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Mob-Sourcing — the Prejudice of Crowds

Posted by Soulskill on from the familiar-territory dept.

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.'"

3 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Our findings prove our findings are prejudice. by VortexCortex · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  2. Re:I propose... by sco08y · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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.

  3. Re:Dead Fish always float only downstream by francium+de+neobie · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.