Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we sort the uneducated from the educated?
Considering that usage of a popular term has no relationship to the level of education that person has, you're facing that problem already. You're just going to have to find less shallow ways of judging people.
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here [merriam-webster.com]. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).
It's not like there was anything in there before NCLB was implemented, either. It was a bad lefty (Ted Kennedy) writing a sort-of decent idea for academic standards by a semi-conservative (Bush), implemented all wrong.
It would be far more efficacious to push for a critical thinking and debate class requirements in grade and collegiate level schools. At least then people would be better equipped to winnow out the facts from the crap themselves, and we wouldn't have to rely on some nebulous "Truth Authority" to inform us.
That may be even harder to make happen than to implement a fair and accurate "truthfulness" rating.
That said, I'm opposed to the idea of any kind of trust ranking. It promotes intellectual laziness, which we already have enough of, and would work against what you promote.
As far as I'm concerned, we need to push tools that stimulate critical thinking and logic. Any system that purports to provide a trustworthiness value of a source is dangerous to society in the long run, for reasons given in others' posts (e.g., groupthink).
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice...
So in the Not very Dark ages not very many witches (of all ages and genders) were not burnt, and not by the church...
This is the problem with truth : Everything most people know to be true is wrong
Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
TFA is/.ed, and MirrorDot's not behaving, so this is a shot in the dark. But I'm reasonably sure we've heard something like this before, and the idea is just as bad now as it was. Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed. I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
Moreover, the WWW as he created it - being a very dumb platform - allows us to implement such a scale at a high level, using user input and so forth.There are already a ton of services that do something very like this. Hell, I can trust the top 10 things on del.icio.us more than I can trust random Google results.
I donno. I just fail to see the point of this. Yeah, people's capacity to care about facts and details appears to be limited, but I don't think this is the solution.
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
Absolutely nothing. The system is exactly a popularity contest, where truth is determined democratically, rather than by actual relationship to reality.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday September 16 2008, @09:19AM (#25024991)
And that, my friends, is the exact problem with Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term). Allow "democratic" control of content, and all content eventually converges on boobs and beer, because it is the lowest common denominator for a lot of Internet users. I need only cite digg.com for this point.
Please dont go against the groupthink on diggdot. Until then, I have no choice but to bury your comment and then reply to it flaming you.
It is a well known fact that George Bush used dozens of Cops with Tasers to bring down Richard Stallman for Smoking Legal Pot for his Melanoma. We should ban Tasers, Bush, Cops and vote Paul/Stallman for 2008 (Paul is still running, the MSM just lies about it).
Also, the moon landing is a hoax, 9/11 really happened on 9/12 but the Pepsi bottling company wanted it moved a day to sell more soda so the fat cats in Washington fucked with the calandar to make it so (this is true, there have been several other diggdot stories proving it...), and Diebold stole every election since Hoover.
Now digg my comment *up* please--if not for stating the obvious, but for its inner truth.
Im curious as to how sites that discuss UFO and/or paranormal phenomena will be rated.
How about religion: Christianity, Islam, Scientology?
How about acupuncture or homeopathy?
Or to be really contentious how about OS feature debates?
We're talking about a grey area that has little to no concrete evidence for or against. How do you judge truth in this sites except by personal opinion?
What about insiders who are leaking information about the next enron?
What about global warming?
What about academic sites that publish research linking cell phones to cancer? What if a paper is published that actually does connect them? How do you prevent it's "truthliness" from getting freeped by people with vested interests in the status quo?
What about a pharmaceutical website that claims their medication is safe despite mounting evidence it shuts down the liver?
What about a website that has recipes for making heavy grade explosives? How do you rate the truth in something that only a terrorist or a government can test?
What is the truthliness of Homestarrunner?
What about the story published in the National Enquirer about John Edwards affairs when nobody believed them?
This is another version of The Semantic Web and is just as impossible to pull of as the original. Both fail to take into account the tenancy to lie and exaggerate things to promote your world views. They operate under "as long as everybody plays by the rules this idea is perfect!"... which is a very stupid idea unless you've got a legal framework to enforce the rules.
What's really needed is a society where a majority of the individuals have a world class education. No rating system will ever work until you get that in place.
What's really needed is a society where a majority of the individuals have a world class education. No rating system will ever work until you get that in place.
