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Fark Creator Slams 'the Wisdom of Crowds'
GovTechGuy writes with some harsh words from Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, speaking at a conference Tuesday in Washington, DC: "'The "wisdom of the crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb,' Curtis said. 'It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.' Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest 'garbage.' Another example Curtis pointed to is the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an 'absolute train wreck.' 'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
'It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't,' Curtis said."
Well, that is if the site works at all.
Voting is broken. Often. It breaks randomly. It is broken more often than not.
Commenting is broken. Often, and it's random. Sometimes you can comment one second, and then be utterly unable to comment the next, and you don't know until you hit "submit" and the comment just doesn't take.
These two things make the site more unreliable than a Commodore 64 BBS running off of a pair of 1541 drives. It is literally painful to use.
Now add to this censorship.
The censorship is ridiculous. People are reduced to leet-speak or "creative spacing" for words like "homosexuality" which occurs more than once in the Texas Republican Party Platform. Perfectly ordinary words are verboten. It's not just profanity that's filtered, it's ordinary English words, so much so that sometimes one can't tell *which* secret word is preventing a posting. One can spend 15 minutes rewording and still be unable to post.
Chris is not sure who is kidding and who isn't
Curtis hasn't read the Texas Republican Party Platform, a mishmash of xenophobia, self-contradiction, homophobia, and some real tinfoil-hat craziness (read the bit about RFID and GPS). If you had never known that the document itself was real, you'd assume it was parody. Poe's law.
http://static.texastribune.org/media/documents/FINAL_2010_STATE_REPUBLICAN_PARTY_PLATFORM.pdf
Go ahead, read it. I dare you. I will bet you cannot make it to page 3 without saying "Wait, what? What the FUCK is this?"
If the national GOP is influenced by the Texas GOP, which is likely - as Texas goes, so does the national GOP, the GOP is looking at a good 40 years in the wilderness.
But I've digressed. Back to Americaspeakingout.com:
The actual good trolls that can be mistaken for loons are few and far between. The real whackos can be identified because they are so darned *earnest* in their opinions - humorless regurgitations of misunderstood and broken philosophy. Reposted ad-infinitum.
The current "most active member" aka "newmoon" is a barely literate bible thumpin' copy-pasta machine. Anything more than 3 lines is copy-pasted from elsewhere, anything from creationist screeds to political nuttery with nothing so much resembling a source url. He and his compatriots, many of whom are less intelligent, are the most prolific. Per capita, the amount of bovine excrement generated by them is astounding. Do not try to debate with them. They are fractally wrong.
Like Curtis, I don't see anything good being extracted from the pile of manure that is americaspeakingout.com. It is technologically broken (the dialog boxes even accept pure html - let your mind run wild with the implications) and it is lacking in any kind of design that promotes discussion and debate. Add to this the low quality of posters, the lack of intelligent posters, and the troll accounts, and you've got ... something that needs to be hosed away.
It is an *utter failure* of a website. As I said above, a BBS from the early 1980s would run rings around it.
--
BMO
Sometimes you're not sure if the troll is a troll, or just a misguided conservative.
;-)
Well, if it helps, the two are usually the same, and conservatives are always misguided.