Pony: "this is fake" flag

March 26, 2005 9:09 AM

Does anyone else want "this is fake" added as a reason on the flag-this-post form?
posted by rcade to Feature Requests at 9:09 AM (19 comments total)

No knock to tramquileye, who I'm assuming thought the weblog was legit, but fiction pretending to be real just to sucker in unsuspecting readers is gruesome. I want back the five minutes of my life I spent reading that weblog entry.
posted by rcade at 9:14 AM on March 26, 2005

Do people post links to fake stories all the time? You could flag it as noise.
posted by anapestic at 9:18 AM on March 26, 2005

i wanted to flag it as, "Why is this tired shit on the front page? Please stop insulting our intelligence."

...or do the rest of you enjoying coming to metafilter to find blogs of illiterate, whiny teens who dabble in OMG prostitution?
posted by naxosaxur at 9:24 AM on March 26, 2005

does anybody actually look at domain names anymore?
posted by quonsar at 9:37 AM on March 26, 2005

I am not a teenager, but I would probably start using "OMG" if people paid me.
posted by anapestic at 9:38 AM on March 26, 2005

Real blogs tell stories. Fiction blogs tell stories. The only thing that makes it good or bad is whether it's interesting to read or not. Not everything on the internet has to be true. Quonsar makes a good point.
posted by Arch Stanton at 9:40 AM on March 26, 2005

Actually, tranquileye never says that he thinks it's legit. People just leapt to the wrong conclusion. That happens here from time to time.
posted by anapestic at 9:45 AM on March 26, 2005

Real blogs tell stories. Fiction blogs tell stories. The only thing that makes it good or bad is whether it's interesting to read or not.

Perhaps. But fiction that pretends to be fact is almost always dreadfully bad. Would anyone have responded to "I am a prostitute" if the post made its fictional status clear?
posted by rcade at 10:12 AM on March 26, 2005

i wanted to flag it as, "Why is this tired shit on the front page? Please stop insulting our intelligence."

Yeah. Am I just getting older, or are there more teenagers around here these days?
posted by mdn at 10:45 AM on March 26, 2005

I'd rather be able to flag an entire thread as "this is an embarrassing cluster-fuck". (Well put, quonsar.)
posted by Galvatron at 10:45 AM on March 26, 2005

Maybe what I'm really fishing for here is an "i want those five minutes back" option.
posted by rcade at 11:15 AM on March 26, 2005

From the link: "In early February I decided I was in love with Matt."

Is there really anything more that needs to be said?

Anyway, no pictures, rate schedule or anything that could possibly be of use to an old pervert looking for some teenage hoochie. Just sayin'.
posted by cedar at 11:26 AM on March 26, 2005

aye, it's noise.
posted by Busithoth at 12:09 PM on March 26, 2005

I flagged it as noise but apparently not enough of us flagged it. Oh well. A little background on why Shannon would be considered postworthy would have helped. Otherwise it's just another fake blogger "confession" thats not all that captivating.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:54 PM on March 26, 2005

Perhaps a short comment in the flag feature could best attend to this kind of problem. We have had a lot of requests for new flags lately.
posted by caddis at 2:13 PM on March 26, 2005

While it's not the "best of the web," I'm not convinced it's fake. Melodramatic, sure, but if it hadn't appeared here, it would have been just one more bit of LJ-esque personal tragedy chronicled on the web.

However, to answer the qustion at hand, I think a [this is fake] comment in the thread would be more useful than a flag; if it's particularly egregious, flag it as noise, as others have suggested. I wouldn't mind a short comment box on the flag page, though.
posted by me3dia at 3:32 PM on March 26, 2005

I don't think it's fake. I do think it's a bit pointless as an FPP.
posted by dhartung at 10:16 PM on March 26, 2005

I flagged it as noise but apparently not enough of us flagged it.

Yeah, because "mathowie" is just a mindless computer program that simply counts the number of flags a post receives and deletes it if it meets a specified threshold.

Does anyone else want "this is fake" added as a reason on the flag-this-post form?

It's a real shame that there's no option like "other" on that form which might cover anything that doesn't fit under any of the listed flag-reasons.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:40 AM on March 28, 2005

But fiction that pretends to be fact is almost always dreadfully bad
Indeed
posted by clavdivs at 11:41 AM on March 28, 2005