[MeFi Site Update] September 20th

September 20, 2023 12:28 PM

Welcome to your monthly Site Update for MetaFilter, our beloved community weblog! The last update is here. You’ll find some updates regarding the site below. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions.

Reminder: I will be the only mod monitoring this thread so please be patient and constructive as I reply to your feedback and questions.

Fundraising Update

– We raised $882.00 in new subscriptions and $14,203.00 in individual contributions. While this might not sound like a lot, it does make a significant difference for the site finances, which as mentioned before, are currently in good health. This does not include the old, lapsed subscriptions that are now resuming as part of our ongoing reach out campaign. I’m still compiling the specific data for this and will provide an update. Thank you everyone who has been able to help by resuming their subscriptions, starting a new subscription or by contributing in any other way, either with one time contributions, providing help or feedback during the fundraising! If you need any help checking the status of your contribution please Contact Us .

Admin/Moderation

– Tightened up language and our moderation practices in the FAQ about AI-generated posts/comments.
– We’ll be adding language to the banner area encouraging people to use the flag feature with guidance on how it works as we review final flagging UI changes from frimble.
– Our card processing system has been reconfigured so that a thank you email goes out for every payment or and a different email goes out for any declined transaction moving forward.
– Final business paperwork from cortex has been completed (we did the work on our end, he’ll reimburse us for the expenses). There will be a longer business announcement within the next week.

Technical changes

– Replaced the Google geocoder in IRL with something that doesn’t break and fixed some bugs surrounding that.
– Removed all Twitter/X share options from the site, removed Twitter/X from the social list and removed the Twitter/X widget from profile pages
– Deleted posts and comments are no longer showing up on the Popular Posts page
– Fixed an issue where some themes were still showing restless_nomad as staff.
– Currently looking at the slightly-broken old test Fanfare in this MeTa thread and broken scrolling in BestOf on iOS.
– We have blocked ChatGPT web crawler across all subsites.
– Fixed some back end community engagement charts and graphs that were using Flash, which are now functioning correctly.

BIPOC Advisory Board

Minutes for the July meeting have been posted and the August meeting is pending approval and will be posted once it is ready. Also, thanks to the efforts and initiative of the Board, we had 4 new members joining in the past 2 meetings.

If you have any questions or feedback not related to this particular update, please Contact Us instead. If you want to discuss a particular subject not covered here with the community, you’re welcome to open a separate MetaTalk thread for it.

posted by loup (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 12:28 PM (188 comments total)

Fixed an issue where some themes were still showing restless_nomad as staff.

Heh, thank you.
posted by restless_nomad (retired) at 12:45 PM on September 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

Thanks for this update, loup!

I'm especially happy to see these:

- Our card processing system has been reconfigured so that a thank you email goes out for every payment or and a different email goes out for any declined transaction moving forward.
– Replaced the Google geocoder in IRL with something that doesn’t break and fixed some bugs surrounding that.
– We have blocked ChatGPT web crawler across all subsites.

I was so annoyed with Google when geocoding broke on all my hobby sites. It seems like a small thing, but I'm glad it's working now.

And I didn't even know you could block the ChatGPT web crawler, but that sounds great as well.

Thank you for keeping us posted - and for all the work everyone does, visible or not, to keep MetaFilter running as well as it does!
posted by kristi at 12:57 PM on September 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

Thank you, kristi!

About the ChatGPT block: This was added to their documentation recently, and we made that change (across all subsites) because it doesn’t hurt anything, but note that MetaFilter was already in their corpus and it's too late to affect ChatGPT or GPT-4's current training data, which was scraped, without letting anyone know, years ago.

More info: Sites scramble to block ChatGPT web crawler after instructions emerge

posted by loup (staff) at 1:22 PM on September 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

I'm still seeing the Share to Twitter on the right sidebar in Modern, FYI. But good call getting rid of it.
posted by deezil at 1:22 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm still seeing the Share to Twitter on the right sidebar in Modern, FYI

Reporting this. Thanks!
posted by loup (staff) at 1:26 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Why are we blocking Twitter, exactly? I get that Elon Musk is an asshole, but skis Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook is still there. Facebook has even had some pretty high-profile data privacy scandals recently. Facebook willfully promotes misinformation and seems to be the biggest contributor to a lot of the ills facing society. Twitter is just owned by a guy who says stupid stuff to make himself sound like an edgelord.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:15 PM on September 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

Why are we blocking Twitter, exactly?

Removing a Share To button is not blocking.
posted by Etrigan at 4:39 PM on September 20, 2023 [17 favorites]

Fixed an issue where some themes were still showing restless_nomad as staff.

I have no idea if it's due to the same sort of issue, but Eyebrows McGee still shows up as staff.
posted by Flunkie at 4:42 PM on September 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Twitter is just owned by a guy who says stupid stuff to make himself sound like an edgelord.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
posted by Flunkie at 4:43 PM on September 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

I mean, yeah, I have a pretty good idea who Musk is. But Zuckerberg has also told us who he is, and it’s arguably worse than Musk, but Facebook is still A-OK. The question is not merely “why get rid of Twitter?”; the question is “why get rid of Twitter and nothing else?” There’s some cognitive dissonance there, made even more dissonant by the fact that Metafilter staff seem to be increasing their usage of Twitter.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:22 PM on September 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

(will bluesky be added to the social list?)
posted by mittens at 5:42 PM on September 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be okay with depriving Facebook of attention via profiles too. I'd be okay with removing a lot of other social media services too, but I realize I'm an outlier. I don't care enough to make a deal of it one way or the other, as I can just not use any of those features.
posted by Alterscape at 6:15 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, an eyebrow raised here at the Twitter-related stuff being tucked under "technical changes". Sure, yes, the mechanics of removing share links etc are, but this is at root a policy change, no?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:17 PM on September 20, 2023 [16 favorites]

(will bluesky be added to the social list?)

If I remember rightly the bar here is "provides publicly-visible profile pages that we can link to", which bluesky doesn't meet yet.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:21 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Based on other Metatalks, the Twitter widgets were removed because they were broken by Twitter themselves with their API changes. It's not an ideological choice to remove them. They don't work anymore.
posted by twelve cent archie at 6:54 PM on September 20, 2023 [44 favorites]

I think Fanfare would benefit from some real user research/design and I hope the corporate structure will be worked out so that can happen as we do have expertise around here before switching templates.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:58 PM on September 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

the Twitter widgets were removed because they were broken by Twitter themselves with their API changes.

But removing Twitter from the (very long) list of sites you can link to from your profile page is nothing to do with the API - it's just a link to a Twitter page.
posted by fabius at 11:08 PM on September 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I, for one, am glad for any additional friction added to the use of Twitter (not just on Metafilter). In a perfectly just world, should such additional friction be enacted for the use of Twitter if and only if that same additional friction is enacted for the use of Facebook (or whatever)?

Maybe. I don't know. I'd have to think about it, I guess. All I really know at this point is:

(1) I don't care very much about the question; certainly not enough to do that thinking.

(2) I'm glad that the additional friction has been added to the use of Twitter, and would be even if my answer to the question would be, were I to care enough to think about, yes.
posted by Flunkie at 11:40 PM on September 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just a heads-up that every time there's a new banner at the top of the site (which there was a lot of during fundraising, but still seems to be ongoing) there is a 70ish% chance it is impossible to remove them on mobile classic (Android, Chrome) as the 'skip to menu' button sits over the 'hide' button. I reported one or two cases of this, but gave up when it was a new one every day.

The current banner also has this issue. Whatever the current approach to compositing it with the nav button in mobile classic is, it's not working very well.
posted by Dysk at 12:14 AM on September 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

I, for one, am glad for any additional friction added to the use of Twitter (not just on Metafilter).

Sure. At the risk of being holier than thou, I stopped using Twitter a while ago and am always confused when I happen across it and discover good, socially aware friends still happily using it. Leaving aside the effect of this on the people who still rely on it, I hope it dies, quickly or slowly.

But for a lot of people it's still the place where they have the most social interaction, support, leads for work, etc, or is the way they publicise their livelihood, or is just somewhere they enjoy being, despite who runs the place.

Which is the same with Facebook, which is, like Airbnb (not much favoured round here) still a site you can add to your profile.

Much as we don't like these places, I assume there are more mefites who do use them than there are that use Stellar (RIP), Ello (ditto), or some of the more obscure sites available to link from a profile.
posted by fabius at 3:28 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

the Twitter widgets were removed because they were broken by Twitter themselves with their API changes

yeah set all your feelings about Elon or the larger network of hideous social-media-operator behaviors aside -- Twitter/X has deliberately become an unusable, unfriendly platform in terms of its ability or willingness to connect properly to other parts of the web. it seems like an unambiguously easy-enough choice to just excise it from MetaFilter in its entirety

Fixed some back end community engagement charts and graphs that were using Flash, which are now functioning correctly.

seems good, but also I assume this was done by no longer using Flash, which breaks my heart a little as I now cannot imagine that the staff have some kind of walled-garden Newgrounds back there
posted by Kybard at 6:04 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought I had caveated my comment enough to assuage anyone who might fear I was an apologist for Twitter/X and Musk but no, I am apparently coming across as a Gamergater – or at least I assume that's what Rock 'em Sock 'em is implying. I don't know what else to say to defend my honour.

I assume the person who asked yesterday on Ask about (gasp!) paying for X will receive a quiet word about their unsuitability for this place.

OK, once any one of those people who actually uses Twitter and actually uses the site to find people on Twitter speaks up, I will personally be willing to take this concern seriously

We should, then, probably greatly simplify the list of possible profile widgets and remove a load more, because I suspect people are more likely to miss the Twitter one than many of the 131 other services that remain.
posted by fabius at 6:25 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wouldn't your made-up scenario about the Ask post have happened by now? Aren't the answers there evidence that this alleged anti-X bias doesn't extend to people asking questions about it?

Since the post is up and the mods haven't banned the poster, I posit you're exaggerating for effect, in order to defend... A social media list entry?
posted by sagc at 6:28 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

OK, once any one of those people who actually uses Twitter and actually uses the site to find people on Twitter speaks up, I will personally be willing to take this concern seriously

I'm surprised to see this! I thought it would be pretty common--someone makes an interesting comment, you go look at their profile, hey, there's a twitter profile, and so you go out to see if they're someone you'd like to follow. Am I just a stalker? I figured everyone did that.

Also, thanks to Dysk for pointing out the banner issue on mobile--I thought it was my personal browser settings causing that unusable jam-up of links.
posted by mittens at 6:31 AM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Since the post is up and the mods haven't banned the poster, I posit you're exaggerating for effect, in order to defend... A social media list entry?

Yes, you posit correctly!

I'm sorry this is apparently such a massive deal. I was supporting someone else up thread who thought this was an odd inconsistency, and I agree.

If there's an actual policy of "links to Twitter/X are bad and not allowed here" then great, that makes sense, and I even approve! Otherwise it just seems odd and I wasn't entirely sure if removing the profile link was intended, or if it was agonised over and a collective decision was made somewhere, or if it was a mistake, or what. I was hoping for clarification.
posted by fabius at 6:34 AM on September 21, 2023

OK, once any one of those people who actually uses Twitter and actually uses the site to find people on Twitter speaks up, I will personally be willing to take this concern seriously

I'm surprised to see this! I thought it would be pretty common--someone makes an interesting comment, you go look at their profile, hey, there's a twitter profile, and so you go out to see if they're someone you'd like to follow. Am I just a stalker? I figured everyone did that.

