Participatory democracry perhaps? What if sites like these became the democracry? What if your vote on sites like these actually decided policy rather than simply informing your representatives about how you think? Then the government itself becomes an unnecessary middle man and the algorithm becomes the government.
"It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.
There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have, she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account."
I don't see why we should stop short of direct democracy? If the technology allows it, why not?
direct democracy = mob rule. if we had direct democracy in the united states, sept 12th: we would have nuked someone. if iraq had direct democracy after the american invasion, surely, a good part of the population would have been killed.
Because of the digital divide, people with easy access to the internet and the proper education to use it are also unequally represented in an e-democracy.
A voting system is extremely effective in preventing trolling here but only because PG put time into instilling the principles he wanted in the community through constant repetition, like training a dog. That required a lot of time on his part initially. Now imagine multiplying that by, say, 30 small sites that you are administering. So, I think it's not that the problem has been solved. PG may need to step in from time to time if the community 'forgets' the principles he started it with - such as when there is a big influx of new users.
Lower participation and, as a result, maybe lower advertising earnings. On the other hand, the cost of not controlling bad content could be much higher both in monetary and non-monetary terms.
Flipside, it could also mean higher advertising rates given the traffic is more qualified if the discussion doesn't degenerate into trolling behaviour.
Think about it, sites like 4chan have issues with getting advertisers BECAUSE of the extreme anonymity.
Anonymity creates a low barrier to entry, facilitating free participation. But at the expense of requiring manual moderation. I don't know how much time has been spent on troll moderation on HN. But let's say you have 100 small sites - moderation could be quite time consuming. And if the sites are too small to allow you to identify trusted users to offload the moderation to (perhaps through some application features), it is doubly problematic. However, identity verification is an easy solution, although at the expense of reducing participation by creating a higher barrier to entry.
Do you accept the argument that this will not affect the majority of applications on App Engine? I had the impression that large numbers of apps were already exceeding the existing quotas.
I do accept their argument, but only because the vast majority of 'apps' are abandoned and use <1mb per day. Fuck, probably at least half have never had code uploaded to them!
This change will affect everyone that actually uses GAE free hosting, even the ones using much less than 1gb/day. The way the free quota works, it's throttled to keep you from using it up all at once -- which means that anyone without billing turned on just took a massive hit to QOS.
The AppEngine team says they chose the quotas so 90% are free, so majority will not be affected. There are over 80,000 applications, so if even 1% of them are exceeding existing quotas, that's still 800 apps that are affected.
"That's what won't happen to most of us. Rather than filling out the form for food assistance, we will be filling out recruiters info sheets describing "a time I worked as part of a team" and rating our C++ skills on a scale of 1-10."
"It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.
There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have, she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account."
I don't see why we should stop short of direct democracy? If the technology allows it, why not?