I’ve been playing with the site and from my perspective there are two problems. One is that there’s a lot of chaff. The other is that there doesn’t seem to be enough activity yet.
If there were a lot of activity, I wouldn’t necessarily mind that there are “experts” I don’t respect; it would still be extremely useful as a microcosm of the world’s beliefs. I do want to know which people the public considers to be “experts.” That’s a useful service in itself.
Censorship? Not in a political sense, of course. But there are privately owned institutions which have an interest in permitting a diversity of views. Universities, for instance. This is a site whose usefulness depends on it having no governing ideology. Blocking “unreliable” sources isn’t really censorship, but it makes the site less good at what it purports to do.
Stuff that I think is bad, and that I would say “reasonable” people agree is bad—celebrities as experts, Deepak Chopra, mentalists, and so on. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem for the site. If people really get their information from those sources, then I want to know that.
I’ve been playing with the site and from my perspective there are two problems. One is that there’s a lot of chaff. The other is that there doesn’t seem to be enough activity yet.
If there were a lot of activity, I wouldn’t necessarily mind that there are “experts” I don’t respect; it would still be extremely useful as a microcosm of the world’s beliefs. I do want to know which people the public considers to be “experts.” That’s a useful service in itself.
Censorship? Not in a political sense, of course. But there are privately owned institutions which have an interest in permitting a diversity of views. Universities, for instance. This is a site whose usefulness depends on it having no governing ideology. Blocking “unreliable” sources isn’t really censorship, but it makes the site less good at what it purports to do.
Thanks for the feedback.
Do you mean chaff as in “stuff that I personally don’t care about” or chaff as in “stuff that anyone would agree is bad”?
Yes, the site is still in the bootstrapping phase. Having said that, the site needs to have a better way of displaying recent activity.
Stuff that I think is bad, and that I would say “reasonable” people agree is bad—celebrities as experts, Deepak Chopra, mentalists, and so on. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem for the site. If people really get their information from those sources, then I want to know that.