Actually, as the person who asked about Twitter in the first place, I find that a little weird. I know people do it - someone here found my Twitter (which was never linked in my bio, incidentally) and added me to a "People of Metafilter" list they had.

But I also use Twitter differently than most people, I suspect.

Sincere thanks to the people who answered about the technical stuff.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:11 AM on September 21, 2023

– We have blocked ChatGPT web crawler across all subsites.

Tech folks: is there any way to feed these LLM crawlers garbage instead of simply blocking? Maybe feeding them a markov'd version of Mefi or something? Like how you can chaff your network and location info for adware? As a tiny act of rebellion.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:15 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Prohibiting chatgpt crawling seems like a straightforward decision to protect users’ ownership of their posts/comments. The decision to remove Twitter from the functionality that makes it easier for users to share their accounts on other sites, seems less obvious to me. Is there any further I do on the logic of this? It seems like many decisions are being deferred until there is a suitable mechanism for increasing community involvement in decision making. Is there an underlying principle that leads to certain decisions being made by the admin now, while others are deferred for future community input?
posted by snofoam at 7:37 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

some people are really hyped up about ethics in game journalism hypocrisy and inconsistency in the super important metafilter profile widgets

That's a really gross comment.
posted by mediareport at 9:10 AM on September 21, 2023 [23 favorites]

I wasn't entirely sure if removing the profile link was intended

Are people having this somewhat baffling discussion aware that profile pages for twitter are now gated behind a login? (It's badly done with janky javascript, so you can kinda still see it behind the login modal, I guess.) Direct links to single tweets (with no visible context shown) are about the only thing that currently works without login, as far as I know.
posted by advil at 10:40 AM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Are people having this somewhat baffling discussion aware that profile pages for twitter are now gated behind a login?

People who clicked on these links may be logged in to twitter? It is not a ridiculous notion. Perhaps not even baffling. Anyhow, loup is free to share the reasoning behind the decision.
posted by snofoam at 10:48 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's a really gross comment.

That seems to be what Metatalk is for.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:01 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Direct links to single tweets (with no visible context shown) are about the only thing that currently works without login, as far as I know.

And these only work about half the time for me. The other half time, I get the "sign up with X" page and cannot see the linked tweet at all.
posted by cooker girl at 11:57 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm surprised to see this! I thought it would be pretty common--someone makes an interesting comment, you go look at their profile, hey, there's a twitter profile, and so you go out to see if they're someone you'd like to follow. Am I just a stalker? I figured everyone did that.

Yes. Isn't that the entire point of the social media connections in our profiles?

I have noticed the Twitter links have often been broken lately though, and a LOT of us have moved on to greener pastures, so as someone who used Twitter a lot (and would still use it if, you know...) I am perfectly fine with removing any trace of Twitter from this site.
posted by bondcliff at 12:52 PM on September 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Lots of questions from users, and not a single post from management for 24 hours. It's on brand, if nothing else.
posted by bowbeacon at 1:59 PM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

None of this is time sensitive. Not sure why people expect Fortune 500 "customer service" at a Mom & Pop store.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:15 PM on September 21, 2023 [39 favorites]

Tech folks: is there any way to feed these LLM crawlers garbage instead of simply blocking?

Maybe, but many of them use Common Crawl. As do search engines. And even the search engines that don't use it build LLMs now, so you would effectively obliterate organic search results, which seems important if you want new MeFi users.
posted by pwnguin at 4:45 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

The reason people go to mom and pop stores is for the customer service.
posted by bowbeacon at 4:55 PM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

[extremely philosophy of technology voice] all technical change questions are policy choices, and vice versa
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:20 PM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

In the actual OP: “Reminder: I will be the only mod monitoring this thread so please be patient and constructive as I reply to your feedback and questions.”
posted by Melismata at 6:42 PM on September 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

We had a huge gap during a hot thread last month when loup was traveling, but nobody knew loup was traveling and no one else on staff had been formally deputized to step in. It caused some real tension here. I really can’t blame folks for feeling kind of skeptical.

The biggest challenge of customer service is reliably setting, managing, and fulfilling expectations, but doing it consistently generates genuine trust and goodwill. I think leadership should try to focus on this a bit more. If the expectation is for us to simply chat amongst ourselves for a while before loup or jessamyn return with thoughts at a later date, that’s totally fine by me, and I’m betting for just about everyone, but this thread’ll go a whole lot smoother if that plan is clearly defined and communicated.
posted by mochapickle at 7:20 PM on September 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

Lots of questions from users, and not a single post from management for 24 hours.

What questions?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:30 PM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

There's one now!
posted by Flunkie at 7:40 PM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

As I read it, 2 questions. Blue sky widget and chatgpt code...stuff.
both answered.

any more questions?
posted by clavdivs at 9:10 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

The question is not merely “why get rid of Twitter?”; the question is “why get rid of Twitter and nothing else?”

Yeah, an eyebrow raised here at the Twitter-related stuff being tucked under "technical changes". Sure, yes, the mechanics of removing share links etc are, but this is at root a policy change, no?

etc etc.
posted by fabius at 11:38 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

The question is not merely “why get rid of Twitter?”; the question is “why get rid of Twitter and nothing else?”

Yeah, an eyebrow raised here at the Twitter-related stuff being tucked under "technical changes". Sure, yes, the mechanics of removing share links etc are, but this is at root a policy change, no?

"Based on other Metatalks, the Twitter widgets were removed because they were broken by Twitter themselves with their API changes. It's not an ideological choice to remove them. They don't work anymore."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:35 AM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

The fact that people didn't get the answer they seem to have wanted doesn't mean they didn't get an answer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:36 AM on September 22, 2023 [25 favorites]

From the post:

- Removed all Twitter/X share options from the site, removed Twitter/X from the social list and removed the Twitter/X widget from profile pages

There are three things there, one of which is the broken widget. Maybe the share options were broken too? But the links from profiles weren't, afaik, other than sometimes/always requiring you be logged into Twitter to see the page, in the same way Facebook does these days.

I didn't think this would be a controversial request, and I'm not sure why people are pushing back so much on the possibility of having an answer, turning this into a bigger deal than it needs to be.

In summary: Why were the links to Twitter/X from profiles removed when they seemed to be working, given that some non-existent, and less popular, services remain?
posted by fabius at 5:55 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Quite a few of the social sites now require a login to see even a basic profile page, so there could probably be a wholesale review of which links to include. Also, Chowhound no longer exists.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:31 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

other than sometimes/always requiring you be logged into Twitter to see the page

The policy, as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, has essentially forever been that "The service and linked page must be human-readable (no RSS) and available to the public without a login." (source, not sure if this is somewhere on mefi proper too)

("What about facebook" is perhaps not the successful counterargument it first appears...)
posted by advil at 8:41 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Look, I don’t think it’s a huge deal but it’s clear that the policy is not in line with practice, since FB and Insta are both on there. TikTok is not. I didn’t check but is BlueSky or Mastodon there?

Twitter was removed as a profile link because… ???

I’m…not really cranky but it’s starting to feel like a gong show. There’s no consistency or strategy. It seems like the site wants to make things difficult that make no sense - why do you want to limit people who are active on social media from connecting but you want people to link to their Amazon page? Because someone who doesn’t have a FB profile is going to click on a FB profile link and get upset? Because you’re taking a stand in favour of World of Warcraft?

It’s just a bit mind boggling.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:53 AM on September 22, 2023 [20 favorites]

I suspect people complained about Twitter and not about Chowhound, and they responded to the more timely demands.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:59 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I suspect people complained about Twitter and not about Chowhound, and they responded to the more timely demands

Sure but to someone who isn’t into all the latest “who’s more evil” competitions, it has no consistency and for a new user setting up a profile it’s a really disconnected and weird drop down list from the Pleistocene era. It’s that when decisions are made based on complaints, you break user experience.

Like, operationally I get it. It’s kind of no one’s job to look at these things. To sit with a new user and really look at what these things convey. But it ends up so random and thoughtless from the outside (I am in this at work right now and probably the next 5 years, so I am feeling it.)
posted by warriorqueen at 9:14 AM on September 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

The policy, as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, has essentially forever been that "The service and linked page must be human-readable (no RSS) and available to the public without a login." (source, not sure if this is somewhere on mefi proper too)

That seems to track then. You can see a person's profile page without being logged in to facebook or insta. I just checked by following links from people's profiles in this thread - I have no login to either service, but I saw folks' profile pages just fine. In the case of FB, I had to close out a popup and I couldn't follow any links, but I could see the landing page - the little and big photo at the top, username, About, and Photos section. Insta lets me see the profile pic and blurb and like the 30 most recent posts (as long as I don't try to click into them) before it tries to make me log in.

Trying to look at a twitter profile page with no login shows you absolutely nothing but the login/account creation page.
posted by solotoro at 9:14 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can see profiles on X with just a popover on the side.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:17 AM on September 22, 2023

I can see profiles on X with just a popover on the side.

The fact that they implemented this in a janky way doesn't mean that they didn't implement it. But also, this isn't even true any more in my testing. Yesterday, when I first tested this for the sake of the thread, it was actually putting a large unhideable modal over an actual profile page, and at least in chrome/safari/firefox, the profile page was at best slightly slightly visible (though there is no sensible description of this in any browser I tried where it is just "on the side"). Today, in all three browsers, it shows the profile page for a sec and then redirects to a login page with a gray background behind the modal.

(All in all this change seems so minor and not at all random, I remain pretty confused by the over-the-top pushback? a "gong show", really?)
posted by advil at 9:33 AM on September 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Here’s the screenshot I just grabbed from the computer I’m setting up.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:35 AM on September 22, 2023

And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy but I do think it’s just - I don’t know. I’m tired out of trying to express that business decisions count.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:36 AM on September 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

From my end, I don't really care either way whether Twitter profiles show up (I'm certainly ok with them getting removed), but I find it mindboggling that this discussion has been between people who have no idea why the business removed the links, rather than the person who is employed by the business and has insight into the business decisions for going on 42 hours now. Is Loup traveling again?

It's almost a deliberate effort to ignore the customers.
posted by bowbeacon at 9:45 AM on September 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

What warriorqueen said.

It's not a massive deal, I don't care if the policy is "we will no longer link to Twitter" or whatever. I asked what I thought was a simple question, that could have waited for loup to respond to the thread. But instead there's lots of argument, pushback, speculation, etc, that means I feel the need to defend... asking a question about why something was done?

Once there's an answer, maybe there is some discussion about inconsistency, or policy, or whatever... or maybe it's all fine and we're all happy! Stranger things have happened.
posted by fabius at 9:45 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ok maybe I’ll make one more go. Twitter is not a flash in the pan. A bunch of people are fleeing it, just as people did Facebook. That is a subset of online people. My transit company still gives service updates on Twitter. My kids school still posts events there and on Facebook. FB is where my community groups organize. I think Elon Musk is a shit, sure. But if I want to communicate with ppl I need to do it where they are.

