Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds 178
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet takes a look at how crowd-moderation can capture and reflect the prejudice of individuals. 'As more web content is crowd-sourced and crowd-moderated, are we seeing only the wisdom of crowds? No, we're also seeing their prejudice. The Internet reflects both the good and ugly in human nature. ... Any system relying on people implicitly encodes prejudices as well. In a world where one politician with a call girl is forced to resign and another is handily reelected, there is no hope for moral or intellectual consistency in crowd-sourced or moderated content.'"
Calling Hari Seldon (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:0, Interesting)
That is precisely why an my karma is in the cellar. Anyone who disagrees with the crowd anywhere, even on Slashdot, will get moderated into oblivion. I really think they ought to have a disagree option in the moderation system.
Nowhere ever, even once, has a crowd of people ever come up with anything great or outstanding. Progress in almost every human endeavor is made by people who are willing to swim against the current carrying all the dead fish that are floating downstream.
Re:Do we need consistency? (Score:3, Interesting)
Except moderation schemes are usually skewed towards hiding things. Look at slashdot: Say 10 people moderate the same post. Half of them like it, half of them hate it. So it gets -5 Troll and +5 insightful or something. It's still at 0 or 1. Nobody will see it.
Plus, people only read so many items on the average site. So say we have a news site where the highest ranked items go to the top of the front page (basically how Digg works? I think? Maybe?) Well, if 100% or 99% etc of the people like an article, it'll be at the top, and everyone will read it. But if the site has a lot of readers and a lot of articles, the things that only 50% or 75% of the readers like will still get buried too low for anyone to actually read them.
What we need to solve that problem is more filters on what type of content you want to see - but then people only see things they agree with, further reinforcing their prejudices. There's really no good system I guess.
Our findings prove our findings are prejudice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, so someone actually used crowd sourcing as a way to gather information for a study against the common wisdom of crowd sourcing -- which reveals that crowd sourcing is prejudiced?
They expect us to believe that their "wisdom" gained from "crowd" sourcing shows "'the wisdom of the crowd' is prejudiced", and theirs isn't?
Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:3, Interesting)
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
Re:I propose... (Score:5, Interesting)
...not having RTFA, that the article is bogus.
Who's with me?
Having read the article, the author was irritated that some listings on craigslist got deleted, thought that it was unfair, and spun that into speculation about how moderation through the crowd might encode some prejudices in some way that he hasn't really thought through.
So, it's not bogus so much as half-baked.
regarding the reply to my signature (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you figure non-RIAA music is better? Most anyone’s “better” is different. Fair enough, make the quality distinction that fits you without getting into label ideology. If the indie model really makes it better, let that influence quality and then make the quality distinction directly.
I say similar things about open-source.
P.S. – do you listen to really good classic popular music? That kind of stuff tends to be on the major labels just as surely as the modern mainstream stuff you’re likely decrying.
P.P.S – do you mean that non-RIAA musicians tend to focus more on the music itself, rather than nonmusic aspects? Steak versus sizzle is another hard to address “better” argument. I figure you need some of both, although I personally have developed a desire for a higher mix of ‘sizzle’ recently.
Re:Already learned... (Score:3, Interesting)
Show us the post that got you modded out of existence.
Capitalism (Score:1, Interesting)
In a privatized society, the public space is owned by individuals and corporations.
It is thus not public but private. Owned and ruled by whatever incentives and agendas those individuals and corporations have.
Said agendas are thus usually politic, religious or to make profit.
There's your free speech right there.
Me, I like state-owned and thus non-profit institutions framed in constitutions defending the right of the individual.
Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:5, Interesting)
James Madison Said It First (Score:2, Interesting)
"Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Alert to the dangers of majoritarian tyranny, the Constitution's framers inserted several anti-majority rules.
http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/politics/democracy/5496-Abhorrence-Democracy-and-Mob-Rule.html [capitalismmagazine.com]
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot actually had a reasonably well-implemented user moderation system, though. If you want spectacular fail, try (for example) Feministe's rather short-lived [feministe.us] user moderation setup, which made the site totally useless for its intended purpose of fighting oppression. (It was briefly a very good place for well-off white women to complain about how the uppity black women were whinging too much without hearing too much from them, though.)
Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, I have no idea who the poster is that you're replying to, but the moderation here is often unthinking groupthink. A majority of people here start from a common basic premise for their thinking/logic on many issues. Anyone who begins with an opposing basic premise, even though they are a logical person, will end up at a much different conclusion than the majority. Groupthink then kicks in and that person is derided as illogical and stupid because because they ended up at a conclusion that seems illogical to those who started from an opposing basic premise, and the moderation around here reflects that attitude.
Around here Christians and conservatives are stupid, irrational, etc... and ad hominen attacks against them are commonplace. Those posts are modded down sometimes, but more often than not are modded up on nothing stronger than prejudice as the common basic premise between the poster and the moderator. Logical fallacies, such as ad hominen attacks, are not good examples of rational thinking and should never be promoted as such. Yet, here they are on a regular basis if you devote the attack toward what is a minority opinion on this site..
I've also been on sites where just the opposite is true for who is seen as irrational and illogical. The secularist is modded as troll and illogical, and ad hominen attacks against them are modded up on those sites. Neither group of mods is doing a good job, and neither group of posters show tolerance for logic that has its origins in a basic premise that opposes their own.
What does it say about our society when we, as a society, are eating our own because of our differences in basic premises? How is this sustainable? How is this good for society? If this keeps on in the same direction it will end in some type of civil war as civility between opposing points of view is rapidly deteriorating. Both sides will have their own thought police. Is that really a society any of us want to live in? If you don't like that society you're the only one who can change our current direction as the only way the current direction our society is taking can change is for individuals to change. Government can't do anything about it, other than try to legislate what point of view is allowed, and I don't really think anyone wants to go there.
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Interesting)
Citation needed.
CEOs of large companies do not generally get there on merit, but on the "old boys" network. I would not surprised if randomocracy generally produced equivalent results.
Re:I propose... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't use the word bogus, but it IS essentially one man's whine about how his stuff was deleted. The last two sentences sum it up for me:
That shows our freedom of speech is better protected when bought and paid for. The web is censored and manipulated in more ways than we know.
Entitled much? Craigslist is offering a service and if you don't like how their service is run, go elsewhere. But just because the actual customers didn't like your presentation, it doesn't mean CL is a corporate fatcat out to ruin the Constitution. If you want to write about mob rule, write about slashdot, or *chan, or wikipedia, or ancient Athens. As of now, this falls under "stories a friend would tell me that I would nod and smile to and then change the subject."
Re:Clearly (Score:3, Interesting)
Top-down control is good when making decisions quickly matters more than getting them right. Battle is the classic example.
Centrally planned economies (i.e. one corporation on a national scale) always go off the rails. On the other hand, everybody acting as individuals and simply contracting to each other would be way too inefficient. You need a certain amount of centralization; not too much, not too little.
Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream (Score:3, Interesting)
But your statement makes you a troll for trying to claim that something as universal as "murder is bad" is the sole domain of one particular religious group. Actually, the "badness" of murder is kind of built into the term. So the first creator was really whoever first came up with the concept to differentiate different kinds of killing. Although it might have been a group effort, and it was certainly recreated by others.
You're religious, that's fine. You're christian, that's fine too. But the point you start making factual errors and claim ownership of a universal concept? And then get modded up for it? That's the point I have to call bullshit. So as to not ruffle your feathers too much, let me put it this way: There are the Mandarin, Indian, and Summarion words for murder. None of those peoples had any interaction with Moses or the commandments, so how did these groups of people know how to define murder?