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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article.
>I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article. What news site is this? For general news sites, I've found them to be of very low quality. I can't remember the last time I gained anything from them.
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True, but maybe there could be some sort of democratic consensus system to establish the questions (one which by design avoids the superficial circularity).
Ask questions that a 5th grader could answer. The level does not hove too be that high for it to be effective. Or... just ask science questions: "Is planet Earth flat?".
Great, now how about extending this to voting rights?
My dream of having people answer 5 simple questions to be allowed to get a voting card would come true.
Example of questions: name three neighbour countries, who is the current president, is France in Europe or Asia, what was the last world war,...
I understand that this will unfairly remove people who are illiterate, or had a difficult childhood, or are simply dumb but they are expected to make a choice which will impact the whole country. If they do not know anything about this country and the world it is in then sorry, they are not in a poisition to choose.
Next in line : voting at elections. My dream of having people answer 5 simple questions to be allowed to get a voting card would come true. Example of questions: name three neighbour countries, who is the current president, is France in Europe or Asia, what was the last world war,... I understand that this will unfairly remove people who are illiterate, or had a difficult childhood, or are simply dumb but they are ex…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article. What news site is this? For general news sites, I've found them to be of very low quality. I can't remember the last time I gained anything from them.
I'd consider HN to be a news source, I typically check the comments on articles first. I'd say I've found this to be true.
If you're in the US, as an exercise, look up the news site of your local newspaper, and read the comments there. They're often of higher quality than the larger state/national news sites, and even then they're mostly crap.
This reminds me of a literary test to vote. In this case it's: "Here's our news story. Answer some questions to be sure you understand OUR point of view, the words and ideas WE want you to acquiesce, in order to express your so-called opinion." Ungood.
Would you really want illiterate voters, though?
Many of the tests were so subjective they could simply fail anyone they wanted to. Especially certain groups who had just recently gained the power to vote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article. What news site is this? For general news sites, I've found them to be of very low quality. I can't remember the last time I gained anything from them.
I'd consider HN to be a news source, I typically check the comments on articles first. I'd say I've found this to be true.
Most news sources however have three primary functions: Identify, Write, and Publish news.
Commenting in HN is key to its existence; Commenting in news sources just happens to be a thing available.
Saying that comments works in HN is like saying comments work on reddit; it's trivially true, assuming the site is in any way functional/popular. But that doesn't mean comments are useful on NYT; take away comments and there really wouldn't be much lost from its primary goals.
Next in line : voting at elections. My dream of having people answer 5 simple questions to be allowed to get a voting card would come true. Example of questions: name three neighbour countries, who is the current president, is France in Europe or Asia, what was the last world war,... I understand that this will unfairly remove people who are illiterate, or had a difficult childhood, or are simply dumb but they are ex…
Unfortunately, in the US, there's a pretty ugly historical precedent for this practice, and it doesn't leave much faith in people's ability to actually write the questions fairly.
This reminds me of a literary test to vote. In this case it's: "Here's our news story. Answer some questions to be sure you understand OUR point of view, the words and ideas WE want you to acquiesce, in order to express your so-called opinion." Ungood.
(i) does not apply; regardless of whether you intend to argue for or against a point made in the article, you're responsible for knowing the same things about what the publishers think they said. Furthermore, even oarsman:regatta-style test bias is of negligible relevance because (ii) also does not apply; as we can see from the 2016 election results, enough people "disenfranchised" by NYT/WP/etc. policies were able to communicate effectively in other Internet venues to produce a catastrophic outcome for the old gatekeepers.
Most of the Internet comments that produced 2016 were either written by folks who'd easily pass this sort of test, or on venues that won't add this sort of test in the future; I wouldn't worry about the impact of this on dissent. If you want to fight against anything a specific media organization does, fight against selective reporting/censorship [1]; but it's not a big deal, the Internet has demonstrated itself up to the challenge of routing around it.
1: If you have a signal with 0s and 1s, and a filter that lets only the 1s through, what is the information content of the original signal? The filtered signal? Incidentally, this is also a major problem in science today.