The conversation here often is snarky towards rubes who continue to interact with non-very-online people in online spaces and the contempt for that is really annoying. I don’t understand why the priority is to remove X over adding TikTok. Like, the policy is based on what, people never encountering a sign in wall? When almost every third link on the blue requires one? I just signed up at Nat Geo today to read about poor birds and coffee.

Stop making random fixes and think about how people are using the site today.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:50 AM on September 22, 2023 [22 favorites]

I asked what I thought was a simple question, that could have waited for loup to respond to the thread. But instead there's lots of argument, pushback, speculation, etc, that means I feel the need to defend... asking a question about why something was done?

Speaking as one of the people who may have been perceived to "push back"...

I was not pushing back against the initial asking of the question. I was pushing back against all the other people who came in later and where all "it's been a whole 6.3 minutes since someone asked that question, and loup hasn't come in to say anything? Sheesh, the management CLEARLY doesn't care, shame on them...."

It is a valid question, in and of itself. And - as I linked elsewhere - it has already been answered in other earlier threads. And still some people continue to - not ask, but shame the mods for not making Officially Notorized Policy Statements Every Hour On The Half Hour to remind people of the answer or something.

That's the bit that was getting to me, actually, not the substance of the question itself. This could have been a question about Pop-tarts or something and the insistence upon an immediate formal statement was what was getting to me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:54 AM on September 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yes, two days is exactly equal to "every hour on the half hour".
posted by bowbeacon at 9:55 AM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Here’s the screenshot I just grabbed from the computer I’m setting up.

Thanks for following up with specifics, as that clarifies some of the confusion! I can see that profile. However, here's a screenshot (hopefully publicly visible, sorry doing this a bit quickly) from a non-famous, definitely non-blue check user, namely, me. This is the norm on twitter now, not the link you posted. I don't know what would condition a profile to be publicly visible, but my guess is exactly paid / famous account.
posted by advil at 9:59 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes, two days is exactly equal to "every hour on the half hour".

If the biggest problem you have in your life is not having a web site's moderator respond to a question in a timely fashion, then you are living a very, very blessed life indeed.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:00 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not the biggest problem in my life. It's the biggest problem for this website. The business doesn't give a shit about the business.
posted by bowbeacon at 10:01 AM on September 22, 2023 [16 favorites]

Thanks for following up with specifics, as that clarifies some of the confusion! I can see that profile. However, here's a screenshot (hopefully publicly visible, sorry doing this a bit quickly) from a non-famous, definitely non-blue check user, namely, me.

It looks like I messed up this link, here it is again; this is specifically what ends up if you go without login to https://twitter.com/icoson.
posted by advil at 10:15 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not the biggest problem in my life. It's the biggest problem for this website. The business doesn't give a shit about the business.

And your evidence for this is.....?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:17 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

The fact that it has been 45 hours since an employee of the site checked in to answer a simple question with a one line answer, leaving people to accuse each other of making irrational demands and being gamergaters.
posted by bowbeacon at 10:18 AM on September 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

It's not the biggest problem in my life. It's the biggest problem for this website. The business doesn't give a shit about the business.
Given how this thread's going, I'm halfway hoping loup's got a chess clock ticking down where if it hits `0` they'll respond but every "where's the response?" comment resets it. It's almost the US-weekend, let's everybody take 5 and come back on Monday. Nothing good's going to come of stewing on this.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:22 AM on September 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

The fact that it has been 45 hours since an employee of the site checked in to answer a simple question with a one line answer, leaving people to accuse each other of making irrational demands and being gamergaters.

And "the company doesn't care" is the only explanation you can think of, as opposed to

* Loup got appendicitis or something
* A massive group of Crypto dudes are trying to do some weird DOS attack on the site because they're mad about the NFT post and everyone's trying to do damage control
* Loup's internet at home crapped out and they can't get online
* The mods are in the middle of figuring out a response but the lawyer called all "wait wait wait before you answer let me take a look at it" and the lawyer's kids are out sick and they haven't gotten to it

etc.?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:23 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ok, I'm done here.
posted by bowbeacon at 10:24 AM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

if this was a rare one-off occasion, sure. But after the previous update in which loup was unavailable to respond to the thread – which only they were allowed to do – after a week of increasingly rancorous exchanges?

This would be understandable if they were the only employee and the expectation was set that they'd be unavailable for x days.

But this is a site that prides itself on its near round-the-clock moderation, spends a large part of its precious money on that, and which is continually endeavouring to communicate better with its users.
posted by fabius at 10:25 AM on September 22, 2023 [26 favorites]

It's the biggest problem for this website.

No, the biggest problem for this website is jut how fucking unpleasant it is here now.
posted by bondcliff at 10:31 AM on September 22, 2023 [50 favorites]

It looks like I messed up this link, here it is again; this is specifically what ends up if you go without login to https://twitter.com/icoson.

Gotcha; I can reproduce that. I also tried it with a blue check account with 123 followers and you can see the profile page. More baffling business decisions.

I still just wish the priority didn’t feel to me like it’s more important to respond to Elon Muskery than to look at what that profile creation and browsing experience is all about. And I don’t think the policy makes any sense to a casual or new visitor to MetaFilter (although that is difference than internal consistency.)

I also wish I’d known it was coming so I could have added some people, but that’s minor.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:51 AM on September 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Direct links to single tweets (with no visible context shown) are about the only thing that currently works without login, as far as I know.

Bluesky doesn't even let you do that, apparently. When I click on Nelson's first link in this comment when I'm not logged in, I get a blank page with "Bluesky//See what's next" with "create a new account" and "sign in" as options. Is that true for other folks when you're not logged in to Bluesky, or don't have an account?
posted by mediareport at 10:52 AM on September 22, 2023

Honest question here, is there a formal or adopted-as-practice timeline for staff responses to MetaTalk threads?

I think a lot of these questions that come up are fairly important, but I'm always uncertain that anything is so urgent that loup should stop everything else they're doing to prune the bushes of the unwieldy garden we're planting in these MetaTalk threads. MetaTalk is gonna MetaTalk, and it may be that staff hanging back for a couple days and then writing more comprehensive summary feedback is the most effective use of time anyway. (As opposed to staff participating in a back-and-forth for several days here.) Certainly don't think it translates to not caring about MetaFilter. Everyone here cares about MetaFilter.
posted by kensington314 at 11:18 AM on September 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

*cat knocked glass of water on computer

*dog knocked cat onto glass of water that got knocked onto computer

*locked out of their house and remain locked out of their house because their phone is locked in there

*went to zoo, tripped over short fence, eaten by hippopotamus, last dying thought was about how much they care about MetaFilter

*have been circling a parking garage looking for car for two days a la Seinfeld
posted by kensington314 at 12:09 PM on September 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

*busy working at other places of employment
*not caring because it isn't a big deal or priority
*horse combat
posted by Jarcat at 12:16 PM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

* cast in the title role of a Beckett play, but secretly wondering why they don't have any lines or stage directions
posted by mochapickle at 12:26 PM on September 22, 2023 [22 favorites]

The site aims to provide "full time coverage," but then the person tasked with periodic checkins in an update thread doesn't post even daily responses during the work week. And it's the second time in recent weeks that this has happened. People are going to wonder what's going on.
posted by CtrlAltD at 12:28 PM on September 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

Bob Porter : Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.
Peter Gibbons : I wouldn't say I've been *missing* it, Bob.
posted by some loser at 12:34 PM on September 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Honest question here, is there a formal or adopted-as-practice timeline for staff responses to MetaTalk threads?

I'll reply at least twice a week, and more frequently when possible. It all comes down to how busy my shifts get (which varies from day to day).

Now, let me address several comments:

“why get rid of Twitter and nothing else?”

Yeah, an eyebrow raised here at the Twitter-related stuff being tucked under "technical changes". Sure, yes, the mechanics of removing share links etc are, but this is at root a policy change, no?

If I remember rightly the bar here is "provides publicly-visible profile pages that we can link to", which bluesky doesn't meet yet.

will bluesky be added to the social list?

If there's an actual policy of "links to Twitter/X are bad and not allowed here" then great

There are no specific policies against posting twitter content here. That being said, there are several reasons as to why we made these changes:

– We removed all Twitter/X share options from the site and from the social list because of the volatile situation with Twitter right now. Musk's idea of "freedom of expression" has been turning it into a platform full of abusive content while their Trust and Safety team has gone through several rounds of layoffs. Put simply, we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

– We removed the Twitter/X widget from profile pages since these have always been aimed for publicly-visible profile pages and Twitter isn’t letting users view the site without logging in. That's the same reason why Bluesky has not been added yet.

Also, Chowhound no longer exists.

Reported! Thank you!

* cast in a Beckett play, but secretly wondering why they don't have any lines or stage directions

This was, by far, the funniest.
posted by loup (staff) at 12:46 PM on September 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

*went to zoo, tripped over short fence, eaten by hippopotamus

OK, so I guess we can definitively say this didn't happen *this time*, but if it ever does happen in the future, I'll make a solid three-figure donation to the site.
posted by kevinbelt at 12:59 PM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Both Jessamyn and I follow these threads closely. The fact that I'm not replying every day depends on several factors: sometimes Jessamyn and I want to discuss the best course of action and I might be busy with moderation, Contact Us questions, and other projects we are working on.

If you have urgent issues, the contact form is always the fastest way.
posted by loup (staff) at 1:20 PM on September 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

…if it ever does happen in the future, I'll make a solid three-figure donation to the site.

*makes note for future*
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 1:43 PM on September 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

RE: Zuckerberg is as bad as Musk

... but Twitter has recently allowed CSAM, with more or less a thumbs up from Musk, which makes it extremely dangerous to link to in a way that other sites are not.
posted by tofu_crouton at 1:56 PM on September 22, 2023

I don’t have a problem with this staff’s site not really caring about what happens in Metatalk threads — honestly this thread is basically the online equivalent of those terrible public meetings from parks and rec and ignoring it is probably overall a good move for site decision making — but on its face the purported desire for community involvement is at odds with a lack of serious intent to engage with the community’s only forum for public discussion.

If it were up to me I would probably say something about how staff will not check these threads but feel free to chat among yourselves if you like, but 🤷. Even in the best of times Metafilter decision-making wasn’t especially sound, and it hasn’t improved as the site circles the drain.
posted by crazy with stars at 2:11 PM on September 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Twice a week seems very reasonable. What in your life is going to change if one of the websites you visit doesn't let you post your profile to another website you visit within three days of demanding answers. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize that as not caring about the site. I think it shows appropriate prioritization.

The Grey has long been the angriest of the subsites, but man, there's really something in the air these days.

The fact that it has been 45 hours since an employee of the site checked in to answer a simple question with a one line answer, leaving people to accuse each other of making irrational demands and being gamergaters.

This is an indictment of current MeTa culture, not moderator response to one specific kind of thread.
posted by solotoro at 2:21 PM on September 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

The Grey has long been the angriest of the subsites, but man, there's really something in the air these days.

Agreed. My friends and I lately have been calling it "NextDoor syndrome."
posted by Melismata at 2:43 PM on September 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

I got about half-way through this thread and I started to get some real Pawnee vibes.
posted by kbanas at 2:58 PM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Reminder: I will be the only mod monitoring this thread so please be patient and constructive as I reply to your feedback and questions.

