A little scary what this implies about groups of people with axes to grind on places like wikipedia.
It's why the wikipages on hot button issues that special interests care passionately about (Scientology, Abortion, etc) are so heavily moderated.
How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
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Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#62What surprised me the most was people willing to go along with a lie. Human memory is a pretty faulty and malleable thing, but this level of confusion as was cited at one point in the article? I think it requires someone to be either consciously lying or have utter disregard to the value of what they're saying. It's one thing to repeat a lie because you didn't know the information wasn't true (though I'd consider pro…
Information that's mostly true with a few lies thrown in is very hard to verify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
Fair enough, but posting that you have a movie that never existed recorded on tape because you presumably liked it so much - that's a completely different thing. That people are willing to do this - for what? Internet points? - saddens me deeply.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#63This seems like an interesting article. However, the large advertisement on the screen covering the entire viewport with no 'close' button makes reading it a real challenge.
You need a better ad blocker.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#64A little scary what this implies about groups of people with axes to grind on places like wikipedia.
It's why the wikipages on hot button issues that special interests care passionately about (Scientology, Abortion, etc) are so heavily moderated.
But who moderates the moderators ?
In this article, the author mentioned he became an editor for street sharks to help him spread his lies.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#65I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
Can't find any fault with the argument. If he did that for fun, tons of others can do it for fan, more with malicious intent, even more for profit, even more than those from idiocy and repeating misinformation, etc.
And many do. Remember that "I rm -rf'd my production server" story recently, and how it turned out to be a lie? Remember that "school treats a kid as a terrorist because he brought a DIY clock to class" thing that after weeks of media coverage turned out to be a completely different story?
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#66I have done something less malicious, but right around the same time.
When I was in NYU's grad math program, the Wikipedia just getting going. It had a lot of articles, but not on every topic. I was studying Analysis and decided to start the article on the Hessian Matrix.
Yes, I started that article and it's been fun to watch it grow over the years. Most sections I have added are still there, as well as some phrases such as "more can be said from the point of view of Morse Theory". It really set the direction of the subsequent topics and edits.
One section in particular, there, was completely made up by me. It was ACTUALLY TRUE, but it was never (to my knowledge) stated anywhere. No one had really made a treatment of the matter. Namely:
Hessians of vector valued functions. I said they were tensors of rank 3.
There was a discussion in the talk page about it. Some people were confused and argued for a bit but since was true, the community kept it, thinking that being a true math concept it must have a source somewhere. Now it has been expanded and an actual analysis of how it can be a tensor of rank 3 has been worked out. Now this may have led to citations that will lead to research on Hessians of vector valued functions acting as tensors. All because I wrote it there.
It wasn't false, like the Colbert's lie that "Elephant population of Africa has tripled in the last six months." But it was an experiment to see what an unsourced original statement would lead to on a fairly mainstream article.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#67None of this is the author's fault. The initial lie was meant as harmless fun, the fact that so many (largely highly regarded) media properties went and spewed it out as fact later on is the real problem. I mean how many times a week do we hear about Old Big Media retweeting nonsense or publishing Onion articles? News sources these days are so programmed to chase every story that there's no room for fact checking and…
What news sources do you use? What is New Media?
I wouldn't say there's a singular answer to that question, it's a combination of multiple sources and social media driven sources. None of them are particularly good, and none of them are infallible even slightly, it's about checking.
Plus a good old fashioned bullshit filter.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#68I know this is pitched as an experiment about the internet, but I think it is an even more telling experiment about the malleability of human memory.
This was something Orwell played upon in 1984. The internet would have made Winston Smith's job infinitely easier.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. I see this more as god-tier trolling. We have no way to easily tell if this piece is a total lie or a long delayed admission of truth. I'm certainly not ever going to research this to determine if it is valid. And that is what makes the troll god-tier. The nugget of truth he alludes to is then instantly suspect for everything now. Though I may forget that the internet of made up of dogs impersonating people from…
Grandparent probably doesn't consider trolls to be "good people". Of course, with the wisdom of experience one finds that trolling is just another form of rhetoric, neither "good" nor "bad". Good people will troll us to the truth at least as often as bad people will troll us to butthurt.
I think it serves as a good. Society definitely needs to place an accurate value on information sources. Currently, there's so much information available that "bad sources" push "good sources" out by cost/quantity.
Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparent probably doesn't consider trolls to be "good people". Of course, with the wisdom of experience one finds that trolling is just another form of rhetoric, neither "good" nor "bad". Good people will troll us to the truth at least as often as bad people will troll us to butthurt.
Liars, not trolls. I mean I guess there's overlap but it's the lying I'm calling out. The author seems continually surprised and concerned that people would believe lies about history, but that's not new or surprising or even interesting. In fact that's why we each have a responsibility to tell the truth.
Everyone who communicates, lies. One who doesn't expect that, won't be able to make much sense of the world. It's not useful to draw bright lines around the category of "lies". It would be pretty awful to lie to your boyfriend about whether you had an STD, or to your kid about the existence of imaginary holiday characters. Making up shit about some forgotten TV show just ain't the same thing.
The best trolling may not be precisely lying, but it's certainly more about assuming alternate versions of reality than it is about e.g. just being rude.