Is Misinformation on Nextdoor Impacting Local Politics? (medium.com) 87
Was Nextdoor's impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium's tech site OneZero reports:
As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher test scores. The last of those was true — but left out the context that Christina hosts both the state's school for the deaf and its largest autism program. District advocates told me later that they had wanted to post counterarguments to the platform, but were hindered by Nextdoor's decentralized structure. Some district officers, for instance, couldn't even access the posts and discussions happening in the city of Newark, because they were only visible to other Newark residents, and they lived outside the city's borders. (The district's headquarters are actually in nearby Wilmington.) After the referendum failed, some pointed to misinformation on Nextdoor as a factor in its defeat....
A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate...
This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again.
Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks.
"It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong.
"There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."
A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate...
This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again.
Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks.
"It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong.
"There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."
Nextdoor is a local social discussion group. (Score:3)
So how much data does Nextdoor collect from it's subscribers? Is it censor ridden? And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
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So how much data does Nextdoor collect from it's subscribers?
They know my name, address, and email.
They also know that I don't like the neighborhood cats pooping in my son's sandbox.
Is it censor ridden?
Not that I can see. They allowed me to use the word "poop".
And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
They don't. Why should they?
Re:Nextdoor is a local social discussion group. (Score:4, Insightful)
So how much data does Nextdoor collect from it's subscribers?
They know my name, address, and email.
They also know that I don't like the neighborhood cats pooping in my son's sandbox.
Is it censor ridden?
Not that I can see. They allowed me to use the word "poop".
And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
They don't. Why should they?
Read the article. Problem with social media is the tragedy of the commons. IT is inevitibly taken over by the worst of the worst.
Now I must admit, it's a great and productive way to screw up people's lives. And has been doing it pretty well this past decade. Anyone who believes anything posted on those type sites is pehaps less than smart.
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My mayor posts to it. It's a good way for him to communicate with residents. It's certainly better than how the other city officials operate, which is radio silence except during the month before election. And it's infinitely better than Twitter, where people who don't live in my city can completely derail the conversation.
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They should be required to use official communication channels.
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I found that NextDoor ranged between trivial and toxic. Never useful. I canceled. I suppose your mileage might vary. And some people like to know when a neighbor sees a scary black man in a hoodie so they, too, can feel victimized by minorities. Whatever floats your boat.
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And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
They don't. Why should they?
Nonsense. Nextdoor is watched over by admins. My wife is one.
They monitor and handle anything that approaches incivility or bullying.
Nextdoor "behavior" may be more a function of the quality of admins and the neighborhoods themselves.
But Nextdoor itself is pretty decent.
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And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
They don't. Why should they?
Nonsense. Nextdoor is watched over by admins. My wife is one. They monitor and handle anything that approaches incivility or bullying. Nextdoor "behavior" may be more a function of the quality of admins and the neighborhoods themselves. But Nextdoor itself is pretty decent.
So the entire story is incorrect? The people who are claimed to have been posting misinformation did not post misinformation, but 100 percent truth? Get your wife to confirm that the story is 100 percent untrue, and damaging the good name of Nextdoor.
So anyhow - get her to confirm that the story here is 100 percent fake. This will be a real bombshell report - and your wife can confirm it.
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They get people to join by mailing postcards in the USPS mail asking victims/neighbors to sign up for their neighborhood forum group. I throw them away as just more junk mail. But then I am not on any social media, so have no reason to be on Nextdoor.
I signed up and then filtered all their email into the trash. I don't get the postcards anymore either.
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So how much data does Nextdoor collect from its subscribers? Is it censor ridden? And how do they discourage the uppity members of the neighborhood from ganging up on others?
I can still post there even though they know I'm a Republican, so it's not censored. Some national politics creeps in, but fundamentally it's a neighborhood social connector and comment board. It's where you go to ask for recommendations on dentists, plumbers, handymen, and repair garages. I even used it to find a chimney sweep, and got a really good one.
It's for crowdsourcing the identity of the snake you found under the barbecue, or for asking which hiking trails are less muddy after it snows. There is a
Re: Nextdoor is a local social discussion group. (Score:1)
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Or did you just post that you're a Republican and that you hoped Trump would win the election?
The last wouldn't provoke any violation of NextDoor's user agreement. The rest, I d
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I'm talking about the distinction between Nextdoor and FaceTwit. On Nextdoor, most politics reflects the values and lifestyles of each neighborhood, so you don't have the problem of being attacked by someone swoooping in from the national level.
Nextdoor is a wasteland... (Score:5, Informative)
When I first started using Nextdoor, years ago, it was a decent place. Local neighbors doing neighborly things.
