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.'"

Comments

Calling Hari Seldon

[Black Parrot]

Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.

Our findings prove our findings are prejudice.

[VortexCortex]

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:I propose...

[sco08y]

...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.

Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream

[francium de neobie]

Yet, there're many unwritten rules on Slashdot that have nothing to do with your comment's quality:

1. If you post near the top, you're more likely to get modded up even if your comment is only mediocre or group think. You can actually quite accurately predict a post's mod points by measuring its position on the thread and its relevance - mod are lazy.
2. Any rebuttal to your comment, even a very half-assed one, and especially the personal attack kind (!), is likely to get you, the parent poster, modded down. Happened to me many times, the mods are basically encouraging flamewars.
3. Long, original posts take a long time to get moderation points - even though it can eventually get a 5 Informative from patient mods. Long, unoriginal post get the same points very easily because the poster copied it from the article or Wikipedia. So, original insights are being discouraged from this system unless you're someone famous like Steve Woz.

Re:Clearly

[Mr. Slippery]

Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate.

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.