What is Citizen's endgame here? Do they want to be some vigilante justice group? A private army? Protection racket?
Whatever it is it probably already exists in South Africa.
Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
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Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#22How could this possibly go wrong?
Offering a monetary reward for streaming crimes would bias our perceptions of poorer communities, where individuals would most benefit from the money. A poor community is incentivized with this plan to reinforce the message that they are crime-ridden, while rich neighborhoods won't receive the same level of coverage because fewer individuals care about the payoff.
What's the phrase? "Fair and Balanced".
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#23Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 They reference each other, too. Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and…
A friend had the app and did nothing but post local incidents to a group chat on a daily basis. We told him to stop or get the boot which he did. It illustrated just how uptight this app makes people. He wound up deleting it after a few months because it made him afraid to go outside as if he was surrounded by crime when in fact nothing had changed. (This is in south-west Queens NYC)
Bad things happen on a daily basis. These apps wont stop or deter crime. The best you can do is stay alert and aware of your surroundings.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#24What is Citizen's endgame here? Do they want to be some vigilante justice group? A private army? Protection racket?
I read this somewhere and it sounds plausible to me: a private police subscription. As-a-service if you will. They would do the same things as police but only for subscribers and with better "customer service". Maybe you could also look at the same thing as: as private security + private detectives (?) scaled and commoditized via software and gigwork. It‘s a nightmarish idea, don‘t get me wrong, but I can see it.
Well if they can do anything about car break-ins and larceny in SF I think they'll get a lot of business. Bet they can
also package their service when renting a car at the airport. Almost dystopian, but I can see it.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#25I don’t like Citizen, but is it inherently a bad thing if there’s more accountability in the form of distributed filming of the government and its agents? My issue with citizen is more how it fear mongers and the general sentiment around what it’s doing. I also think it’s a terrible idea to encourage people to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream.
One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. I'm sure this doesn't rise to a level of conscious bias, but it does sometimes feel that anything that threatens their gatekeeping is going to get a lot of flak in the opinion section.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#26Someone is going to try livestreaming a fleeing suspect and end up getting riddled with bullets.
Or just stage it with some friends in masks.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#27Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 They reference each other, too. Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and…
Yes it's anxiety inducing but doesn't it just tell us the truth of who we are? If you can't handle the anxiety, nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it. In other countries, the government has cameras everywhere and use the footage to find and prosecute. Apparently America prefers to have individuals take on that role.
Is "nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it" really the standard that we want when judging whether to share our revulsion about a company or product? You're not wrong about that part, I'm just not sure what your point is.
It's no secret that social media in general stokes many of our worst impulses. Citizen strikes me as somewhat unique because it starts from such a negative place and then encourages us to feel worse. Facebook benefited from engagement resulting in political chaos but that's only one of the ways individuals can interact. Citizen can't even claim that weak defense. It's like the social media version of for-profit prisons: it claims to want safety but it benefits the most when we think we are unsafe.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#28Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 They reference each other, too. Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and…
A friend had the app and did nothing but post local incidents to a group chat on a daily basis. We told him to stop or get the boot which he did. It illustrated just how uptight this app makes people. He wound up deleting it after a few months because it made him afraid to go outside as if he was surrounded by crime when in fact nothing had changed. (This is in south-west Queens NYC) Bad things happen on a daily basi…
I'm in LIC/Astoria, I had a similar experience. My wife rolled her eyes at me for ages when I told her about "local" (literally never anywhere close to us) incidents and felt very smug when I finally punted the app forever.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#29I don’t like Citizen, but is it inherently a bad thing if there’s more accountability in the form of distributed filming of the government and its agents? My issue with citizen is more how it fear mongers and the general sentiment around what it’s doing. I also think it’s a terrible idea to encourage people to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream. One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. I'm sure…
> One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money.
While there will be some bias from being challenged, I think there's also plenty of good reasons for journalists to challenge these sorts of companies.
Journalism is a profession and brings with it a lot of ethical considerations. Teaching of journalism goes into depth on why the ethics are important, how to report on sensitive topics, and all sorts that makes journalists far better qualified to report on things.
There's absolutely a place for self-taught/hobbyist writing, but it's not journalism, and if we depend on it for the "important" or hard topics we'll lose out on the benefits that well trained journalists bring to the table.
Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read this somewhere and it sounds plausible to me: a private police subscription. As-a-service if you will. They would do the same things as police but only for subscribers and with better "customer service". Maybe you could also look at the same thing as: as private security + private detectives (?) scaled and commoditized via software and gigwork. It‘s a nightmarish idea, don‘t get me wrong, but I can see it.
Well if they can do anything about car break-ins and larceny in SF I think they'll get a lot of business. Bet they can also package their service when renting a car at the airport. Almost dystopian, but I can see it.
I don’t think that they would do anything more than security guards currently do, which because of the liability and risk of prosecution, in San Francisco, is zero.