FWIW, I always took this to mean loup has this thread open in a window and will reply as things come up, but if 3 big questions come at once, there will only be 1 answer at a time because there’s not a full corporate PR team monitoring the thread or anything. But I did incorrectly assume that “monitor” was an active ongoing thing, and that being patient meant a few hours not a few days.

Maybe I was picturing an old school Reddit AMA?


As someone who reads but otherwise tends to lurk in these update threads, this is me dropping a comment card in the box to suggest that including I'll reply at least twice a week, as my workload allows or similar verbiage in the above disclaimer would help correct expectations around what monitoring means. I misunderstood it and I think other folks have as well.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 3:06 PM on September 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

*makes note for future*

I thought about including a caveat like life insurance does, but honestly Brandon, if you’re willing to push your co-worker into a hippo enclosure, just go ahead and take my money. I have to respect that dedication.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:59 PM on September 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Twitter has recently allowed CSAM, with more or less a thumbs up from Musk, which makes it extremely dangerous to link to in a way that other sites are not.

In case anyone else doesn't know what "CSAM" means, it apparently is an acronym for child sexual abuse materials.

I still find twitter largely usable, with vigorous blocking, but it'll disappear into the void from one too many dumb decisions eventually, and I don't care which social media options have specific links from profiles here. ( just a data point since I'm here, I'm removing this from my activity and won't see or respond to arguments, have a good weekend and happy fall/spring depending on your hemisphere!)
posted by the primroses were over at 5:18 PM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Man, I’m really starting to reconsider my death-by-hippopotamus donation offer.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:43 PM on September 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Loup, thank you for the detailed update. Given your post, I think your timeline for responding is reasonable, and I'm a little baffled at the different expectations on display here. And, for what it's worth, removing links to X/Twitter profiles seems pretty reasonable as a technical choice given the technical fragility (at best) of X/Twitter these days.

I am also noticing that a delay of a couple of days gives some of our more combative members a chance to have a full "snarky comment" > "escalating rhetoric at the injustice" > "flounce in a huff" cycle with no engagement needed. Seems efficient!
posted by feckless at 6:53 PM on September 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

not a day goes by without news of facebook doing something terrible. can metafilter please avoid driving traffic to them, too? facebook = instagram = meta = threads

recent examples I found without looking too hard for the strongest arguments because I figure we've all read it before:
- enabling mass murder: Facebook accused by survivors of letting activists incite ethnic massacres with hate and misinformation in Ethiopia
- complying with search warrant: Nebraska mother sentenced to 2 years in prison for giving abortion pills to pregnant daughter
- Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise

Or just based on values in this thread. Care about ChatGPT vacuuming? that's a thing Facebook does.
posted by aniola at 8:02 PM on September 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Metafilter driving or not driving traffic to social is completely nothing to these sites.

MetaFilter being incomprehensibly weird in its rules and policies and focusing on making sure Elon Musk never gets 800 profile visits rather than fixing basic shit like the banner overlapping the skip down link on mobile or improving the editor or encouraging people to post or basic planning or donor relations or planning where and how people can share is…well, I guess it’s par for the course but it’s really sad.

I hope the sense of doing right lasts beyond the cliff the site is approaching.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:31 PM on September 22, 2023 [43 favorites]

I think there was an update last time that frimble is working on standardizing hundreds of non-standard pages across metafilter that are all slightly different and have each evolved in their own direction? Like identical twins multi-hundred-uplets that have each grown up into their own adult even though they were raised by the same parent?

That sounds like a huge project and I bet once everything is standardized it will be a lot easier to make that sort of technical change and I bet around then the lawyer will come through with answers about volunteering and all of a sudden things will start happening real fast, relatively speaking.
posted by aniola at 9:16 PM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, I think it'd be real cool to reach out to the users of metafilter and the rest of the world too by doing a fundraiser/mutual aide metatalk.

By analogy: When you want to learn something, teach. When hurting, help someone else. To relax, offer scritches to a pet. I'm sure there's probably a famous quote that says what I'm going for here but better, maybe someone knows of one?

Anyway, after the metafilter fundraiser, do one for everyone else. Reaching outwards and helping others is a way to thrive.
posted by aniola at 9:20 PM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

That sounds like a huge project and I bet once everything is standardized it will be a lot easier to make that sort of technical change and I bet around then the lawyer will come through with answers about volunteering and all of a sudden things will start happening real fast, relatively speaking.

Well, I hope so, and I think that’s a good perspective. But…I don’t know. When I was on the Transition Team I felt hopeful, but just now, I don’t. I think MetaFilter best serves the internet by being a good place for thoughtful discussion, non- algorithmically served but human-based. And having people join in.

But as the list of places and people you can’t link to grows, it seems more and more like it’s risking being pretty hostile to people. Don’t link your profile, don’t share (although the technical sharing issues are much more compelling to me), don’t network with others, etc. And if there’d been a full clean up of the social profiles, i would at least see the user represented there.

Anyways, I’ve spent more time on it than it’s worth. I hope your belief is correct.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:49 PM on September 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Thanks for the answers loup! I'm not sure why people made such a big fuss about the question. I don't 100% agree with removing the profile links to Twitter without reviewing the other sites included there (for brokenness and for Facebookness) but I don't entirely disagree with the reasoning either.

I also thought that "monitoring" these threads meant you'd respond at least once a day, so perhaps those expectations could be managed a bit better?

Given the site's stated position on Twitter/X, why does it still have an active Twitter/X account? (Or more than one?) Surely that's a more prominent way of saying "We think using Twitter/X is fine" than letting users link to their profiles?
posted by fabius at 11:06 PM on September 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

The Grey has long been the angriest of the subsites, but man, there's really something in the air these days.

I think what's happening is everyone is in stages of grief.

It's not that Metafilter is dying; we're all talking about that because it feels like something we can fix. But our world is dying; the world that we all built, the internet we all built, the homes and spaces that we built for ourselves are dying and we are grieving it and we are all handling it differently. Some of us are raging, some of us are retreating, some of us are quieting. I see it on site after site, social media location after social media location. People of my generation - which is around the general age of the Metafilter userbase - are losing faith in the promise of the internet, and while they're not spending any less time there, they're spending less hope there. There's less to go around, and it feels like we have to conserve it.

There's no technical fix that can get it back. We can throw bulwarks up against the tide; and I do, I donated to Metafilter this month and will do so again despite struggling financially, because homes, spaces, refuges matter. But I think it's important for us to admit to ourselves that this isn't a thing The Mods Are Doing To Us, this isn't a thing where Somehow Metafilter Is Bad At Nonprofiting, this is a thing where the entropy of the internet universe is advancing and advancing and someday it's going to eat the stars.
posted by corb at 8:14 AM on September 23, 2023 [65 favorites]

Twitter has recently allowed CSAM [child sexual abuse material], with more or less a thumbs up from Musk, which makes it extremely dangerous to link to in a way that other sites are not.

For clarity, and reluctantly, in the spirit of making sure left-wing critiques of right-wing episodes are accurate, it should be noted that the CSAM in question was a quoted pic posted by a right-wing shithead who said "he’d done so to draw attention to child sex trafficking" [WaPo gift link]:

Twitter came under renewed fire Thursday over its handling of child sex abuse imagery after it reinstated the account of a right-wing influencer who had tweeted an image of a toddler being tortured.

The post was deleted by Twitter but the poster was reinstated after being banned. That's the CSAM episode referenced above, I think, but if not feel free to correct.
posted by mediareport at 8:25 AM on September 23, 2023

i feel like there are a lot of people in here going "why are people so ANGRY" who might have missed that there was like a 300 comment argument in the August update thread about whether or not the staff is unresponsive. the people who read MetaTalk regularly bring the context of recent discussions into these threads. if you have not read the previous thread, i'm sure it seems like people are angry for no reason, but the temperature in the room was already turned up, and has been turned up for quite a while.

regarding Twitter specifically, i guess i geneally agree with Warriorqueen's stance on the issue. it's not like this makes me ANGRY, it's just kind of baffling to me in terms of priorities. why does twitter matter so much to people? historically, a lot of posters on this site have always had a weird adversarial with Twitter disproportionate to how bad the site is (Facebook is literally responsible for a genocide???). that is not to forgive any of the horrible decisions made over there lately. from my perspective, it's like someone bought my whole block. well sure, the new owner sucks, but it's still my block. i do not have another place on the internet to link people to. so i just won't link anything in my profile any longer - that's fine for me, but i can see why people are annoyed
posted by JimBennett at 10:01 AM on September 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

There's no technical fix that can get it back. We can throw bulwarks up against the tide; and I do, I donated to Metafilter this month and will do so again despite struggling financially, because homes, spaces, refuges matter. But I think it's important for us to admit to ourselves that this isn't a thing The Mods Are Doing To Us, this isn't a thing where Somehow Metafilter Is Bad At Nonprofiting, this is a thing where the entropy of the internet universe is advancing and advancing and someday it's going to eat the stars.

i really fundamentally disagree with this framing. no offense meant to anyone but i do actually think the state of the site in 2023 is because of Decisions People Made, it's just that those people are not the people who currently own the site. things on the internet have gotten worse in general, which definitely contributed, and it's always possible that if different decisions had been made, the site would be struggling anyway - sure. but like, there were a series of business decisions that led this particular site to this point, which is why people hope that there are also a series of business decisions that can lead the site out of this spot.

i do think everything is kind of in stasis while we're all waiting to see what the future of the site can even look like, legally. i personally am in big "Wait and See" mode, but when people see the same communication issues that we had under the previous administration, i do understand why they get so frustrated.
posted by JimBennett at 10:09 AM on September 23, 2023 [32 favorites]

i feel like there are a lot of people in here going "why are people so ANGRY" who might have missed

I feel like most of them are perfectly aware, based on participation in both threads.
posted by Jarcat at 6:02 PM on September 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Google Talk has been rebranded to Google Hangouts, but I don't know if it's the sort of service that you could just ping someone on if you're not already acquainted via email.

I'm not sure actually if TikTok lets you see a profile without logging in - I know you can access it via browser. If they're viable, +1 to adding TikTok as an option for socials.
posted by creatrixtiara at 11:29 PM on September 23, 2023

Google Hangouts has subsequently been rebranded to Google chat
posted by Sebmojo at 12:29 AM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is there anything stopping people putting a link to their presence on other services on the internet in one of the free-form boxes on the profile page, if there isn't a dedicated widget?
posted by Dysk at 12:34 AM on September 24, 2023

corb: I think what's happening is everyone is in stages of grief.

Flagged as Fantastic.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:10 AM on September 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

FAQ about AI-generated posts/comments

Can I say this is in my opinion a bad policy? I think AI responses should be discouraged but if they are helpful and people cannot tell the difference, what is the harm? With all the platforms I use (Bard/ChatGPT) the hard part is prompting the program to give you any result whatsoever, so it is not as if you can just say something generic and it will come up with a good result. This is similar to me outlining what I want to say in a paper and giving it to a junior to flesh it out, then me editing the final product.