What makes you think that a world-class education will cause people to set aside their own prejudices on any subject? Educated people still make bone-headed analyses whenever their own ox would be gored by the "truth".
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick [chick.com]? And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers? And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site? Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack? And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot.;-)
Your version,
Their version,
the Truth and
what actually happened.
If that works out will I see a big red pulsating "This is all bullshit" label on the Scientology or any Creationist homepage? I doubt any admin in their self-righteous mind would put something like that on their site. In the specific idiology what is true in reality is a lie in their world. So who's to decide who gets one of those and ranked by what? And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
This will NEVER work. Since everyone makes their own truths nowadays there will be just as many ranking systems as there are opinions.
It seems to me that google page rank is probably the most effective implementation of this concept that is possible. Technically it does not ensure that the content of a website is truthful or reliable, but it does make the determination that it is popular, which is all any kind of 'press here to record that this website is truthful' is ever going to do. There are very few areas where people will agree on 'truth'. Imagine this concept applied to websites that discuss creationism for example. These kind of sites will receive many votes for being both truthful and untruthful. All you are really doing is measuring the popularity of the idea that they express.
Perhaps, an attribute could be added to the 'a' tag to indicate the type of link, so that a page author can indicate a rough reason why they have linked to a page. If I were to create a link in this post to a site that speaks of the LHCs potential to destroy the planet and called the link... "Check out these silly bastards". The PageRank of that site would increase, as there is no way to tell if I am supporting or lampooning that site with my link. A simple category system (not unlike slashdots moderations options) might help this process. So that I could add a category="funny" or category="insightful" to my link tags and any analysis tools (PageRank in particular) could adjust the ranking accordingly. Would be interesting to see what the top 10 funniest sites on the web were anyway:o)
It's bad enough that we have government at every level trying to legislate away personal responsibility, now we have a respected industry leader advocating for the same sort of Orwellian control.
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
Why? It's not like it's a danger. It's just information contrary to normal belief. I may not agree with it, but I don't think that it's worthy of FPMITA prison.
Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Research shows ratings would have inverse effect (Score:5, Interesting)
... for conservatives, at least.
Consider this research, which I saw yesterday - possibly the most depressing thing I have read in terms of seeing rational politics and governance in my lifetime. Conservatives are more likely to believe something that supports their belief system after it has been refuted by experts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375_pf.html
For example, when shown a clip of George Bush in 2003 claiming Iraq had WMD's, 35% of conservatives agree. When shown the same clip plus the 2004 Duelfer report (compiled by a Bush appointee) which demonstrated that Iraq did not have WMD's, suddenly 64% of conservatives believe the weapons were there.
The same effect was seen with statements about tax revenue. In general, when shown expert testimony that contradicts preestablished beliefs, conservatives' beliefs go the other way: experts in general have negative credibility with half the country.
This was not true of liberals: they tended to be unswayed or slightly convinced by expert testimony.
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
"Which, if I am correct..."
You're aren't correct.
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we sort the uneducated from the educated?
Considering that usage of a popular term has no relationship to the level of education that person has, you're facing that problem already. You're just going to have to find less shallow ways of judging people.
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
yo wassup
i no what u mean ppl keep judgng me on how i right ppl shld quit jugdng me on hwo i right
(Gah, I hate myself for writing that)
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website to get a -1 Troll for adding words I don't use to its dictionary, thus legitimizing people who aren't just like me to make the world a place where I am not perceived as superior to them.
I often use language as a means to reaffirm my biases, and I am too good for people who express the concept of "salutations" in a different way than me. Should "wassup" find itself in the dictionary, how will we know who to look down for superficial reasons? I won't even touch upon the reasons for making the distinction in one's personal life, because if you don't share my personal bias you are an ignorant slob, and I'm better than you.
Note: Try reading the introduction to a dictionary, where they explain their methods and purpose. You'll find that they are not written to address the purpose you are trying to burden them with. So you are using the wrong tool for the job. If you need help, you can start here [merriam-webster.com]. Read especially the last section. (Their procedure is typical of a dictionary).
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm with you. In fact, I'm taking Latin classes at the moment so I can finally avoid vulgar tongues entirely.