Then about 2 years ago, as it became popular, it became a cesspool of Karen issues. Put a couch on a corner for a neighbor? You're turning the neighborhood into a ghetto. Call the place a ghetto? Neighbors coming down on you. Ring doorbells pushed that over the edge. Soon everyone used it for "crime" searching; posting videos of "suspicious people."
Before long people convinced themselves that our local parks weren't safe as one lady had her purse stolen one day. Now everyone thinks our little town, with virtually no crime, is a cesspool of crime.
Last year I began to see a new trend. These folks would jump on, fire up some political attack on people. If folks enjoyed the attack, they would leave the posts up. If the community didn't like it, they would remove the posts. In essence what they were able to do was to prime the community on these issues, gauge support, and create division.
Nextdoor has somehow made it under the radar, but for me, I'm now convinced that it is as bad, if not worse, than Facebook. What Facebook did to our country, Nextdoor has done to my little town.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
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It's just another technology that pays its users off in attention. This is the golden-age of attention-seeking, if you can call an age that caters to self-righteous, self-serving social deviants "golden".
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This is the golden age of communication and among the first mainstream uses of communication are attention-seeking, deception, etc. Was I really the only kid who made prank phone calls?
I wouldn't say communication is bad, though, or at least it's not really any worse than the people doing the communicating. And I think that happens to apply very well to young Sloppy and his prank phone calls. I could have also easily written prank letters instead, but phones are so much less effort. And now everyone is in t
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It's not the communication that's the problem. It's the operant conditioning mechanisms built into social media which distort the kinds of communication people do.
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Don't know. Got to admit that it never occurred to me growing up. I expect that if it HAD occurred to me, someone would have recognized my voice sooner or later, and my father would have tanned my hide....
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I don't know about Nextdoor. But this stuff has been going on since long before Al Gore invented the Internet. They were called bridge clubs or quilting bees. People would get together for some sort of communal activity. One or two busybodies would attempt to spread shit about neighbors they didn't like. Most people would see through the attempt and ignore them. The few that went along were labeled gullible fools and generally discredited by the rest of the community.
The Internet has amplified this effect.
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Does Nextdoor display the Trust Score next to your name? If not, the impact of these lists is not proportional to the social media megaphone.
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Does Nextdoor display the Trust Score
That is tracked across multiple web sites. And is available for an extra fee.
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So you have to go to a third party and through a paywall? Definitely doesn't have the same reach as the social media algorithms that pry your eyelids open and insert the most inflammatory... I mean addictive... I mean engaging content directly to your retina.
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Facebook had a pseudoscience category [reuters.com] you could use to target people. Somehow I think the Qanon people are probably getting a lot of ads for gold.
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emselves that our local parks weren't safe as one lady had her purse stolen one day. Now everyone thinks our little town, with virtually no crime
You're not making your case very convincingly here. Why are people stealing purses? I am sure you have less crime than Compton or San Francisco, but it doesn't sound like "virtually no crime."
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GP told a story about one purse being stolen, now you've turned it into multiple purses. It's a textbook example of the amplifying power of social media on rumor. People think crime has increased because people literally like you are spreading deceptive information.
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Purse stealing never happens just once.
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When I first started using Nextdoor, years ago, it was a decent place. Local neighbors doing neighborly things.
Then about 2 years ago, as it became popular, it became a cesspool of Karen issues.
Textbook tragedy of the commons, an open area that is destroyed by the worst people taking it over.
People can effectually ruin other people's lives via that crap. Wait until the accusations of sexual misconduct start.
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People can effectually ruin other people's lives via that crap. Wait until the accusations of sexual misconduct start.
In the 80's I remember accusations (from church members) of satanism because a teacher somewhere in the district played D&D. People really wanted her to lose her job because of that, and we watched a cringey movie at church that I think depicted a LARPing group accidentally? murdering one of their players, this was supposed to represent the role playing/satanism threat. I was too young to understand whatever shenanigans played out at the school board level from all that.
Then there was the stories of c
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People can effectually ruin other people's lives via that crap. Wait until the accusations of sexual misconduct start.
All kinds of stupid, and now it's all evolved, and amplified on places like Facebook and Nextdoor. That's all a sick joke.
Sexual misconduct is not a joke. Accusing a teacher of messing with a student is serious, and should be investigated.
"Stranger Danger meets Safety Culture. A nasty mess that ends up with social paralysis.
