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I suspect that a major reason for the demise of Metafilter is it's just so rude that people have started leaving and not returning. I used to love it and spent

by jaggs 12y ago

I suspect that a major reason for the demise of Metafilter is it's just so rude that people have started leaving and not returning. I used to love it and spent a lot of time hanging out there, until it started to get so incredibly snarky that I felt uncomfortable commenting. The last straw was when some veteran accused me of trivialising the holocaust just because of an innocent quote. Nobody needs that stuff.

m0nty 12y ago
That's the reason I stopped visiting. I once asked a tech-support type question and was told to "man up and grow a pair", and tell my users they would just have to live with the problem (no attempt to answer the actual question). Unfortunately, answers like that tend to get lots of favorites since they sound so emphatic, and people on MeFi seem to like emphatic answers, in the same way reddit likes funny answers.
- joshmillard 12y ago
  Man, I am sympathetic if you got an obnoxious answer like that, but for what it's worth as one of the folks who moderates it that as stated is a comment I'd delete from an Ask Metafilter thread in a heartbeat and would expect other users to have flagged a bunch as well. The system isn't perfect but "man up and grow a pair" is really precisely deletable as a crap non-answer in our moderation rubric.
  - m0nty 12y ago
    Thanks for that :) It's a great community but some of its flaws grew a bit tiring. I genuinely hope it can come through its current crisis and keep right on going.
epo 12y ago
Your caricature of what MF is like is so grotesquely at odds with my experience that I would suspect that you are exaggerating or making it up. Metafilter, by and large, has an informed, intelligent and very helpful community. There are always jerks or people having a bad day but the mods deal with that promptly. That said, people who are just asinine, like perhaps those making unfair generalizations, are often dealt with by gentle ridicule. I have never seen anyone unfairly snarked, ever.

by jaggs 12y ago

m0nty 12y ago

That's the reason I stopped visiting. I once asked a tech-support type question and was told to "man up and grow a pair", and tell my users they would just have to live with the problem (no attempt to answer the actual question). Unfortunately, answers like that tend to get lots of favorites since they sound so emphatic, and people on MeFi seem to like emphatic answers, in the same way reddit likes funny answers.

joshmillard 12y ago
Man, I am sympathetic if you got an obnoxious answer like that, but for what it's worth as one of the folks who moderates it that as stated is a comment I'd delete from an Ask Metafilter thread in a heartbeat and would expect other users to have flagged a bunch as well. The system isn't perfect but "man up and grow a pair" is really precisely deletable as a crap non-answer in our moderation rubric.
- m0nty 12y ago
  Thanks for that :) It's a great community but some of its flaws grew a bit tiring. I genuinely hope it can come through its current crisis and keep right on going.

epo 12y ago

Your caricature of what MF is like is so grotesquely at odds with my experience that I would suspect that you are exaggerating or making it up. Metafilter, by and large, has an informed, intelligent and very helpful community. There are always jerks or people having a bad day but the mods deal with that promptly. That said, people who are just asinine, like perhaps those making unfair generalizations, are often dealt with by gentle ridicule. I have never seen anyone unfairly snarked, ever.