Please make him go somewhere?

April 25, 2021 9:59 AM

Every few days, I look over at the US politics sidebar on the front page, and see ""Let me tell you this right now, Donald J. Trump ain't going anywhere." On one hand, I feel a certain amount of glee looking at that headline and thinking "well, that was WRONG" - on the other hand, I think "I could have gone all day without even thinking about him if I hadn't looked over there."

I don't find it particularly triggering, and I would like to be able to see and participate in future threads about "US Politics." At the same time, though, I wonder if perhaps the sidebar has outlived its usefulness? The newest story there is from Feb 28th; at this point, everything there has been archived and can no longer be commented on.

posted by jordemort to MetaFilter-Related at 9:59 AM (8 comments total)

Just in case people don't understand the mechanism of the US Politics sidebar and tagging/exclusion options for it, here's the FAQ entry which should be up to date.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:06 AM on April 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Easy option is to make a bunch of us politics posts real fast
posted by Going To Maine at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

Also, there’s an election coming up in 2022 and contenders are already laying the groundwork for 2024. That sidebar might want to go away for now, but given the state of the world it’s going to need to come back on an at least annual basis.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:31 AM on April 25, 2021

Given how hard republican legislators are still working to overthrow various results of the election (see Arizona’s “recount” currently in progress, for example) I’m kind of amazed the Politics sidebar is as quiet as it is.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:54 AM on April 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

I, on the other hand, have looked at the sidebar many a times and thought about the blissful lull as a result of him not going anywhere.
posted by Namlit at 1:16 PM on April 25, 2021

The slow movement of the sidebar is not purely a function of #uspolitics posting frequency, since it is manually curated. There has been at least one recent #uspolitics post that has not sidebarred (the GOP rebranding one, which has now become the latest "Democrats bad Y/N?" thread since apparently that's the only conversation we're capable of having anymore).

I believe all of the posts currently featured on the sidebar have been closed, which would seem to make the sidebar somewhat less useful than usual. Would it be reasonable for posts to be removed from the sidebar once they have been archived and closed to new comments?
posted by Not A Thing at 6:32 PM on April 25, 2021 [8 favorites]

Due to an error on the part of gmail I get a lot of GOP stuff intended for another person with a similar address who apparently is a Trump supporter. Mr. Trump et al. have raised nearly a billion dollars to "take back the House" in 2022, and if that happens, Mr. Trump will run again for president in 2024. We have seen the ongoing turmoil that his presence has caused; another four years of that would change the country in many ways.
posted by Cranberry at 12:41 AM on April 26, 2021

There's actually been one or two US Politics threads per week through Biden's first 100 days, and a handful have also been tagged with potus46 as a tag.

If whatever drives the sidebar is looking for both the USPolitics and Potus45 tags combined to propose new entries, it might not seem like there's a lot of new stuff. But it would be nice to push our 45th president off the front page for a while, even if I'm sure he'll be back some day.
posted by thecaddy at 10:20 AM on April 28, 2021 [2 favorites]