What's the plan, Stan, for Trump 2025?

December 20, 2024 7:42 AM

Given how much this previous administration hived off a lot of users, what's the mods/owner's plan for this?

Will be there be clearly defined threads for anything Trump-related? Something ongoing that way we don't have multiple new posts each day?

The man farts and it's "news", says stupid shit and it's "news", and the media will breathlessly keep up the 24 hour news cycle around this turd. For four years.

This is not me saying US MeFites shouldn't have a safe space to deal with the incoming crisis; it's more like how will MeFi contain it from infecting everything else.

posted by Kitteh to Feature Requests at 7:42 AM (24 comments total)

Mod note: No plans at the moment, members are advised to flag comments or post they believe are off topic and add a note explaining the reason for the flag.

Posts about US politics should be flagged with the uspolitics flag, which allows people to filter out said posts via MyMefi. If a post isn't tagged that way, then check to see if you can add the tag and if not, flag it with a note and ask the mods to add the tag
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:51 AM on December 20, 2024 [6 favorites]

This is not me saying US MeFites shouldn't have a safe space to deal with the incoming crisis; it's more like how will MeFi contain it from infecting everything else.

I think the monthly I/P threads have worked "well," insofar as most of the discussion on the subject happens there. I could see monthly "The Orange Horror" posts, but presumably the hard part will be parsing what's actually worth a separate post, and him just ruminating about invading Mexico.

Posts about US politics should be flagged with the uspolitics flag, which allows people to filter out said posts via MyMefi. If a post isn't tagged that way, then check to see if you can add the tag and if not, flag it with a note and ask the mods to add the tag


I eased away for a few weeks this fall when there were oodles of political posts, minus the tag. I occasionally would flag and ask for the tag to be added, but at a certain points I threw up my hands. I like MyMefi in theory, but in practice the user base is now so small, it's 50/50 that there's more than one or two posts that fit my interest filters on a given day.
posted by cupcakeninja at 9:01 AM on December 20, 2024 [5 favorites]

Data Point:

Wonkette, the Democratic Party blog I spent most of the last 8 years at, on The Day After, said that its standard operating procedure of making a thread for each new Republican outrage was going to be unsustainable.

My suggestion would be to treat Trump-adjacent posts as OutrageFilter until proven innocent by clear notability.
posted by Lemkin at 9:32 AM on December 20, 2024 [4 favorites]

Maybe all US Politics posts can be hidden under the details tag with a ▶click here to hurt yourself warning.
posted by phunniemee at 10:45 AM on December 20, 2024 [7 favorites]

As a feature request, it'd be nice if there were something in big letters--even a button--on the new post screen to make it clear what to do with US politics posts. I know about the tag, I've filtered and unfiltered the tag a million times depending on how crazy politics makes me feel any given week...and then on this morning's political post, I completely forgot the tag existed (fortunately someone else added it).
posted by mittens at 2:31 PM on December 20, 2024 [3 favorites]

Surely adding tags to posts for which there's a policy of including certain tags is something that one would reasonably expect paid mods to do?
posted by dusty potato at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2024

What incoming crisis? Too many beans in the can?
posted by Ideefixe at 3:54 PM on December 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

I say every Saturday, a weekly roundup post go up. Monday at 8am, it is closed.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 4:47 PM on December 20, 2024 [3 favorites]

"I worry about people who throw rocks."

-Chrisjen Avasarala.
posted by clavdivs at 6:03 PM on December 20, 2024

If a post doesn't have the US politics tag, delete US politics comments. MetaFilter is curated StumbleUpon, not a US politics website.
posted by one for the books at 7:13 PM on December 20, 2024 [17 favorites]

Unfortunately, US politics has a hugely outsized effect on world affairs; I'm not sure what the point of being provincial about it is. This is everybody's problem. As an American: Yes, you're welcome!

That said, I'm strangely optimistic that "the man farts and it's news" may be less true this time around. Barring some plot twist out of the back matter of Watchmen, Trump will not be president five years from today. We've not in living memory elected a new lame duck president, but we've done it now, and I feel like the ticking clock on his presidency is going to blunt some of what he's trying to do; we've already seen that house republicans seem to have lost a significant amount of fear of him, probably because they know his ability to hurt them is dwindling. I feel like this might all have a different tone than we've been expecting.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:47 PM on December 21, 2024 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure what the point of being provincial about it is.

I'm tired, boss. I'm tired of coming to a place that used to be great for a range of discussions about a range of topics, and instead finding a bunch of threads that are ghost towns, comment-wise. With the unvarying exception of US politics threads, which stay busy. I simply don't want to spend much time (in life; not just here) talking with people about US politics. I'm grateful for vigorous discussions that don't center political concerns, and they're much rarer than they used to be here.