The language of Shakespeare is too recent an invention for my tastes; it's the language of Cicero for me!
And for anyone who might find this viewpoint absurd, keep in mind that I'm not taking it too far, like those Sanskrit-only types.
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Funny)
I think their word of the past year was "w00t!"
The mating call of the homosexual barn owl?
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
Critical thinking will never be in high schools as long as we have programs like No Child Left Behind.
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be even harder to make happen than to implement a fair and accurate "truthfulness" rating.
That said, I'm opposed to the idea of any kind of trust ranking. It promotes intellectual laziness, which we already have enough of, and would work against what you promote.
As far as I'm concerned, we need to push tools that stimulate critical thinking and logic. Any system that purports to provide a trustworthiness value of a source is dangerous to society in the long run, for reasons given in others' posts (e.g., groupthink).
Parent
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd mod you +1 truthy (but I could be making this up).
Parent
This article is not true. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This article is not true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice ...
So in the Not very Dark ages not very many witches (of all ages and genders) were not burnt, and not by the church ...
This is the problem with truth : Everything most people know to be true is wrong
Parent
I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Can you just imagine all the poor people who are heavily confused about the state of affairs in Soviet Russia after reading slashdot? How were they to know that these things were untrue!?
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Waitaminit....that's almost how it should be...
Parent
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA is /.ed, and MirrorDot's not behaving, so this is a shot in the dark. But I'm reasonably sure we've heard something like this before, and the idea is just as bad now as it was. Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed. I fail to see how embedding such a scale in the protocol would help, and it's not unlikely that it would hurt the situation.
Moreover, the WWW as he created it - being a very dumb platform - allows us to implement such a scale at a high level, using user input and so forth.There are already a ton of services that do something very like this. Hell, I can trust the top 10 things on del.icio.us more than I can trust random Google results.
I donno. I just fail to see the point of this. Yeah, people's capacity to care about facts and details appears to be limited, but I don't think this is the solution.
Parent
Re:I can get you ratings readily enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
Parent
And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is to prevent any such proposed system from becoming yet another popularity contest plagued by those who want to quash unpopular ideas?
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, my friends, is the exact problem with Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term). Allow "democratic" control of content, and all content eventually converges on boobs and beer, because it is the lowest common denominator for a lot of Internet users. I need only cite digg.com for this point.
Parent
Bury (Score:5, Funny)
Please dont go against the groupthink on diggdot. Until then, I have no choice but to bury your comment and then reply to it flaming you.
It is a well known fact that George Bush used dozens of Cops with Tasers to bring down Richard Stallman for Smoking Legal Pot for his Melanoma. We should ban Tasers, Bush, Cops and vote Paul/Stallman for 2008 (Paul is still running, the MSM just lies about it).
Also, the moon landing is a hoax, 9/11 really happened on 9/12 but the Pepsi bottling company wanted it moved a day to sell more soda so the fat cats in Washington fucked with the calandar to make it so (this is true, there have been several other diggdot stories proving it...), and Diebold stole every election since Hoover.
Now digg my comment *up* please--if not for stating the obvious, but for its inner truth.
Parent
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about religion: Christianity, Islam, Scientology?
How about acupuncture or homeopathy?
Or to be really contentious how about OS feature debates?
Quite!
Parent
Re:And Then What? (Score:5, Funny)
At what point did Berners-Lee appoint themselves Rulers of the Truth?
Shortly after aquiring multiple personalities [wikipedia.org]?
Parent
What about text editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about sites that slam MySQL?
What about Vi vs Emacs?
Hell... lets be serious:
What about insiders who are leaking information about the next enron?
What about global warming?
What about academic sites that publish research linking cell phones to cancer? What if a paper is published that actually does connect them? How do you prevent it's "truthliness" from getting freeped by people with vested interests in the status quo?
What about a pharmaceutical website that claims their medication is safe despite mounting evidence it shuts down the liver?
What about a website that has recipes for making heavy grade explosives? How do you rate the truth in something that only a terrorist or a government can test?
What is the truthliness of Homestarrunner?
What about the story published in the National Enquirer about John Edwards affairs when nobody believed them?
This is another version of The Semantic Web and is just as impossible to pull of as the original. Both fail to take into account the tenancy to lie and exaggerate things to promote your world views. They operate under "as long as everybody plays by the rules this idea is perfect!"... which is a very stupid idea unless you've got a legal framework to enforce the rules.