This is why Social media needs a lot of adjustment. Everything has become amped up. Conspiracy prone people end up in a state of freeze (note a number of Qanon people seeking psychiatric help as they end up not believing anything. And it's not just far right wing, I see the algorithms on facebook trying to pull me one way or the other. My lady friend going QAnon, and some others going into a weird liberal spiral. I've
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Then about 2 years ago, as it became popular, it became a cesspool of Karen issues. Put a couch on a corner for a neighbor? You're turning the neighborhood into a ghetto. Call the place a ghetto? Neighbors coming down on you. Ring doorbells pushed that over the edge. Soon everyone used it for "crime" searching; posting videos of "suspicious people."
You need to move out of California.
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Re: Nextdoor is a wasteland... (Score:1)
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Nextdoor is a hot mess but around here it's a hot mess on both sides of the equation.
Crime has definitely spiked around here, whether it's a headline-grabbing armed carjacking in a neighborhood where jaywalking was the biggest crime 2 years ago, or whether it's a major uptick in nuisance crimes -- cars rifled, garages rifles, catalytic converters cut out or package thefts.
So you get these Ring videos posted of these events. About half the posts are pretty reactionary, chiding the mayor and council. If I h
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I completely agree. The plurality of posts I see on ND are on some of the most inane topics I could conceive of. "Does anyone have the personal contact info for a police officer? I want to talk to them about how to deal with the violence in the coming months.", "Suspicious person walking down the street at 2 AM this morning!", "Where can I find information on how to get vaccinated?", "Why do trains have to keep honking their horns at the crossings? They are scaring my dogs!"
ND is good for one thing and that
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I guess when it comes to children some people are more equal than others.
Re: The real problem (Score:1)
Do you mean they could care less, or that they could not care less?
The former implies you want them to care less.
There are MANY problems (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to let childless people vote on school funding, stop making them provide school funding.
Oh, but you want to spread the "joy" of funding to everyone in the community? Then everyone has the right to be involved in determining that funding.
In general, school referendums start with the premise that they would like to have X. But, while they're at it, Q, R, S, T, U, W, Y, and Z would be nice, too. Oh, and we can toss in P, too, since it didn't last time.
If the referendum fails, it is brought back during the next available election. And the next. And the next.
Going forward, it is going to be even harder to pass them. Over the last few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in building referendums passed to increase available classroom space, as enrollment steadily drops.
Locally, they pushed and pushed and pushed some more to build a brand new high school to meet the anticipated rapid growth in enrollment, despite a 3% drop in elementary enrollment. The school was built in time for that 3% smaller group to reach middle school, while elementary enrollment continued to drop. The result is TWO high schools operating at 50% capacity.
Toss in the reality that COVID closed everything, and the schools claimed they could maintain the same level of teaching without all those modernized facilities we paid for. Some of which are still being built, spending referendum money while no one is in the buildings.
Of course, they really can't maintain it the previous quality of learning, because they don't know how to do virtual learning.
Re: There are MANY problems (Score:3)
That's fine by me, so long as when those children grow up, the tax money the government takes from them is ring-fenced so that those same child free who voted against education don't benefit in any way from it in their old age.
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My school district keeps taking more money while at the same time giving worse results as time goes on. Tell me why I should keep rewarding them for failure?
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Yes lets not fix ideas that are currently failing. Just give up and go somewhere else! We need to redo the education system. In the US, an average of 15k per student is spent on public K-12. To what end? Take 10 students and give each a voucher for 15k. Let 10 families spend that on one teacher for 10 students. Thats 150k per year in pay for the teacher. What does a teacher make now typically? I bet its a lot less.Thats because of administration, buildings, pensions, etc. We don't need those costs - its all
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The alternative is worse. Private schools only help the elite, and yet the people who whine about the elites the most are the ones sending their kids to private schools. So you end up with a populace who is less educated. Then they'll complain "how come our jobs are going to countries with better schools?"
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Private schools only help the elite
You probably should to talk to the poor people who take advantage of existing voucher programs to get their kids out of public schools into those "private schools for the elite". The ones that use 2/3rds as much money to give kids a better outcome.
Many are trying to expand to give more poor people the opportunity to get out of the cesspool of public school, but keep running into road blocks put up by politicians tied to the public schools, like denying them access to schools that were closed, or changing th
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Re: The real problem (Score:1)
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If we keep letting childless people vote on school funding...
If you say that people without kids shouldn’t vote on schools would you also say that:
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Is public school really an "objectively good thing" when a large swath of teachers are actually trained activists teaching children anti-science (men can be women), racist (non-white people don't have any agency in their lives so they require white saviors), and anti-national (america is bad, Lincoln didn't march with BLM, tear it all down) beliefs?