I'm not sure how many users remain here who aren't here for political content. Maybe I'm tilting at windmills, and MetaFilter without US politics everywhere is a Garfield-without-Garfield thing. If you subtract another political-but-not-politics brace of topics that I don't always want to chat about (housing policy; homelessness; leftism vs. liberalism; Israel/Palestine; misogyny; etc.), does it become Garfield-without-Garfield-and-Jon, and Odie just wandering through random frames?

Anyway, It did not used to be like this here. I'd like to imagine a future for MetaFilter that stretches beyond Gen X/Millennial types grousing about US politics.
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:24 AM on December 22, 2024 [22 favorites]

I simply don't want to spend much time (in life; not just here) talking with people about US politics. I'm grateful for vigorous discussions that don't center political concerns, and they're much rarer than they used to be here.

Do non-political discussions often turn into US politics discussions? I don't recall that happening much, but I may have just missed it.

I have seen posts about non-US politics turn to US politics. Example 1. Example 2.
posted by ftrtts at 12:27 PM on December 22, 2024 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure how many users remain here who aren't here for political content.

I'm here for that primarily! I do tend to chime in on Canadian politics threads more to keep the Can con high. I read much more than I comment on, so it's a good reminder to comment more on the content I love to read.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:35 PM on December 22, 2024 [6 favorites]

I tend to stay out of the politics threads and participate in the non-politics threads, so there’s that.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:16 PM on December 22, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'd be in favor of stuffing all the outrage-style posts off in their own little corners... yes, all of them, from politics through social issues on down to the ones focused on the site and its users/staff.

I fully believe that the outrage posts - and the prevalence (perhaps even encouragement) of certain flavors of them - has been incredibly damaging to the site over the years. It hasn't slowed in the slightest, just changed targets.

... even though a great many people have pointed at the trend as a reason they stop/reduce their time here.
posted by stormyteal at 8:55 PM on December 22, 2024 [10 favorites]

Is it really the outrage posts, or is it the incredibly nasty conversations that spring up around them; and if, as I am certain, it's the latter, what can be done differently?

Because, look, if these were simply topics that people didn't want to engage with, then people wouldn't engage with them. As far as I can tell, people engage with them a lot. And when the conversation goes sour, people engage with them even more, exponentially more, until they cease to engage with the conversation suddenly, and often cease to engage with the site ever again.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:48 AM on December 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

I'm here for, variously: US politics, AI politics (read: consistently pushing an anti-big-corporate-AI / pro-open-source-AI viewpoint), and videogames.

I like that Metafilter exposes me to non-US-politics, and I mostly try to keep my USpol opinions out of those threads and think that should be the expectation. But from traffic alone it's clear a significant percentage of the most-active users want to talk about US politics with each other, and getting in the way of that is... getting in the way. If we're going to change anything it should be limiting the spread of US politics outside its designated threads (eg weekly roundups for lower-priority outragefilter).
posted by Ryvar at 1:01 PM on December 23, 2024 [3 favorites]

the information I find in MeFi tends to be superior to network news reporting. There's a distinction between the content/links posted, and the discussion that ensues (not that I'm disparaging the discussion, and I've shed my share of heat vs. light)

I'm not sure what to tell you re: outrage. yes at times it seems performative and pointless, but man there is a lot to be unhappy about, there's a lot that requires our attention and action. there's a ton of content posted to MeFi that is fluffy and fun, I think it's up to the individual to decide how they're engaging. I don't see the point of casting aspersions on how others engage.
posted by ginger.beef at 8:18 AM on December 24, 2024 [5 favorites]

Late to this, but I have an idea.

From my memory of 2016 through 2020 and all the posts in the Blue, not to mention the Fucking Fuck threads, the posts attracted a lot of trauma dumping, people made rapid-fire comments without reading what came before, and contributed to depression and suicidal ideation. The other, more technical, problem is that the threads got to a length where reading them and responding cogently was impossible, and also mobile browsers started to choke after about 1000 comments.

Those threads have no "replay value." There's nothing gained by becoming another compilation of horrors, or giving members the space to make each other feel bad. And yet, members demanded it back in 2016 and forced it on the owners/mods.

Unless something has changed on the backend, posts in the Blue cannot be closed early, they run for 30 days. However, they can be deleted, and deleted could mean something as extreme as "the link is 404'd" or as mild as "it's removed from the front page, anyone with the URL can still view it, but comments are closed."

So my proposal is this: A general Trump-hate-sink megathread is opened on the Blue. It comes with an advisory: "THIS THREAD WILL BE LIGHTLY MODERATED. THIS THREAD WILL BE DELETED IN ONE WEEK." It won't be deleted as in 404'd, but simply de-listed. Anyone who has the link can still view it. When one of these is closed, Hate-Sink megathread #2 is opened, again for one week and lightly moderated. And so on.

This alleviates the problem of overloading the moderators, it avoids the threads becoming too long, it gives a bit of an advantage to anyone trying to stay current rather than fixate on a single argument. Any Trump-related threads outside the megathreads comes with an added expectation that the should remain tightly on-topic -- i.e. they are not for trauma dumping or "everything sucks and fascism always wins". If they can't stay on topic, send to deleted pile.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:31 AM on January 10

Also late to this.