Parent
I don't know if I believe this... (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the "goodluckwiththat" tag (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the "goodluckwiththat" tag (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
And how do you educate people without trustable knowledge ?
Parent
Re:A rating system can't overcome stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think that a world-class education will cause people to set aside their own prejudices on any subject? Educated people still make bone-headed analyses whenever their own ox would be gored by the "truth".
Parent
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see it from here: TRUTHINESS WARS!
Forget about the Usenet flame wars, the Slashdot flame wars, even the Wikipedia editing wars, people... This is the Real Deal! Years after the Truthiness Wars, the Intertubes will still have that scarred, scorched look that faintly glows in the dark due to the irradiated remains of a thousand web sites.
Decades after the commotion, survivors and veterans will trade horrible, traumatic war storie...
Remember when the Vatican webmaster was allowed to rate Jack Chick [chick.com]?
And Disney allowed to rate Warner Brothers?
And Fox News allowed to rate Barack Obama's web site?
Oh, come one, what about when Theo de Raadt was allowed to rate Linus Torvalds? And Linus counter-attack?
And... Wait for it... RMS and the FSF rating Microsoft? Now, THAT is what I call a nice truthiness battle, baby! The mother of all such battles, in fact. Thousands of web sites went down in that one with the infamous 0% truthiness rating. Ugly, my man, but it had to be done.
OK, does anybody else think this is a Bad Idea(tm), or am I the only one?
And here is the proof: don't trust anything I ever posted on Slashdot. ;-)
And what version of the truth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your version,
Their version,
the Truth and
what actually happened.
If that works out will I see a big red pulsating "This is all bullshit" label on the Scientology or any Creationist homepage? I doubt any admin in their self-righteous mind would put something like that on their site. In the specific idiology what is true in reality is a lie in their world. So who's to decide who gets one of those and ranked by what? And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
This will NEVER work. Since everyone makes their own truths nowadays there will be just as many ranking systems as there are opinions.
Slashdot getting a truth rating? (Score:5, Funny)
PageRank? (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that google page rank is probably the most effective implementation of this concept that is possible. Technically it does not ensure that the content of a website is truthful or reliable, but it does make the determination that it is popular, which is all any kind of 'press here to record that this website is truthful' is ever going to do. There are very few areas where people will agree on 'truth'. Imagine this concept applied to websites that discuss creationism for example. These kind of sites will receive many votes for being both truthful and untruthful. All you are really doing is measuring the popularity of the idea that they express.
Perhaps, an attribute could be added to the 'a' tag to indicate the type of link, so that a page author can indicate a rough reason why they have linked to a page. If I were to create a link in this post to a site that speaks of the LHCs potential to destroy the planet and called the link... "Check out these silly bastards". The PageRank of that site would increase, as there is no way to tell if I am supporting or lampooning that site with my link. A simple category system (not unlike slashdots moderations options) might help this process. So that I could add a category="funny" or category="insightful" to my link tags and any analysis tools (PageRank in particular) could adjust the ranking accordingly. Would be interesting to see what the top 10 funniest sites on the web were anyway :o)
1984 all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
trust metric (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?
Website Metadiscussion Layer (Score:4, Informative)
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:4, Informative)
PageRank is a popularity contest, not a truth gauge.
Otherwise how do you explain The Onion as the first result for "onion"
Parent
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:5, Insightful)
The onion is far more accurate than your average editorial page.
Perhaps, but it is a rather bad reference on actual onions.
Parent
Re:Fancy way of saying PageRank doesn't work... (Score:4, Insightful)
a popularity contest, not a truth gauge
The distinction is, I regret, becoming increasingly subtle.
Parent
Re:This will never work (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry Mr. Twain.
Parent
Re:Truth rate this post (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, let's truth rate (True or False answers only) the following sentence in this post:
"This sentence is false."
I'd have to give it 3 trues out of 5 possible.
Parent
Re:But truthiness is more important! (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone out there DDoS the fuck out of it while they're at it?
Why? It's not like it's a danger. It's just information contrary to normal belief. I may not agree with it, but I don't think that it's worthy of FPMITA prison.
Parent