I don't know what people would gain here from using straight ChatGPT even though I realize there were a few experimental or joking attempts. My biggest problem is AI is a very vague term and encompasses a lot. I understand wholesale comments are not meant to be AI but is this realistic scenario AI? I'm not nitpicking or using far-fetched examples:

Scenario 1:

- I want to mention a television show in a comment but all I can remember is the show involves two brothers running an airport.
- I go to Google and describe it, it comes back with "Wings."
- I post the comment with the name of the television show, and Google most certainly used a form of AI/ML to return my description correctly as Wings.

Scenario 2:

- I use Grammarly (and if there's a better version let me know) and even Chrome and the iPhone have some sort of grammar functions.
- These most certainly use a form of AI to do both text prediction, improve grammar, and make editorial choices on how information is presented, it is not simply spell check.
- I find these tools are used heavily with non-ESL speakers so there's also a somewhat exclusionary issue here.

In a perfect world we might even use ChatGPT to give an AskMe user a response immediately after trying to post. "Hey this is your Metafilter assistant, does this answer your question: AI response here, if not or doesn't quite please feel free to post!"

Heck AI could even help mods by detecting trolling tones and rating comments as such. We have a large corpus of flags associated with comments, it wouldn't delete the comment but could make better use of mod time by automatically highlighting comments that might be an issue before anyone gets to it.

I guess my biggest fear is that I understand that you don't want someone spamming AskMe with ChatGPT questions or somehow use it for other portions of the site, but AI is going to become an increasingly integral part of our lives that will make telling what's AI and what's not harder and harder to do. As it becomes a regular part of the web, like Javascript was when it first came out and everyone thought it'd destroy things, AI will have good uses you don't even realize and bad uses. It should be on a case by case basis in my opinion.

Beyond helping me personally figure out how to cohesively get my ideas together to generate something coherent, and always work-related or similar, I've seen it used in communities to better facilitate conversation with Grammarly being a huge one. If someone has even a poorer grasp of the English language, or maybe issues with expressing themselves, and relies on LaMDA models like Bard or ChatGPT to express themselves I find it no different than Oscar Pistorius running the Olympics with running blades.

For a high level summary I feel as if there's enough good use cases and AI will be pervasive enough that this will be used by members to pile-on users not because of AI but because they disagree with the point being made.
posted by geoff. at 9:12 AM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

If nothing else the internet will soon be absolutely flooded with ai generated bullshit in any space that doesn't control for it. Maybe it's all luddite (kinda our jam) but setting a norm that we want to interact with people and not computers here seems like an ok thing to do. At least in the short term until things sort out.

I think AI responses should be discouraged but if they are helpful and people cannot tell the difference, what is the harm?

Because helpful is doing a lot of lifting in that statement. AI is good at making authorative sounding comments that are also completely wrong and in general they are being marketed to people to find answers not coherently express the answer they already know.
posted by Mitheral at 9:25 AM on September 24, 2023 [29 favorites]

Can I say this is in my opinion a bad policy?

Did you ... just write an 8 paragraph screed about how we should be allowed to use AI without actually reading the linked policy in question? I can't really account for it in any other way -- neither scenarios seem relevant (definitely not scenario 1, scenario 2 if you misread it maybe).
posted by advil at 9:29 AM on September 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

In a perfect world we might even use ChatGPT to give an AskMe user a response immediately after trying to post. "Hey this is your Metafilter assistant, does this answer your question: AI response here, if not or doesn't quite please feel free to post!"

Honestly this would be one of the quickest ways to get me to want to close & scrub my account. The hard part isn't "getting gen-AI to come up with a plausible-sounding response", it's "it will gladly emit statements ranging from wildly wrong to subtly wrong" & unless I'm familiar enough with the topic space & going over the output with a fine-toothed comb representing it as coming from me is lending it unearned legitimacy.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:30 AM on September 24, 2023 [23 favorites]

Do we really need AI to make our authoritative sounding comments that are also completely wrong?
posted by otsebyatina at 9:41 AM on September 24, 2023 [30 favorites]

Geoff, I use ChatGPT most days, I have worked professionally with AI, I have used Stable Diffusion extensively. I am not anti-AI (although I recognize issues with some existing AI implementations). However, I think the broadly anti-ChatGPT message of the FAQ is correct, and the existing FAQ language is excellent:

Using ChatGPT or other AI-like tools to write posts or comments on MeFi without explicitly saying you are doing so is discouraged. Tossing in ChatGPT's opinion in discussions is not OK. MetaFilter is, at its core, about knowledge and wisdom shared by its members.

This doesn't prevent a contributor who is less confident in English from having their text checked and improved by ChatGPT (although they should be explicit about that). It doesn't prevent contributors from using whatever AI tools they choose to find information. It does disallow using ChatGPT to confidently and incorrectly answer questions and provide comments, and I think that is correct.
posted by siskin at 11:18 AM on September 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

what is the harm?
Negative environmental impact.
posted by aniola at 11:33 AM on September 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

In a perfect world we might even use ChatGPT to give an AskMe user a response immediately after trying to post. "Hey this is your Metafilter assistant, does this answer your question: AI response here, if not or doesn't quite please feel free to post!"

I’m on record as thinking some of the reflexive criticism of LLMs on this site is tiresome and not as well informed as it thinks it is but this seems like something of a troll suggestion. Is Ask so swamped with questions that we need to divert people from actually using it? I don’t know whether enough demand for a “bespoke” Q&A site exists to sustain a business but I do know that Ask is not going to be able to compete with the companies doing automated Q&A, so we might as well lean into the thing we at least sort of know how to do.

I think it would be great to leverage ML tool for better search and tagging and so on but I don’t think the policy has any bearing on that (lack of technical resources, obviously, does).
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 AM on September 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

what is the harm?
implicit bias
posted by aniola at 1:45 PM on September 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think it is a non issue that will be used to further alienate people with unspoken rules on what’s right and at worst used as an excuse to attack people for opinions people don’t agree with. Yes I did read it and I know rules are not evenly applied here. Even extremely well trained lawyers have difficulty in this.

Wrong answers or bad faith answers predate AI. We have precedence for dealing with this. Just because it is a new technology does not mean there will be. An increase needing documentation. But I’m in the minority I guess so I’ll concede I’m not what the community wants.
posted by geoff. at 2:19 PM on September 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Did you ... just write an 8 paragraph screed about how we should be allowed to use AI without actually reading the linked policy in question?

Maybe it was written by an LLM.
posted by snofoam at 3:20 PM on September 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

I am fine with having the site focus on contributions from humans for now. If AI eventually has something worthwhile to say then the site can always change policies.
posted by snofoam at 3:24 PM on September 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think AI responses should be discouraged but if they are helpful and people cannot tell the difference, what is the harm?

This is exactly why I want the policy. I want to know when I'm being fed automated responses.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:42 PM on September 24, 2023 [16 favorites]

The problem is you can't really know for sure. At best, you can trust other users to take the discouragement to heart.

Way I see it, if you post comments written with the assistance of AI, it's at the very least assumed that you cosign the content, and can't retreat to blaming the tech when inaccuracies, bias, etc. are pointed out.

Considering AI is being rapidly integrated with all manner of online services, it's not realistic to insist that at no point in developing a comment (from idea to research to composition) there be any advantage taken of AI-tainted resources.

As always, just continue to insist on good-faith effort towards quality and accuracy in commenting from others here, regardless of tools used.
posted by otsebyatina at 4:25 PM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Because Chat GPT will sometimes respond with wrong answers. Why would we want wrong answers. In another recent Ask, someone asked ChatGPT and it came up with fake restaurants that don't exist....
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 5:42 PM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think being wrong or biased is quite the crux of it - as other comments have humorously pointed out, people are perfectly capable of that on their own - so much as that anybody who wants to run their question by ChatGPT can go to chat.openai.com, a site that is conservatively 1000x more frequently visited than Metafilter. It seems perfectly reasonable to say that ask.metafilter.com exists to provide the more specialized service of running questions by the human users of Metafilter. The policy does not appear to forbid those users from using GPT in an assistive capacity behind the scenes, which indeed would largely be impossible to detect, anyway - only from using it in the most low-effort, least value-added way. Like saying "hey, I typed your question into Google" and pasting the results verbatim.
posted by atoxyl at 6:38 PM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

One could criticize it as a rule in search of a problem, and we certainly have no shortage of rules here, but this one is pretty brief and to the point and basically just encouraging good faith, and other sites have certainly had problems with low-effort use of AI-generated responses.
posted by atoxyl at 6:40 PM on September 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

All the comments saying "but what about search engines, they use AI, checkmate" come across like undergraduates defending plagiarism by suggesting that truly original work is impossible anyway, you are just reading and regurgitating others' ideas anyway.

It utterly misses the point. It's about authorship, not some cleanroom understanding of avoiding all kinds of "AI" at every step. Go have a conversation with ChatGPT if you want. Then go write your own comment. Much like you're allowed to read a journal article and textbook and base your essay on that information, but you can't copy text from it.

You can't have AI write your comments. People are taking that like it means you're not allowed to read before posting, in case am AI was involved in ranking your search results, and it makes no sense.
posted by Dysk at 8:42 PM on September 24, 2023 [17 favorites]

Creating arbitrary rules for problems that can be taken of by other policies is working pretty well, I guess. But sure use academic language to I guess undermine mind my point. I was willing to concede that if the community doesn’t want it so be it. But let’s pile on by people who don’t understand it. Remember when single YouTube link posts were akin to tarnishing the site? Go ahead and keep adding obscure rules, it is really helping keeping user growth and new diverse users going!
posted by geoff. at 10:48 PM on September 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

geoff., the sarcasm isn't helping me see your point.
posted by Too-Ticky at 12:29 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah I think this is a windmill that can remain untilted at, policy is fine.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:43 AM on September 25, 2023

Of course you can have AI write your comments. You just can't admit it. If detection were a solved problem it could be worth putting resources towards enforcing a rule about it, but at the heart of things it's the same expectation that one participate in good faith as applies to conduct here generally.

Just keep things simple. The piling up of specific rules and guidelines is of dubious value, especially if the goal is to grow the userbase.
posted by otsebyatina at 4:33 AM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

but what about search engines, they use AI, checkmate

Search engines starting to use AI now are actually making my life harder, not easier, as they keep trying to "help" me, and I'm like "no thanks I would just like a fucking website you bastards".
posted by corb at 4:33 AM on September 25, 2023 [18 favorites]

Advocates for AI here seem to be missing a big point - the unique value of discussion on Metafilter is being able to tap people's knowledge and lived experience that we generally trust more than the rest of the web. "I have been there" and a community are THE value proposition around here, not just getting information. The moment I have to wonder if a recommendation is from a real person and genuine that value is gone.
posted by openhearted at 5:43 AM on September 25, 2023 [16 favorites]

Metafilter isn't some libertarian wasteland, we've always had specific rules and written and unwritten policy more restrictive than most other sites. Personally I think that has what has allowed the site to survive.
posted by Mitheral at 5:46 AM on September 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

this is a thing where the entropy of the internet universe is advancing and advancing and someday it's going to eat the stars.

And now I'm thinking of The Nothing from Neverending Story and I'm all sad about Atreyu's horse and shit.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:46 AM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

Metafilter isn't some libertarian wasteland, we've always had specific rules and written and unwritten policy more restrictive than most other sites. Personally I think that has what has allowed the site to survive.

