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Change.gov Uses Google Moderator System
GMonkeyLouie writes "The website for President-elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov, has unveiled a section called Open for Questions, which lets users submit questions and vote them up or down, in an effort to let the collaborative mind produce the questions that are the most important to the American populace (or at least the web-savvy portion). The page is powered by Google Moderator. It was unveiled yesterday, and CNet reports that when they went to post last night, '159,890 had voted on 1,986 questions from 3,255 people.'"
Too bad the censor all CHANGE.GOV suggestions related to a re-opened examination of the 9/11 Commission report
That's because 9/11 wasn't an inside job, and Obama's staff don't want to lower themselves to wading in the world of truther nutjobs.
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Asking the mob any questions about Democratic Governor Blagojevich is a quick way to get modded into oblivion.
Which reflects why decision-by-mob doesn't always make for the most informed discussion.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I voted on a few questions just to see how it worked, I saw at least 10 Blagojevich questions out of the 50 I voted on. If the wingnuts are gonna spam stupid questions they should be deleted when there are real questions out there. There were also five or so birth certificate questions. The Republicans are probably not going to have good luck winning elections anytime soon unless they realize people don't care about this bullshit right now, we care about the war and the economy.
Uhhh, I get what you're trying to say, but in this context, my response is something along the lines of "So what?"
Obama isn't asking for policy decisions and then promising to enact the ones that get the most votes. They're asking for questions, and having people rank the questions. While I'd certainly be more careful about taking advice from someone less educated, I don't see what's bad about encouraging them to ask questions.
Will certain politically charged questions get strongly upvoted? Most certainly. Does that make this exercise worthless or somehow harmful? Hardly.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You know, it's stuff like this that reminds me that 9 time out of 10, the Slashdot moderation system actually gets it right. We all know it isn't perfect (and often it is the 1 time out of 10 that is the most important) but it ussually does reward people that are trying to add to the conversation. Meta-Moderation weeds out at least some who would abuse the system. And most importantly, it doesn't actually censor (as in romove) things that are not valued by the community at large.
I think the key is that mod points are relatively rare (at least compared to most other sites). That way, when you get mod points you are more interested in bring good comments forward than you are in moving poor comments to the back. I've never understood why other sites don't use a similar system.
But stop and think how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.
I'm not sure which is worse: the stupid people who are completely ignorant, or the smart people who think they know it all and act, unknowingly, half-cocked at best.
They are undermining nothing.
The structure of the Executive Branch is spelled out in the Constitution. Nowhere does it say how the Executive Branch will interface with the people, other than the minimum rate of State of the Union addresses.
If this Executive Branch wants to use a website to poll opinions out in the open, then the dynamics of that are perfectly acceptable to our system of government.
Do you imagine that any previous administration has not given undue weight to the shouting of lobbyists and cronies?
This is massively superior to that.
Harassing the President Elect using a debunked accusation is inappropriate behavior.
The public is modding it away. Too bad for the crackpots.
While it may be technically feasible to do a true democracy. It probably isn't a good idea.
1. Public opinion can change on a whim. There is no way we can be fully knowledgeable on all laws that are going on, even keeping track of all the summary of the laws while keeping a full time job. So all we need is some activist group to play a commercial with scary music, and a guy with a deep ominous voice. Showing children being effected can change majority of public opinion, without having to give any good evidence.
2. Protection of the minority. In some way were are all a minority in one area or an other. Lets say for example there was a some populous unpopular actions happening on slashdot, with some Evil Music commercials convinces the majority of the population that we as a group are all bad. Thus create laws against all slashdot users.
3. Group intellect usually favors the strongest voices not the correct idea. The more people you put in to make decisions the more often the chance that good ideas will be left out. People are not natural leaders, it is something that needs to be worked on. If given up to nature most people will assume the person with the strongest voice is correct and their idea must be wrong because he sounds so sure about it.
4. Corruption: People will tend to vote for what is best for them, not what is best for the country.
While our system isn't perfect it really is an attempt to balance these problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why?
Why shouldn't the government use tools that work?
They government also uses tools that are build by, among others, IBM, Dell, and Apple. Their buildings use wires and pipes made by companies. The paper is made by companies. The clothes they make are made by companies.
What do you expect, the government to make /everything/ they use in-house?
I'm not sure you understand what you're trying to imply.
Representative government suffers from all those problems. Why do you think putting an imperfect human in between the people and their authority will mitigate instead of exacerbate those problems?
1) Our representatives don't even read the legislation they vote on. I don't see how the public could be much worse.
2) Same thing happens with representative government. See the War on Drugs for instance. In fact, representatives make this problem worse, they have incentive to seize on issues like this for political points.
3) Representatives also favor the loudest voices (i.e. lobbyists).
4) Corruption is an even bigger problem in representative government, since fewer people make the decisions, each of them has more power to abuse and more to gain by doing so.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!