Sat 26 Jan 2008
I’ve been running BBQ as (with a couple exceptions) a one-big-question-a-day venture, including weekends. We’ve seen a pretty interesting variety of responsiveness to different topics and different types of questions, which is great. But I’m wondering if Saturday and Sunday are good days or not so good days to drop new questions.
Does it make more sense to take the weekend off, as it were — let Friday’s question stand until Monday? Or one question for the whole weekend, posted Saturday morning and standing through Sunday night?
Do folks want real thinkers on the weekend, or something lighter and chattier, down-time fare?
And, aside from that, how y’all doing?
Posted by Josh Millard12 answers so far!
Better be a pretty damn good question on Friday then, bucko.
Light and chatty is good for the weekend, I think. Something silly that we can keep talking about. The heavy fare, well, you run out of things to say pretty quickly.
Dying: Why Must We?
This weekend on the BBQ!
I’d say do a nice, light, chatty question and leave it up for the whole weekend. Even though I have more time to come up with a thoughtful, well-prepared answer to something intellectual on weekends, fuck that. Up with chatfilter!
Also, does anyone use MSN Messenger? Anybody else get the… “You have received one new message from [insert name here]” and then have it not show up in your inbox? The alert stays at X New messages, but it goes away if you sign out and sign back in.
… Has someone hacked the Microsoft servers finally? :D
It mostly depends on how things go on MeTa: after a GiveWell or SexismFlameout thread I’m pretty useless for tough questions.
Two alternatives:
1) Every visitor gets a random story on the weekends. I’m wondering if this will trigger old questions to flare up periodically. That’d be neat, if possible. I could see it also having the effect of killing conversation on the weekend, due to everyone not hitting the same story. You’d have to combine it with highlighting the most recent comments sidebar widget, or something. Downside: requires custom coding. Upside: builds out the “old” content of the site, creating richer and deeper community around each question.
2) Pick one of the “Best of..” questions (defined as > n topical comments), and rerun it for the weekend.
Dying: Why must we?
If we were dead, we couldn’t talk about being dead, could we?
Why should we make things more or less uncomfortable? Let the questions stand for themselves.
I am the opposite of most people on here and and in the mefi-verse. Weekends is when I get time to surf around, so I would vote for the big big big big big big questions for the weekend!!!
How can we drum up interest in BBQ? I’m seeing the same people posting all the time. I’m sure more people would join if they knew about it. I bet even many Mefites missed the announcement on Metatalk.
I’d love to have more people over here, but I’m hesitant to push it hard over on mefi; we mention it now and then and I see a couple more people sign up, but without Matt deciding to really push BBQ (and there’s no particular reason for him to do so) it’s not really something that likely to get a whole lot more visiblity there.
This is up to Matt of course, but I think he should push it — for Metafilter’s benefit.
When you go to post a question, the form should say, “Are you sure AskMe is the right place for your question? Friendly, chatty questions survive better at metachat.org. Big philosophical questions are welcome at bigbigquestion.com.”