Why is Ask Metafilter the way it is?
July 16, 2010 11:35 AM Subscribe
Why is Ask Metafilter the way it is? I'm relatively new here and, while answers to questions with concrete answers are offered by knowledgeable people with great speed, a lot of the personal questions are answered with opinions that seem to be full of a lot of self-righteousness and condescension.
Most relationship-related answers seems to disregard the fact the the OP may, in fact, know their mate better than a random MeFite. For example, the recent question about an author being disappointed about his wife not being interested in his work did not receive many answers that I'd consider reasonable (tell her that that is important to you, discuss ways that she could accomodate his request while at the same time discussing ways that he is deficient in her eyes to make sure they can both be happy, etc.). Instead, there was a lot of "Tough shit. Deal with it, Mr. Patriarchy." The cycle seems to repeat itself pretty frequently, and the sexes switch - it's just as common to see these types of answers with a woman asking the question about her husband, etc. I assume that this is a result of a systemic bias - most of the people here seem to be white, middle class, young, and progressive.
I'm sure I will get flamed/banned into oblivion, but I'd like to hear if anyone else has noticed this too.
Most relationship-related answers seems to disregard the fact the the OP may, in fact, know their mate better than a random MeFite. For example, the recent question about an author being disappointed about his wife not being interested in his work did not receive many answers that I'd consider reasonable (tell her that that is important to you, discuss ways that she could accomodate his request while at the same time discussing ways that he is deficient in her eyes to make sure they can both be happy, etc.). Instead, there was a lot of "Tough shit. Deal with it, Mr. Patriarchy." The cycle seems to repeat itself pretty frequently, and the sexes switch - it's just as common to see these types of answers with a woman asking the question about her husband, etc. I assume that this is a result of a systemic bias - most of the people here seem to be white, middle class, young, and progressive.
I'm sure I will get flamed/banned into oblivion, but I'd like to hear if anyone else has noticed this too.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Heya, discussions about the site itself need to take place on Metatalk, not here in Ask Metafilter. Feel free to post this there if you'd like. -- cortex
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posted by mkb at 11:36 AM on July 16, 2010 [1 favorite]