And there's a point at which restrictions shift from creating a strong container for discourse to becoming so onerous that they stifle all discussion. We can argue (and should argue, generally) about where that point is, but "some of X is good, therefore more of X is always good" shouldn't be the framework. Structure vs freedom is a spectrum, not an either-or binary, and too much of either side can be a problem.
posted by lapis at 8:24 AM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

This was such an anodyne and straightforward policy as written, it's not "vague" or hard to figure out. To the extent we're discussing anything at all about the actual policy, it seems to me that it must arise from a misunderstanding of what "ChatGPT or other AI-like tools" is intended to convey, and/or possibly "using X to write posts or comments". I still think this is extremely clear in context. However, to clarify the context I propose that a simple modification of "AI-like tools" => "LLM-like tools" could be helpful:

Using ChatGPT or other AI-likeLLM-like tools to write posts or comments on MeFi without explicitly saying you are doing so is discouraged. Tossing in ChatGPT's opinion in discussions is not OK. MetaFilter is, at its core, about knowledge and wisdom shared by its members.

If there's a concern about people not knowing about what an LLM-like tool is, a link to wikipedia seems like enough, it's a bit technical but has many examples. But even if you don't know the acronym, the phrase "ChatGPT or other LLM-like tools" would convey a lot about what's intended (just as the current phrasing does).

For those missing the context, I believe that it probably originates from this incident. A user created an account to post chatgpt generated answers to askme, disclosing what the account was doing. There was immediate, near-universal, clear, consensus that people didn't want this, and the account's answers were deleted, and the account creator even apologized. The current policy is actually so anodyne, I'm not sure this case is itself clearly ruled out! (Perhaps by the second sentence.) Given this incident, though, it's not really even a policy in search of a problem -- it's a codification of consensus from one of the more straightforward MeTa threads from the past few years in response to an actual event.
posted by advil at 9:29 AM on September 25, 2023 [13 favorites]

One reason I have a relatively positive feeling about this AI guideline is that it feels distinctly more balanced and realistic than some of the suggestions that came up before. I mean there were conversations about mandatory identification of links to AI-based sites, which runs way harder into the issue of unprovability that folks like geoff are suggesting. The text linked in this post ultimately just seems like an appeal to this idea

at the heart of things it's the same expectation that one participate in good faith as applies to conduct here generally

in context of a specific range of behavior.

I am (I think I already said) sympathetic to the idea that there’s just too much FAQ so I don’t know that this text really needs to appear outside of, you know, the extended content guidelines for mods to cite. But in and of itself it’s not an unreasonable stance.
posted by atoxyl at 10:40 AM on September 25, 2023

(Also probably not even significant enough to have this argument about but that’s what happens here I guess)
posted by atoxyl at 10:42 AM on September 25, 2023

For what it's worth, here are the social apps available in profiles that I know don't exist any more:

– Thank you! Asked frimble to have them removed and the FAQ will be updated as well.

MetaFilter being incomprehensibly weird in its rules and policies and focusing on making sure Elon Musk never gets 800 profile visits rather than fixing basic shit like the banner overlapping the skip down link on mobile or improving the editor or encouraging people to post or basic planning or donor relations or planning where and how people can share is…well, I guess it’s par for the course but it’s really sad.

– Rather than a matter of prioritization, this was a quick change, the banner is something frimble is currently working on as well.


That sounds like a huge project and I bet once everything is standardized it will be a lot easier to make that sort of technical change

– Yes! That is the goal.

and I bet around then the lawyer will come through with answers about volunteering and all of a sudden things will start happening real fast, relatively speaking.

– There are a lot of moving parts to this, but Jessamyn and I will keep you posted on the progress of this.

I also thought that "monitoring" these threads meant you'd respond at least once a day, so perhaps those expectations could be managed a bit better?

– Yes! I keep this thread open and catch up with it every day during my shift (and sometimes outside). The twice-a-week commitment is more so because sometimes we might want to discuss specifics internally and/or my shift will be really busy with mod stuff. I will adjust the wording in the next site update.

People of my generation - which is around the general age of the Metafilter userbase - are losing faith in the promise of the internet, and while they're not spending any less time there, they're spending less hope there. There's less to go around, and it feels like we have to conserve it.

– This speaks volumes to me. I grew up during the advent of Web 2.0. Most of my friendships IRL come from the internet (particularly HospEx and super niche sites), most of my career has been working with internet startups that believed in a true sharing economy and have declined over the decades while struggling with investors and revenue models. The fact that I still believe it isn't too late for the internet to serve humanity (rather than corporate interests) is a huge reason why I joined MetaFilter and it's mission to "fulfill the web's potential to bring people together".

Is there anything stopping people putting a link to their presence on other services on the internet in one of the free-form boxes on the profile page, if there isn't a dedicated widget?
– No

However, to clarify the context I propose that a simple modification of "AI-like tools" => "LLM-like tools" could be helpful

– Thank you! I've made some changes to the wording in the FAQ entry to address Generative AI and Large Language Models specifically.
posted by loup (staff) at 12:03 PM on September 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Rather than a matter of prioritization, this was a quick change, the banner is something frimble is currently working on as well.



Okay, but - and with true respect which I do have for you - in my opinion, making these one-off reactionary changes and never stepping back at looking at things like “what is the profile page set up/edit experience like” or “how many of your members still have a X profile, maybe we could do a quick poll” or reviewing documentation that references Google+ could sometimes be prioritized above Elon Musk Is A Jerk.

I realize the API was necessary, and this got tossed in. But to me, that’s prioritizing the internet skirmish of the year over just basic consideration for users. I would like to ask that when requests like that are made, they be part of a review of whatever area. I mean…the one-offs are what created a lot of the technical mess. It’s the same with user experience.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:29 PM on September 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

I also may as well go ahead and say that I think having the moderation team focus so much effort (I am not advocating for zero) on being incredibly proactive on things like which authors are milkshake poop or whatever, vs. focusing on what the experience of being a member is like, how hard it is to post, etc. (they intersect, but they are not the whole experience) is one of the course corrections that would strengthen the future of the site.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:33 PM on September 25, 2023 [16 favorites]

Just to resurface a question from earlier in response to this from loup:

Musk's idea of "freedom of expression" has been turning it into a platform full of abusive content while their Trust and Safety team has gone through several rounds of layoffs. Put simply, we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

Will the @metafilter Twitter/X account be stopping for now then (not sure if there are other accounts)? Generating "engagement" on the service by posting things there feels like supporting it.

Not trying to be difficult – I struggled with the ethics of this regarding a popular account of mine – but I'm wondering how you've thought about wanting to avoid driving traffic to a service that you're using to promote this site.
posted by fabius at 1:24 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Will the @metafilter Twitter/X account be stopping for now then (not sure if there are other accounts)? Generating "engagement" on the service by posting things there feels like supporting it.

You are not being difficult. That's a great question. Since we reactivated our presence in social media we have been seeing an increase in daily signups and we were discussing this last week. So far, we are leaning towards being present there to drive traffic here (but not the other way around). That being said, this might change in the future.
posted by loup (staff) at 1:31 PM on September 25, 2023

I would like to ask that when requests like that are made, they be part of a review of whatever area. I mean…the one-offs are what created a lot of the technical mess. It’s the same with user experience.

Yes. It often feels like random trees are being addressed and no one's looking at the forest, and when questions are asked about why a particular tree was addressed and how that ties into overall forest management, there's no real answer other than, "We felt like addressing that particular tree," and then there's a fight about whether the tree-trimming was aesthetically pleasing rather than about why it happened.
posted by lapis at 1:35 PM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

I cannot fathom how it makes sense that the official @metafilter account can post to Twitter because it generates signups, but you want to discourage users from doing the same. Wouldn't the latter also generate signups, especially if sharing were made easier and more prominent? Or conversely, if Twitter is so bad that we don't want to support it by users giving it content, why you are willing to compromise your position because it gets a few signups?

I realise in the previous site update thread I suggested that admins be more proactive in, say, updating the footer to remove outdated links, and that this didn't require any community consultation. I don't think the same applies to removing support for Twitter. There is no community input here – you just decided to do something, you're leaning this way or that way, but maybe you'll lean another way in future, who knows? Certainly not community members.
posted by adrianhon at 1:47 PM on September 25, 2023 [19 favorites]

Is there anything stopping people putting a link to their presence on other services on the internet in one of the free-form boxes on the profile page, if there isn't a dedicated widget?
– No

Haha, thanks loup, but this was more a rhetorical question for the people acting like they couldn't link their twitter profile any more!
posted by Dysk at 2:34 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm really not bothered about linking to my Twitter profile from my Mefi profile page, in case that was to me. It's more about the removal of the Share link. Mefi users posting "check out this fascinating post on metafilter.com" also lets people on Twitter follow crumb trails here.

Yes, I am aware you can do everything manually, copy and paste still exists, etc, it just seems inconsistent.
posted by adrianhon at 2:55 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

So far, we are leaning towards being present there to drive traffic here (but not the other way around). That being said, this might change in the future.

I would strongly advocate for staying there. Separate the users from the company - so many are looking for a space to replace Twitter in their life and offering a port in the storm is both kind to them and good for business. The fact this place moderates a lot of the worst parts of Twitter will appeal to some % of users.
posted by openhearted at 4:19 AM on September 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

Having an active account on Twitter feels like being much more supportive and approving of the service than allowing people to link to or share to it.

Yes, if MetaFilter stopped being active on Twitter it would be slightly to MetaFilter's detriment, but isn't that often the nature of following through on what you believe?

At the moment it feels like, "We do not approve of Twitter and its owner, so we'll disable the ability to share / link to it, inconveniencing users, but we won't stop posting to Twitter because it would inconvenience our business."

I know I'm in danger of hammering this into a simple right vs wrong issue, when it's always more complex. This just feels very morally inconsistent.
posted by fabius at 6:08 AM on September 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

At the moment it feels like, "We do not approve of Twitter and its owner, so we'll disable the ability to share / link to it, inconveniencing users, but we won't stop posting to Twitter because it would inconvenience our business."

This is the least charitable read. Why not read it as "we are on Twitter to steal their users only" as this is a lot more consistent with the site's positioning? We aren't a corporation trying to generate a profit off conversions, we want people for whom this site could be a benefit.

The linking function was also broken by them, not us - I don't have a Twitter account so those links are like articles behind a paywall now.
posted by openhearted at 6:18 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, but then if you want to steal Twitter's users, why not encourage users to share Metafilter posts on Twitter and steal even more of their users? It makes no sense! Is it that only Mefi admins can be trusted not to be corrupted by posting on Twitter?
posted by adrianhon at 6:35 AM on September 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

I don't know about the least charitable read - I'm sure I could do better :) I was trying to be factual and logical but we're all biased in some way aren't we.

It's not "stealing users" unless we think everyone who signs up for MetaFilter as a result of finding it on Twitter, simultaneously quits Twitter.

