101–110 of 127 posts
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I am certain a left leaning group is doing the same thing. Think moveon.org (in a different medium). They just negate each others extreme views.
See, this is why people are stupid in this country. Obama: "I'm trying to fix healthcare" Republicans: "He's trying to kill your grandmother" Washington Post: "Obama, Republicans disagree over whether healthcare plan will mandate euthanasia"
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I'm not going to say anything about how dubious your sources are, but I will address a couple things: 1) Blogs are not inherently "news". Ergo, they should not always be put into a news feed. 2) The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonable. The reason it's OK to remove these from the Google News f…
"1) Blogs are not inherently "news". Ergo, they should not always be put into a news feed." Here is something I just found on the google news feed: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20012891-10391698.html This isn't news either, yet it's still there "The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonabl…
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/ "Jesse Norton aka Younes Abdullah, How Did Your Conference Go At RM? You Know, The One With Convicted Terrorist Omar The Goat Humping Bakri Muhammed?"
http://www.michnews.com/Alan_Caruba/ac080410.shtml "This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, to ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz."
Seriously?
What they fail to understand is that there was never a conspiracy to censor their content, it was the greater Digg community that did that because their articles are usually unprofessional, fact-challenged fantasies that nobody wants to read. They should probably have asked a conservative. It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. O…
This kind of stuff (both sides) is why politics should be kept as far as possible away from Hacker News.
Politics isn't just about elections. It's the science of influencing people. That definition doesn't exclude unethical means.
There are a lot of lies and distortion thrown around in political ads through regulated media outlets. Obviously the potential for abuse on the net is much greater, and cheaper too...
Anybody can bias what's out there. Sometimes it'll happen directly, sometime people are paid to do it. It reminds me of the propositions that get on the ballot in California. Some interests used paid signature gatherers (in some cases using criminals to do the work) to get something on the ballot, then follow up with a heavily funded misleading ad campaign.
Here's an example of even a relatively small company abusing what appeared to be posts from average people:
http://thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-d... [thedailybackground.com]
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/21/flash-second-hi... [thedailybackground.com]
http://i.gizmodo.com/5134652/belkin-employee-sheds-light-on-... [gizmodo.com]
This is slightly off topic, but why do people do things like this? I don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths to do something like this. I just don't get it. I see people around me fighting over parking spaces. I see people holding conferences on how to fight over parking spaces (that guy is muscling in!). I see people do the same for roughly every damn topic in this world, and sometimes it gets really me…
The city of San Luis Obispo (known as being the first for banning smoking in public places and one of the first to have curbside recycling) came up with 72 hour abandonment. There are no 72 hour parking signs. But go on vacation, away to visit family, carpool or use your bike instead of driving, bed in bed with the flu for days... and a car left is in violation. They mark a tire and the street with chalk and leave a little "courtesy notice" under a windshield wiper and then at three days tow. Beside the high towing fees, and a substantial impound release fee, there is also a citation for abandonment ($280). Of course the towing contractors charge a hefty per day storage fee. They (the city police and parking agency) may reduce/rename the abandonment citation considering picking up the car from the towing yard to be "no intent to abandon". Of course some strapped for cash may not be able to get a car right away, and end up losing a vehicle due to the high ransom at the towing yard. The pirates may extract a lot of money for cargo ships, but on a personal level what the City of San Luis Obispo does to people hits harder as a percentage.
Note that this practice happens even in from of ones own home, even if there is no parking shortage. Neighbors that don't get along use it as a way to harass each other, and in some places people call in complaints to tr and get parking spaces. As a college town, there are many places were units have no off-road parking, or insufficient off road parking. The city makes money on this, as do the towing contractors. They see to meet the public notice requirements without people noticing... I know of an employee who has bought dozens of vehicles at auction for the minimum bid (towing/storage fees).
There's dirty business at every level it seems.
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I am certain a left leaning group is doing the same thing. Think moveon.org (in a different medium). They just negate each others extreme views.
I don't think they cancel each other out. Digg has an extremely conservative bias. Half the stories on the front page are basically "Global Warming Is A Hoax Because Jesus Wouldn't Let That Happen"
Too bad I couldn't have caught it sometime between the swing from Liberal Hivemind to Conservative Cabal, it might have been worth reading.
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I am certain a left leaning group is doing the same thing. Think moveon.org (in a different medium). They just negate each others extreme views.
False equivalence. Because there happen to be two parties in the US does not mean there have to be two groups trying to censor Digg. Also leftists could never agree to this shit, we're not organized (pun intended).
Actually... I just realized that both sides tend to "prove" their points with lots of ad hominem. It's just that the ad hominem coming from liberals tends to be a touch better spelled; I think the smart conservatives quickly learn to keep their heads down, so only the dumb ones try to step out into the shit-storm.
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They did "stuff", but ultimately Digg's philosophy limits what they can actually do. They're all about "power to the people", and in an online voting context that leads directly to voting cliques, as inevitably as Duverger's law leads to two major parties. You can't fix the cliques without also destroying power-to-the-people. To Digg's credit, they've tried to be true to their philosophy. Unfortunately, it's not poss…
You're speaking nonsense. "Power to the people" is a completely empty PR phrase at Digg.
The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.
What they fail to understand is that there was never a conspiracy to censor their content, it was the greater Digg community that did that because their articles are usually unprofessional, fact-challenged fantasies that nobody wants to read. They should probably have asked a conservative. It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. O…
This kind of stuff (both sides) is why politics should be kept as far as possible away from Hacker News.
Tangentially, I think it would be awesome to get a data-dump of all voting records for, say, 2009, of HN.
Something that shows every story and comment (with parent/child relationship) and timestamped voting records.
Assign a random id to every account that actually voted to protect privacy and preclude any chilling effect on future votes.
That would be fun to mine.
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"1) Blogs are not inherently "news". Ergo, they should not always be put into a news feed." Here is something I just found on the google news feed: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20012891-10391698.html This isn't news either, yet it's still there "The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonabl…
You're seriously comparing a movie review and a well articulated op-ed piece about where our debt comes from to sites like this (the ones listed in the article about Google censoring 'conservative e-zines')? http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/ "Jesse Norton aka Younes Abdullah, How Did Your Conference Go At RM? You Know, The One With Convicted Terrorist Omar The Goat Humping Bakri Muhammed?" http://www.michnews.com/Alan_Caruba/a…
This was an okay article and an opinion on where our debt comes from. I was merely pointing out the blogs and opinion pieces do get into google news.
As for the links you just posted: I may not agree with any of the content, but they are also just opinions (and not much worse than the links I posted)
The reason you don't want them posted is because you don't agree with them politically, which goes against the freedom of speech.
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This. Others game social media sites to drive traffic to sites that profit them. This is the first I've heard of people doing it for political reasons though.
Why do you think so many apple article makes it to the front page? What do they get out of it?
Influencing people is power. Why do you think the diversity in ownership of U.S. broadcasters has become so eroded? There's more to it than lack of competition.