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The idea that people vote on an objectively good thing like public school funding is ridiculous.
School funding is not "objectively good". Student performance in public schools is only weakly correlated with spending. If you include charters and private schools in the data, then student performance is negatively correlated with spending.
Since 1960, inflation-adjusted per-student school funding has gone up 300%. Most of that money was used to expand administration and bureaucracy.
The last thing the public schools need is more money without accountability.
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The idea that people vote on an objectively good thing like public school funding is ridiculous.
School funding is not "objectively good". Student performance in public schools is only weakly correlated with spending.
You're conflating funding and the amount of funding. The idea of funding public schools as a whole is an objectively good one (which is what the GP said). Now, the amount of funding needed for effective implementation (what you described) is up for debate.
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You're conflating funding and the amount of funding.
No I'm not. The vote was NOT about whether schools should be funded. It was about whether funding should be increased.
It is a pedantic difference anyway. Should the schools receive $1? Sure, whatever. Should they receive enough to actually open and operate? Now you are talking about an "increase".
The idea of funding public schools as a whole is an objectively good one
No it isn't. Some jurisdictions use vouchers to fund private schools. It may be your subjective opinion that public schools are better, but that is not an objective fact.
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The idea that people vote on an objectively good thing like public school funding is ridiculous.
You're conflating funding and the amount of funding.
No I'm not. The vote was NOT about whether schools should be funded. It was about whether funding should be increased.
As you can see, the original statement (which you left out, but I added back) simply referred to funding and that was what I was commenting on. The vote may have been about an increase specifically, but that's not actually what the statement said. Turns out, we're arguing about different things...
The idea of funding public schools as a whole is an objectively good one
No it isn't. Some jurisdictions use vouchers to fund private schools. It may be your subjective opinion that public schools are better, but that is not an objective fact.
Now you're conflating "good" with "better" and/or "different". Preferring to spend public money on private schooling doesn't make the idea of funding public schools a bad idea. A related point is you're still us
Re: The real problem (Score:1)
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The idea of funding public education may be a good idea. Public schools not so much. They are NOT the same thing. We should take a lesson from those crazy libertarians in Europe and use vouchers or a similar system.
Perhaps, but non-public schools aren't automatically better. One could also argue that money spent on other options could instead be spent to improve public schools and those teachers at the other options could teach in public schools, both to the benefit of everyone rather than just those that can pay more. That said, there will always be a place for private schools for those parents that want their children to have non-mainstream and/or specialized educations, like schools following religious doctrine, e
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People complain that the average voter is an idiot, and then turn around and refuse to fund public education, and somehow they don't see the connection. I honestly don't understand the anti-public-school hatred that has grown up in the last couple of decades. There's misinformation (teaching our kids to be liberal and gay), and apathy (they won't get better so I'll just put my snowflake in a private school), closet racism (the sort of students they have will only encourage crime), etc.
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It comes from having gone to those terrible public schools and deciding that we wanted better for our children instead of the lowest common denominator.
Vouchers should be available for any family that wants to place the child in private school. You live in the city, you pay rent/mortgage then you are paying into the school fund. Why should you be forced to support public school while also paying for private schooling? It amounts to having to pay twice. Hence, everyone should be offered a voucher and get to
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So give up on public education as a failed 200 year old experiment? No possibility of ever fixing it, leave it only for poor kids? Not the American way in my view.
Re: The real problem (Score:2)
We spend a tremendous amount of money to wind up in the middle academically. Decades of listening to the teachers unions and their politicians isnâ(TM)t working, and they should be ignored for a few decades to see what we can pull off
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The whole point of the voucher is so poor children aren't abandoned to public school. Every student, regardless of income, would get a voucher that would cover the education cost. Instead of being forced to go to the public school in your neighborhood, you could have private schools doing everything they could to attract students.
I'm also pretty sure resource allocation could be made more efficient in this way. At the moment, administration costs are absolutely insane and they have no incentive to use the r
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So how do you improve public schools? Bail on them totally? Vouchers are unlikely to ever be widespread. The same people pissed at ever paying a single dollar in taxes for schools will also be pissed about paying a single dollar for a school voucher.
If this becomes common enough, then all public schools then become private schools and you're back in the same boat; not enough money from the government to pay for schools, and you end up with specialized rich people private schools versus poor people governme
Re: The real problem (Score:1)
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The real issue is that there are a lot of childless people who could care less about public school funding. The idea that people vote on an objectively good thing like public school funding is ridiculous. If wee keep letting childless people vote on school funding, were gonna end up with a nation of stupid people who went to garbage schools (which is what we have now).