I don't think the world is quite ready for what is about to happen on the 20th and in the first two weeks. I really hope Mefi is a place where we can discuss the policy overhauls _and_ also support each other through, for instance, a redefinition of transgender existence into insanity or other nonexistent legal status.

Tut-tutting about the site's traffic is... not how ideally this site responds to what is about to be done.
posted by andreaazure at 5:59 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]

I really hope Mefi is a place where we can discuss the policy overhauls

The thing is, there's nothing to discuss. It's all bad, nearsighted, hateful, avaricious, neo-fascist or some combination. I think the membership of the site is pretty universally behind the idea of Orange Man Bad, GOP Bad. (Then again, this site couldn't get universally behind the idea of "Harris would make a better President than Trump", but I digress.)

_and_ also support each other

Respectfully, you are trying to use the site for a purpose to which it is poorly-suited. This is not a political advocacy site, nor a community support site. Those places exist, and they are great! There have definitely been links to places like that in previous discussions! Here, we post links that are interesting, we bring our own perspectives. Sometimes we don't support each other, we disagree, we even argue, and that is the intended purpose.

There is a cost to making Trump, and U.S politics, the focal point of the site. That cost is increasing the anxiety of the readers, trauma-triggering, driving away hope. (To say nothing about driving away users old and new.) Just today someone decided to squat a context-free shit on a Games Done Quick thread, and that's a charity raising money to prevent cancer!

If every day MetaFilter becomes the Another Horrible Day In Trumpland Blog, what would be found in the comments section? The same thing that ran day after day from 2017-2020, on the frontpage and in the MegaThread and in the Fucking Fuck section:
"This sucks and I'm scared"
"Fascism won"
"I don't know what will happen to me"
"This would have been different if [$SOMETHING]"
"[Comment redacted because the mods don't like actual exhortations to violence]"

We have had this discussion many times on the Blue and on MetaTalk. In 2019 it was in relation to climate change. But that didn't seem to stick so we did another one later that year. And then again in 2022. And also in mid-2024 in the run-up to the election.

So I'm just going to cut & paste what I wrote previously:

Certain topics (usually political, environmental, social) bring out a sense of fatalism and hopelessness from commenters, and while their feelings may be genuine, the comments begin to accumulate a message of:

It's hopeless, this country is turning fascist, there's nothing you can do
The temperature will rise 5 degrees, massive environmental catastrophe, there's nothing you can do
U.S. and Russia will start a global war leading to nuclear exchange, there's nothing you can do
and so on

And what I want to tell these people is that EVEN IF YOU ARE BEING HONEST and genuine and not just trolling and EVEN IF YOU ARE CORRECT (for whatever value "correct" has when making armchair prognostications about immensely complex topics), I don't think you understand the effect those comments have on other people. It makes me check out of threads, it makes me hesitant to read other posts because I worry about how that sort of negativity and hopelessness spreads, it makes me engage less with this site. Especially when it becomes a debate battle between people who believe that things can be salvaged and improved vs. people who don't. [...] Then the second-order effect is those dozens and dozens of people using further comments as a way to communicate and share their fear/anger. Then the third-order effect is the reaction from anyone who's trying to comment in the thread on analysis, or strategy, or anything that isn't the raw exposure of (completely justified) anxiety.

And thus we have the problem: Even though none of these people had intended to take over the thread, even though all of them are processing their real emotions in an entirely human way, the thread has become (a) dangerous for people whose anxieties trigger more easily when they read catastrophizing predictions, (b) useless for people who are trying to discuss the topic, rather than their feelings about the topic, and (c) combative between the disparate users of the site as described above.

But don't take my word for it! Let's check out what former mod restless_nomad said after the Fucking Fuck threads were retired:

we decided there was no real way to make it fair to both the people who wanted to express that particular emotion and all the other folks who found that emotion, in aggregate, seriously harmful to their own mental health. This wasn't a judgement of the validity of the feeling or even really of the effectiveness of the rhetorical choices being made - it was making people, including the mods, miserable, and that is not good for the site or the people being harmed. (emphasis mine)

In fact, since this MeTa will close in a few days, I'd really really appreciate if the final words came from either the mods or the new triumvirate of 1adam12, Rhaomi and Gorgik -- #pleaseanswer or whatever -- with what they are thinking of doing in 2025. This sort of question actually requires a management decision. Do you like my idea above? Or bring back the mega-threads? Or a completely separate subsite? Tighter moderation for anything tagged uspolitics? Looser moderation? Laying out options and asking members to vote/choose would be worth discussing, far preferable to having every member ad-hoc their own solution with exclusion lists and Greasemonkey scripts.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:03 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]

Mod note: There is a MeTa that touches on this that is going live tomorrow morning.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 9:51 PM on January 13

Mod note: It's live!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 1:55 AM on January 14