thus subscribed to tags on Ask for drawing, illustration, and sketching.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:36 AM on January 6, 2018

I would also like to see (though not enough to want it if it puts undue strain on the servers) a "MeFi Front Page" layout with recent and popular posts from each of the groups. The OP request is pretty easily done with RSS and IFTTT.
posted by softlord at 9:54 AM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

It has the potential to create a virtuous cycle. The less visited filters would get an opportunity for exposure which could prompt visits and comments and even posts and make them more visited filters. Currently, I kind of forget that jobs exists, and I am not looking for a job right now, so my dream job could get posted and I would never see it. Knowing this, I am less likely to take the trouble to post a job, even though the pool of candidates that MetaFilter represents is such a great one. Etc., etc.. EpiMetaFilter could turn that effect on its head.

RSS can definitely approximate this, and I am a huge fan of RSS (R.I.P. Google Reader), but it has a homogenizing effect on sites. The look and feel of MetaFilter is part of the experience.
posted by mumblelard at 9:55 AM on January 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

On the human side of it, I suspect it'd lead to more noise in AskMe, because it wouldn't be quite as obvious that people were on the green rather than the blue. I see that a fair amount when there's a MeFi post and and AskMe post with similar topics (or one inspired by the other) where people start getting really chatty in the AskMe thread because they were just being chatty in the MeFi thread.
posted by lazuli at 10:02 AM on January 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

brace yourself for when someone posts ten show episodes at once on FanFare
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:28 AM on January 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

You could call it MetaStripes and make each post in a band of its subsites colors...mostly green and blue with occasional purple blue grey brown etc..probably look cool...
posted by sexyrobot at 2:49 PM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

MetaMetaFilter? MeMeFi?
posted by sexyrobot at 2:51 PM on January 8, 2018

brace yourself for when someone posts ten show episodes at once on FanFare


You could show most recent 5 only.
posted by Miko at 5:59 AM on January 9, 2018

You could call it MetaStripes and make each post in a band of its subsites colors

LOAD "MEFI"
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:57 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

MetaFlow.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 2:51 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]