So you think people should not have a say in how they are taxed and how the taxes are spent?
Irony of The Web (Score:1)
The web was intended to give everyone a "voice". Publishing for the common man. They even used words like community and democratization for the masses.
Apparently, no one considered the risk of giving drooling morons their voice via the web's various printing presses. Worse, they seem to have failed to consider how VASTLY outnumbered they are by drooling morons.
While others are taking up the fight against ignorance on these platforms and the platforms themselves, I am embracing the existence of these platfor
Re: Irony of The Web (Score:3)
Since you believe this has no effect on your government or product availability, it seems you're one of them.
Re:Irony of The Web (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, no one considered the risk of giving drooling morons their voice via the web's various printing presses.
It's not that, though. There's a reason social media is the threat and not news groups or chat rooms or any of the older ways of using the web to speak. The problem isn't people being given a voice: the problem is the way the platforms pick which voices to amplify.
Social media has been explicitly designed to exploit human psychology with the goal of getting people to "engage" more. The problem is that it turns out the best way to get people to "engage" more is with disinformation and campaigns designed to make them angry. (Obligatory xkcd cartoon: someone is wrong on the Internet [xkcd.com].)
What happens is that the algorithms look for posts that are causing "engagement" and then spread them to other people it thinks are likely to "engage" with them. They create profiles to ensure that posts likely to cause "engagement" with one group are shown to that group but not another. You end up creating an algorithmic echo chamber that just continually amplifies the extreme voices.
The problem was never giving drooling morons a place to speak, the problem was with ensuring that their voices were the only voices heard because their voices "drive engagement."
Since I do not participate in any such platforms, except the Slashdot cesspool, I can easily avoid dealing with these drooling mouth-breathers.
Except you can't avoid dealing with the people they put in power, which was kind of the point of the article and recent elections.
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I don't think it's just that social media gives a soapbox to pre-existing blockheads, although that happens. I think it makes people worse, or at least appeals to the worst in people: the conformist; the attention-seeker; the bandwagon jumper; the self-righteous tub thumper.
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Nextwhat? (Score:1)
| sed "s/Nextdoor/$( grep -i --perl '[a-z]{3-10}' /dev/random )/"
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Unclear if apartments are included. Maybe, maybe not.
Just the ticket. (Score:2)
Everything against us is now misinformation. Everyone against us; a nasty name. If what we want doesn't happen, we must censor. Our old tools of manufacturing consent are no longer viable. By no means should people be able to form their own opinions. What we say is true and right, while anyone opposed is automatically wrong.
Class Action (Score:3, Insightful)
Nextdoor is probably isolated from liability due to EULA and TOS agreements, but I doubt that individual posters are isolated. Nextdoor has a "real name" policy with at least a minor level of verification, so most posters should be identifiable.
Is this a realistic suggestion? Probably not. But... I think the real solution to most of the issues with social media is to find a way to hold people accountable for the (mis)information that they post. If there were real penalties for online defamation, social media would be less of a cesspool and a lot more useful.
Re: Class Action (Score:2)
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I think the real solution to most of the issues with social media is to find a way to hold people accountable for the (mis)information that they post. If there were real penalties for online defamation, social media would be less of a cesspool and a lot more useful.
You might be able to try that in other countries, but the First Amendment prevents that in the US.
Besides censorship, the only way to combat lies is with the truth. If you see someone lying all the time, you can follow up their posts with a link to a page where you document all of the falsehoods they told. Then other people can decide for themselves whether they should believe that person.
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I think the real solution to most of the issues with social media is to find a way to hold people accountable for the (mis)information that they post. If there were real penalties for online defamation, social media would be less of a cesspool and a lot more useful.
You might be able to try that in other countries, but the First Amendment prevents that in the US.
The First Amendment [cornell.edu] prevents the government from preventing you from speaking. It doesn't absolve you of the responsibility [cornell.edu] for what happens as a result of your speech. The First Amendment also does not apply to private citizens or companies from preventing you from speaking, it only applies to the government (specifically "Congress").
Now is it practical to start using defamation laws to clamp down on social media? Unknown, I am not a lawyer. I don't however, think our constitution prevents it. The classic
Betteridge (Score:3, Insightful)
Betteridge ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) is very busy lately.
A difference in opinion is not misinformation (Score:1)
What all the wailing and hand wringing about misinformation and needing context has done is encourage people t
Stop trying to make censorship happen (Score:2)
Every time some rubes blather on about misinformation and disinformation, the CIA and NSA exchange high five's for their propaganda about propaganda working.
Re: (Score:1)