MetaFilter Drawbacks

[jesse_the_k]

In my last post, I waxed enthusiastic about MetaFilter. Now some realistic counterbalancing.

The rate of change there is fearsomely slow. In the beginning, there was constant misogyny, including rape jokes. Now they're gone—not made at all, or sometimes made and deleted by mods as fast as they can. MetaFilter is still pretty proud of that. I want to believe that the posters who like dropping harassing crap are random drivers-by, but I'm not sure. There seems to be some awareness of male-female, racial, and class issues. The disability posts I've seen have been principally inspiration porn. The most recent "hot button"* has been trans* issues, and as jiawen noted yesterday, she's so frustrated with the willingness to progress at the speed of the newest person she's quitting the site (after making some outstanding posts and putting up with some definitely clueless, perhaps well-intentioned interrogation).

*Who the fuck wants their life to be someone else's 'hot button'?

I've read a lot of back and forth on every topic. But is it acceptable to mock someone for things in their nature? There is no shortage of MetaFilter posters who are willing to debate anything. In other words, here be fearsome snarky libertarians, as well as anarchists and Democans and Republicrats and so forth. It is in no way a safe space.

The decisions of the mod are final, yet that doesn't stop MeFites from posting whining threads in MetaTalk every week about "my simple, harmless comment got hammered." Then other MeFites get popcorn and hammer back: your simple harmless thread objectifies and vilifies and pushes people away from the site! and back and forth for hundreds of comments. Some folks seem to enjoy poking and watching; some folks are willing to hang in there and educate.

A couple quick quotes:

Metafilter: Where the reasonable conversation is simple mindfulness/meditation techniques = heroin = slavery = conspiracy by technocratic cabal
posted by stenseng at 8:28 AM on April 15

The one really un-awesome thing about Metafilter is how there's a bunch of grumpy dudes who constantly complain about moderation and what a PC echo-chamber it is and yet still stick around to annoy everyone trying to have fun and discuss stuff in good faith. If it's such a bad place to be for you: go away? How is that hard to figure out lol.

Meanwhile some of the best posters are still MIA. Sigh.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:38 AM

Less vital, but still a significant barrier: They love their acronyms and abbreviations—holdover from USENET-era founding in 1999, methinks. MeTa, MeFi, the Blue, the Green, the Gray, threadsitting, threadshitting and more. The site consists of first-page posts (FFPs) and discussions, but there's no second page. For answers wade through the wiki which is half addressed to the new user and half addressed to the old timer sitting off stage drinking rum.

Comments

[owlectomy]

I used to joke that Metafilter collectively knew more about nuclear physics than about women. (This, after seeing two questions on the heels of each other -- one relationship question that got a lot of bad answers, and one nuclear physics question that got long and clear and cogent answers.)

It's frustrating how I can see so much improvement, over the time that I've been on the site (over ten years now) -- going along with some shifts in my own attitudes about sexism online, since -- and still feel at times how huge the distance left to travel is.

But there are so many online communities that drift painfully towards "free speech is an absolute good so no matter what you say, if people are hurt or offended it's there own fault," and that develop a culture of aggression and being proud to take your lumps, I'm really glad for one that -- even if in theory more than practice -- takes seriously the idea that conversations take careful tending in order not to let a few aggressive loudmouths dominate. (Though I also really empathize with people who get tired of being constantly in 101 mode).

[jiawen]

However, on trans issues, MeFi has not had particularly good tending. The mods have let drive-by transphobia, casual transphobia, amazingly annoying displays of cis privilege and even some really blatantly transphobic things go. The incident with them allowing someone to sockpuppet in order to display transphobia was the last straw for a lot of us trans folks. I don't know if that means they need to educate themselves about trans issues more, or what exactly it means about the mod staff, to be honest... but regardless: they quite definitely let cis loudmouths derail, insult and generally make the community hostile for trans people.

[jesse_the_k]

That's terrible enough on its own, but MetaFilter claims to despise sock puppetry as the worst sort of wrong. What hypocrisy! Who wants to hang around for the three or six or nine painful years it would take to change that unacceptable behavior?

thank you for representing as long as you did.

[owlectomy]

I missed that that had happened until just now, as it was buried far down in a fighty thread, but that's really egregious.

Definitely they need to do a lot better job when it comes to transphobia.