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Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds
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.'"
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
All theory is gray
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.
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?
...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.
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.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I call BS here. I don't think you got modded into oblivion for "mentioning that logic should dictate the outcome of a decision and not political motivations." Hell - I'm an extreme liberal and I agree 100% with that statement. I'm thinking it was probably something else that you said.
Show us the post that got you modded out of existence.
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.
"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
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Slashdot actually had a reasonably well-implemented user moderation system, though. If you want spectacular fail, try (for example) Feministe's rather short-lived 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.)
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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."
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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.