MeFi Projects

In the past few months, I've been providing answers for the r/askhistorians subreddit, mostly (but not only) to questions about French history. A question about the presence of Africans in France in the late 19th century prompted me to investigate this topic, which has been little studied by academia: there are works on Africans before and after the 19th century, and, for that century, works on Afro-Caribbean people, but not so much on Africa-born residents. So I did a little bit of research and wrote this 8000-word essay which includes a few stories (found in newspapers) about some African people who lived in France in last quarter of the century, decades before African immigration began. [more inside]
posted by elgilito on Aug 27, 2021 - 1 comment

A few months ago I asked this question about replacements for reddit. Since then, I've been trying my hand at Python and ended up writing this program that pulls the top posts from your subreddits and emails them to you. This has worked well for me in that it allows me to bypass all of the muck and keep any reddit surfing to a minimum. [more inside]
posted by holmesian on Jul 20, 2017 - 5 comments

Moderators of r/worldnews on reddit worked with me to test an idea: what are the effects of encouraging fact-checking on the response and spread of unreliable news? On average, messages encouraging fact-checking caused a 2x reduction in the reddit score of tabloid submissions, which likely influenced reddit's rankings. [more inside]
posted by honest knave on Feb 1, 2017 - 3 comments

Me irl is a subreddit where every post must be titled "me irl". The prompt is to post "selfies of the soul". It has 250k subscribers, and is responsible for several of the highest scoring links on reddit of all time, including #7. This is the burden I carry with me.
posted by The Devil Tesla on Sep 2, 2015 - 9 comments

A WebGL puzzle game for close readers. [left click] to place the falling comment flower; [space] to remove the flowers adjacent to the cursor from the board. It's still pretty beta, so feedback and bug reports are appreciated.
posted by jeisme on Oct 9, 2013 - 3 comments

My attempt to make a buck or 2 off reddit (and help people find good birthday gifts ;P)
posted by petsounds on Aug 22, 2013 - 1 comment

A group blog written by some of the comrades from /r/Communism. I thought having a forum for extended writings by people at /r/Communism was a nice idea and after proposing it and having quite a few people interested, we set up a little home on the net. There is no single line pushed by the blog, each user has their own perspective. The project is an attempt at exposition and dialog. Current writings include: Pacifism as Privilege, Tibetan Feudalism, Marxism and Oppression, Violence in Media, the Zeitgeist Movement, and more.
posted by symbioid on Dec 5, 2012 - 0 comments

A small collection of bookmarklets (?) which augment the function of social(ist?) websites, including metafilter, reddit, and craigslist. The MeFi one creates a visualization/navigation sidebar which shows favorites and quoting relationships between comments, and adds "reply" threading (based on quotations). It helps for getting a quick overview of what's going on when you come late to a massive thread. Source code (javascript) is free.
posted by yourcelf on Mar 13, 2011 - 7 comments