The linking function was sort of broken by them - if you're logged in to Twitter it still works - but I realise that doesn't meet the criteria for linking from here. Fair enough. But sharing, from loup:

We removed all Twitter/X share options from the site and from the social list because of the volatile situation with Twitter right now. Musk's idea of "freedom of expression" has been turning it into a platform full of abusive content while their Trust and Safety team has gone through several rounds of layoffs. Put simply, we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

But generating engagement - tweets, likes, retweets - numbers Musk can point to as signs of a successful and popular service, is OK? No MetaFilter's numbers won't make or break Twitter by themselves, but we all know of small gestures that add up in aggregate (voting, marching, signing petitions, etc).

I agonised over a similar issue with my personal account, and then another with 70,000 followers (including spammers, bots, etc, no doubt). I wish Twitter was tolerable again because I miss the flawed-but-fun/interesting Twitter. For me it was consistent to admit I had to stop them posting.
posted by fabius at 6:39 AM on September 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Wait, what's stopping people from linking to/from twitter? Or is it just the added friction required to share from Mefi to Twitter? Because that just seems like such a small issue. Is there a big contingent of people who compulsively share stuff from Mefi via the Twitter share button?

People keep referring to "not being able to link to twitter", and it might help with clarity to say "can't use the Mefi profile badge to link to my twitter account", or "can no longer one-click-share content from Mefi to Twitter."
posted by sagc at 6:44 AM on September 26, 2023

It's a little tiring hearing, "lol you can still write twitter.com/me on your profile page and copy and paste links to Twitter" when this has been acknowledged in the last few comments. I have no idea how many people shared Mefi posts to Twitter using the sidebar link – I can't imagine it's a huge amount, to be honest, but in fact I think it should be quite a bit easier to share to social media, especially for comments, as is common on other forum software.
posted by adrianhon at 6:51 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is there a reason why this twitter link stuff is being decided by admin while other changes are awaiting community input at some future date when it is legally/logistically possible?
posted by snofoam at 7:02 AM on September 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, as an interim step towards community-guided management, I think it would make sense for admin to proactively offer the rationale for decisions made rather than waiting for users to ask about it.
posted by snofoam at 7:05 AM on September 26, 2023 [14 favorites]

The decision to remove Twitter/X was, generally speaking, a technical one. A lot of this was becoming harder and harder to maintain with all the technical changes going on at Twitter. So it made more sense to remove it for now. If these are features the community wants to have, it makes more sense to rebuild them than to keep maintaining them as they keep breaking.

Update: frimble has now removed the services listed above from the dropdown. I'll provide an update about the FAQ once it is updated.
posted by loup (staff) at 10:29 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

The decision to remove Twitter/X was, generally speaking, a technical one. A lot of this was becoming harder and harder to maintain with all the technical changes going on at Twitter.

Does that 'technical' reason only refer to removing the profile page widget which goes to a non-public page? Because on Friday you wrote:

We removed all Twitter/X share options from the site and from the social list because of the volatile situation with Twitter right now. Musk's idea of "freedom of expression" has been turning it into a platform full of abusive content while their Trust and Safety team has gone through several rounds of layoffs. Put simply, we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

which is an entirely different justification. Or was the earlier comment made in error?
posted by Busy Old Fool at 10:54 AM on September 26, 2023 [6 favorites]

The decision to remove Twitter/X was, generally speaking, a technical one.

That's not what you said above:

Musk's idea of "freedom of expression" has been turning it into a platform full of abusive content while their Trust and Safety team has gone through several rounds of layoffs. Put simply, we want to avoid driving traffic there for the time being.

But now the reason given, "generally speaking," is that it was a technical issue? Huh?

loup, those parts of the decision that *weren't* purely technical should have been raised with and discussed by the community before being announced from above - and then offered with zero explanation until users repeatedly asked for one.

Or, what adrianhon said:

There is no community input here – you just decided to do something, you're leaning this way or that way, but maybe you'll lean another way in future, who knows? Certainly not community members.
posted by mediareport at 11:02 AM on September 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

And I don't think everything needs community input, nor do I think the Twitter decision in a vacuum is the most important issue ever, but this whole conversation is so emblematic of my frustration about this place. Loup says, "We did a thing," users ask why, no official answers come for a long time, leaving users to apparently start harassing each other for asking and/or inventing answers, loup comes back with one answer, loup gets pressed a bit for the logical inconsistency of that answer, and then loup gives a totally different answer. It doesn't feel like decisions are being made for thought-out reasons, or that those reasons are being communicated in honest ways.
posted by lapis at 11:07 AM on September 26, 2023 [17 favorites]

I'm not really sure why the "removing Twitter" thing is so hard to understand. MetaFilter's "share" widgets have never given you options to share to every single web site on the Internet. They focused on sharing to the biggest common grounds on the Internet: Facebook, Twitter, and maybe Reddit at some point (I don't remember). Was there a del.icio.us option back in the day? I can't recall, but there certainly hasn't been one recently, the same way that there's no "share to Pinboard" option.

Twitter is no longer one of the 2-3 biggest public grounds on the Internet. Where it used to be one of the ten most-downloaded apps in the App Store, now it has absolutely cratered. Even leaving aside the alt-right-ness of it, it's lost a shitload of users. I'm not sure whether Threads has already surpassed it in usage, but smart money's on it doing so pretty damn soon. And I'm saying that as someone who loathes Threads and doesn't touch it.

The "embedded tweets" widget got removed because it flat-out no longer works. That's not a MeFi-only thing.

As for removing the option to add it to profiles: that does feel a little premature to me, because Twitter isn't an exclusive private site. Instagram and Facebook often prevent you from looking at profiles when you're logged out, too. Bluesky, which got compared to Twitter, is still flat-out invite-only, and Twitter isn't. So personally, that feels like maybe something that could be reasonably undone? But at the same time, MetaFilter doesn't let me link my Truth Social account, and Twitter's not much better than Truth Social, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (I think it's reasonable that MetaFilter currently has a Twitter presence, but perhaps it's time for MeFi to make the leap from Twitter to Threads?)

It's honestly hard to have lucid discussions about this stuff when a dozen different people are getting upset about different Twitter-related changes on MeFi. And the whole "this speaks volumes about the decline and fall of MetaFilter" tangent feels... overblown. There have been a lot of really disappointing MetaFilter happenings recently and I get why everyone feels pessimistic and/or apocalyptic, but I'm not sure that "MeFi reacting to Twitter becoming an anti-semitic shithole" is part of that. And I do feel kind of uncomfortable, as a Jewish man, that so many people online are willing to overlook Twitter's sliding towards "Soros conspiracy theory" territory, as if it's just some inconvenient technical blip on par with Facebook changing which react emojis you can use on comments. Yes, Facebook is a gross company that does gross things; yes, there is a difference between the shitty things that Facebook does and Elon Musk all but posting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into every user's feed every day.

(I'm not saying that anybody here is intentionally overlooking that, to be clear, or accusing anyone of posting in bad faith. But I think that Twitter's shift towards alt-right insanity is getting downplayed a little bit in this discussion, and is more salient than it's being made out to be.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:21 AM on September 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

As for this...

It's not that Metafilter is dying; we're all talking about that because it feels like something we can fix. But our world is dying; the world that we all built, the internet we all built, the homes and spaces that we built for ourselves are dying and we are grieving it and we are all handling it differently. Some of us are raging, some of us are retreating, some of us are quieting. I see it on site after site, social media location after social media location. People of my generation - which is around the general age of the Metafilter userbase - are losing faith in the promise of the internet, and while they're not spending any less time there, they're spending less hope there. There's less to go around, and it feels like we have to conserve it.

I see this attitude a lot online and I at least partly feel prone to it too, but I think that the people of my generation clause is really important there.

Y'all, you're old. If MetaFilter feels wearier and creakier than it used to, well, alt.rec.xfiles is a lot quieter these days too. Gaia Online isn't quite the same. Something Awful and Slashdot have seen brighter days.

I joined MetaFilter when I was 19, and the impression I had then was that most users were mid-to-late-thirties or older. That was a decade and a half ago. MetaFilter doesn't appeal to a lot of new users because MetaFilter has always been a site for people who also knew what The Well is. Its financial issues make user retention harder, and erosions of user retention mess with its finances, and, well...

Way back in college—back when I first joined MetaFilter!—I read a fantastic book, whose name I've unfortunately forgotten, about the phenomenon of people fleeing one MMORPG for another: refugees of The Matrix Online building new community in Second Life or World of Warcraft or Eve. A lot of the bleak pessimism I've seen on this site for the last couple of years sounds a lot like the accounts I read of the users who stayed put for as long as they possibly could. That's what this is. There are other places—they just happen not to be here.

I'm hopeful that MetaFilter settles down in a "smaller but stable" configuration, but it's a really goddamn small business and people are expecting corporate, professional responsiveness from a staff that's more-or-less the equivalent of the folks running my local tiny bookstore. I bet you can picture the one I'm talking about: narrow rows of dusty shelves, books all disheveled, an absolutely wondrous space that you can just lose yourself in but God help you if you're seeking out one particular book in one particular section. Imagine everyone in this thread talking to the guy behind that counter the way they're talking to at loup here. Eesh.

The youths I know feel all kinds of apocalyptic about the job market and the country and the environment, but most of them know how to find cool people online. This whole "death of the Internet" thing is indeed generation-specific, I think: namely, a bunch of Gen X-ers and elder millennials who the Internet largely left behind in 2006 are finally hitting the point where the stagnation and decay turn a little bit more drastic. It's a mortality issue in more ways than one. I don't mean any of this to be dismissive—it's a real phenomenon and it's an unpleasant one—but it helps to see it for what it is. I think that what's happening to MetaFilter is gonna keep happening to MetaFilter. My personal hope is that it will stabilize into a plausible, sustainable small business, but a lot of the doom-and-gloom feels to me like people raging, in vain, against the dying of the light.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:42 AM on September 27, 2023 [16 favorites]

The youths I know feel all kinds of apocalyptic about the job market and the country and the environment, but most of them know how to find cool people online. This whole "death of the Internet" thing is indeed generation-specific, I think: namely, a bunch of Gen X-ers and elder millennials who the Internet largely left behind in 2006 are finally hitting the point where the stagnation and decay turn a little bit more drastic.

Well, and to fine-tune this a little bit - I don't think anyone is necessarily having trouble finding cool people online, or cool things online. The internet itself will continue no matter what happens here. But the internet as a place of semi-anonymous ideas, where people primarily engaged on their computers and wrote long, thoughtful things to each other, is largely disappearing (with maybe fanfiction alone holding the line). There is no successor to Livejournal. There are no successors to the MUSHes. There is no successor to Television Without Pity and its forums. When they finally put out the lights here, there will be no successor to Metafilter. There are other places...but there aren't other places like this. And that is why it's worth fighting for, and preserving...but also why, yeah, it's worth being kind to people who are fighting what is ultimately a retrenching action.
posted by corb at 6:36 AM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think that what's happening to MetaFilter is gonna keep happening to MetaFilter. My personal hope is that it will stabilize into a plausible, sustainable small business, but a lot of the doom-and-gloom feels to me like people raging, in vain, against the dying of the light.

I think what can be frustrating is if, like adrianhon and to a much lesser degree, me, you’re in the business of online/digital spaces, you can see that the bookstore owner is like, not opening on Saturdays and doesn’t have a website. I am 100% sympathetic to the small business aspect, having worked in one. I’m a fan of our team. I’m not in favour of expectations of instant responses etc. but when you’re small you have to be more strategic, not less.

Also, there is an engagement cliff and it does worry me. This isn’t just about active users but number of posts. Once that drops too far, there’s not enough for people to engage with and it spirals down. We’re not there but it’s a consideration. For me, the biggest barrier there is the question of “what’s ok to link to” and that’s where the profile thing gets me, as discussed in my previous posts. The stats shared last year showed flat growth but I’m guessing this year is worse.

The Twitter share thing is small but I disagree that it’s insignificant. Compared to Facebook and Instagram Twitter global usage is less than half and has been for a long time. (Threads, by the way, as of August anyway, had less than half of Twitter users daily and was declining. useage dropped 80% after the first three weeks of Threads being available.)

But in terms of what people want to do online, Twitter is more aligned with MF (find stuff and comment) than Instagram (find pretty stuff and buy/make/dress.)

Also, people on Twitter are looking for alternatives. A strategic approach would have been to announce that in 6-9 months the profile/share changes will take place and ask the community to go actively recruit people.

As to why have a share button…the share button is for ease but it’s also a signal and a ramp.

If you find MF via Twitter, or you find it another way and like Twitter, and you see the share button, it lets you know you are welcome to share. Twitter is still The Commons when it comes to text based content sharing. If you just have Mastodon or whatever, the casual reader will not know if you really just mean your instance.

Sharing is what we want really, for growth, people who like our content to share it. It’s about meeting people where they are and it’s also being aware of how having OR not having things that are standard conveys information to readers/users. It’s about thinking of where alignment exists.

For me the profile link is a different thing..I’ve expressed that already though; it’s about reacting to be (or to be seen as) “good” over making a good experience by looking at the whole.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:08 AM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

There is no successor to Television Without Pity and its forums

Primetimer is the successor. It even looks and works the same, although snark is not the default in the forums. But it is still plenty snarky.
posted by jgirl at 11:34 AM on September 27, 2023

Also, every TV show has a subreddit.
posted by bowbeacon at 11:48 AM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

A strategic approach would have been to announce that in 6-9 months the profile/share changes will take place and ask the community to go actively recruit people.

Yep. Even 2-3 months would have been smarter than just announcing it from on high with no rationale given, and no community discussion. And, while no one asked, for the record I have no problem with the site deciding Twitter is too toxic to support as part of MeFi's site architecture. The way it was done, however, flies in the face of all the nice language we keep seeing about increasing transparency and the value of community involvement blah blah.

Ok, I think I need to go back to avoiding MetaTalk for a while.
posted by mediareport at 12:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

That's not what you said above

loup, those parts of the decision that *weren't* purely technical should have been raised with and discussed by the community before being announced from above - and then offered with zero explanation until users repeatedly asked for one.

Thank you everyone for the feedback here. In this case, yes, it was *mostly* a technical decision (Twitter things started to break and being harder and harder to maintain). Then the volatile situation with Twitter played a role with the decision making process. It was not an either/or case but rather both.

On top of that, other factors played a role:
– The easy fix was to remove these. We can add them back if the situation changes or the community thinks this is necessary.
– Last time we asked for feedback to make specific changes, the feedback we got was mostly inconclusive. So we though it was easier to remove it for the time being.

As you know, site governance is currently in a transition period. This will, unavoidably, change how feedback is collected and applied to the decision making process. Ideally, we will have better systems like UserVoice or something similar instead of just a MetaTalk thread for this.

On a separate note: if you have seen a “We’re sorry a server error occurred” error today, frimble is already aware. Looks like there was a spike in CPU usage on the server around that time. It hasn’t been the case before or since but we're looking into the root cause.
posted by loup (staff) at 1:16 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Y'all, you're old ... a lot of the doom-and-gloom feels to me like people raging, in vain, against the dying of the light.

You know what? This is nice language but it's really fucking rude. People who think Metafilter is in a bad situation are old people who are expecting too much? Did everyone somehow forget that last year the Steering Committee discovered, to the admins' surprise, that the site was within months of going bust, and that only a heroic effort by the SC and by donors managed to save it? And that the same body that was able to do this is no longer operating – for reasons that I understand and sympathise with?

Who are these "oh, but for the passing of the old internet ways" complainers? As far as I can tell, everyone has more specific issues here. You aren't engaging in good faith with people's discussions here, you're throwing up strawmen to beat down.
posted by adrianhon at 2:24 PM on September 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

I mean, you ight disagree with it, but I really don't think the comment was "rude" in the sense that it shouldn't be made.
posted by sagc at 2:37 PM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

– Last time we asked for feedback to make specific changes, the feedback we got was mostly inconclusive. So we though it was easier to remove it for the time being.

Can you explain this comment more? It looks like you're saying that you didn't get great feedback about specific things on a post in July that was also a post about a bunch of other things and didn't have any specific question other than "let us know if you have any feedback," so you decided not to ask for any user feedback on anything in any format?
posted by lapis at 2:48 PM on September 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

sagc: Fine, call it dismissive. Or maybe condescending?

Loup: I'm not sure whether I'm more unhappy about the baffling inconsistencies in your repeated attempts at explaining the policy decision here or the fact that you never seem to admit any fault or even regret about the miscommunication whatosever.

But that's outweighed by your claim that you made the change because last July, the feedback you got about plans to simplify posting to the blue (by removing the need submit “Link URL” and “Link Text” fields) was inconclusive. So... is the answer just not to ask for feedback on proposed changes now, because that happened a year ago?

Consider this a vote of no confidence, for what little that matters. I've already cancelled my subscription.
posted by adrianhon at 2:50 PM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

I missed that that was last July.
posted by lapis at 2:53 PM on September 27, 2023

Way back in college—back when I first joined MetaFilter!—I read a fantastic book, whose name I've unfortunately forgotten, about the phenomenon of people fleeing one MMORPG for another: refugees of The Matrix Online building new community in Second Life or World of Warcraft or Eve.

I just want to say this book description sounded really interesting to me so I did a quick Google and I think maybe this is it: Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds by Celia Pearce and Artemesia. Description says the game that closed was Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and the players relocated to There.com.
posted by sigmagalator at 8:32 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

The sense of entitlement on display here is fucking amazing.
posted by slogger at 6:42 AM on September 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

There is no successor to Livejournal. There are no successors to the MUSHes. There is no successor to Television Without Pity and its forums. When they finally put out the lights here, there will be no successor to Metafilter. There are other places...but there aren't other places like this.

I don't mean offense, but I think we're in the same age cohort, and a lot of what you're saying comes off like "I, as a Gen Xer, am not aware of sites like the ones when I was a teen, and therefore they must not exist".

LiveJournal didn't fade away, Television Without Pity didn't fade away, the people who founded them sold and got paid money for it. LiveJournal went to some Russians and got monetized for fetish enthusiasts, but the code got reused to Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, DeadJournal and others. TWoP was sold by the EICs to Bravo, who kept them on for an extra year before they left and Bravo eventually pivoted the site to be more video interviews and focus on their reality shows. These were active decisions made by the site owners, who had built the site based on a shit-ton of work by paid recappers and mods, and that money came from advertising.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:11 AM on September 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

Can you explain this comment more?

Sure! I think we currently don't have a useful system for collecting quantifiable feedback. Until we have better systems, we had 3 possible outcomes:

– Do nothing for now, leave a couple features broken and add a note about it in the site update.
– Create and monitor a separate Meta thread for those features alone knowing that a Meta thread will not be a good solution to reach a decision.
– Remove them for now adding a note about it in the site update and collect qualitative feedback from the community.

In this case, we discussed it internally and figured that the third option was probably the best way to go since we can add them back, if necessary.
posted by loup (staff) at 1:51 PM on September 28, 2023

OK. It appears that you see little to no value in canvassing opinion from Meta because, essentially, people disagree and there will not be unanimous opinion in any direction. It feels likely that for a large number of site changes, the same result will be true if you "collect qualitative feedback" afterwards, too.

So maybe... there's just no point in asking for community feedback on anything, at least not on Meta, right? The people who are "internal" (I assume admin/owner/mods) might as well decide on changes, as they do now, announce them in locked threads, and not respond to discussions elsewhere. I'm not sure it's a great way to run a site that relies on donations and claims to respond to community feedback, but it would at least avoid arguments.

You recently mentioned Uservoice. I am genuinely curious to know what more about how you feel that would work better than Meta threads. I can see advantages and disadvantages. But ultimately I agree with other people's diagnosis of Metafilter's direction, which is that absent elected community representatives, and absent some mythical unanimous collective decision-making process in Meta, admins are basically making decisions on their own. I happen to find many of those decisions baffling and I think they have been explained incredibly poorly, if at all.

I do understand that the transition to a more community-led operation is waiting advice from lawyers. I hope that when that happens, the community leaders aren't just relied on to fundraise or to advise where those funds should be spent, but have the authority to directly spend those funds, overriding admins, mods, and even the owner. Otherwise it's not community-led.
posted by adrianhon at 2:10 PM on September 28, 2023 [15 favorites]

As an addendum on the ChatGPT web crawler note, Google's recently added/announced Google-Extended as a token to add to robots.txt to opt out of their gen-AI products as well.

Direct-quote:

A standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products.
Google-Extended doesn't have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent strings; the robots.txt user-agent token is used in a control capacity.

I'll leave it to you on whether to add it or not, but I figure it's worth mentioning.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:11 PM on September 28, 2023

I hope that when that happens, the community leaders aren't just relied on to fundraise or to advise where those funds should be spent, but have the authority to directly spend those funds, overriding admins, mods, and even the owner.

Yes! This is, and has been, the goal since last year's transition: An actual community-run site. Where it's leaders will have actual power over budget, structure, initiatives, staffing, development, decision-making, etc.
posted by loup (staff) at 3:37 PM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

sigmagalator: Oh my gosh, that's the one! You have no idea how much I've tried to hunt this book down over the last couple of years. I'm delighted to have its name again, thank you!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:39 PM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is the business update coming soon? I believe it was promised last week but now can't find that reference.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:44 AM on October 3, 2023

Yep, posted this morning. Was aiming for Friday and had a few people I was waiting to hear from and posted today.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:41 AM on October 3, 2023

Link to business update.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 8:54 AM on October 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think we're in the same age cohort, and a lot of what you're saying comes off like "I, as a Gen Xer, am not aware of sites like the ones when I was a teen, and therefore they must not exist".

LiveJournal didn't fade away, Television Without Pity didn't fade away, the people who founded them sold and got paid money for it. LiveJournal went to some Russians and got monetized for fetish enthusiasts, but the code got reused to Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, DeadJournal and others.

Sure, I'm aware of all that, and I'm not saying this shit happens in a vacuum, but also Dreamwidth and the other journal clones just don't exist in anything like similar numbers. There are financial reasons a lot of these things happened, but that doesn't make it less true that spaces where this kind of things exist are smaller and smaller and fewer and fewer. The fact that some people got paid while other people lost their spaces doesn't make it less true or less of a problem.

And it matters for spaces like this to know what the zeitgeist is and what the appetite is for longform discussion.
posted by corb at 3:20 PM on October 3, 2023