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Sure it matters. Let's say there's a local zoning board meeting, asking for comments on a new landfill that'll go in just a few blocks from your house. You an
by 3JPLW 8y ago
Sure it matters. Let's say there's a local zoning board meeting, asking for comments on a new landfill that'll go in just a few blocks from your house. You and your whole neighborhood put in your anonymous comments (~50), but the landfill company hires a bot network to overwhelm the site with tens or hundreds of thousands of comments. Your local board cannot possibly individually read all the comments, so they just sample from it. The comments of the folks it'll actually affect are completely lost in the noise.
- antpls 8y agoThank you for the explanation. Those are valid and understandable points. I'm however kind of worried that the comments are sampled. I'm sure there are tools out there that will find duplicates, cluster similar comments together, etc In my opinion we (as world citizen) should find a way to organize millions of comments rather than building barriers. Twitter probably already does it to some extend, it should be technologically accessible today. Trying to deny the access to bots on the palteform can't hurt, but that's a temporary patch to the real problem of opinion aggregation. Is there a complete dataset of the past comments freely downloadable? Some civic data scientist and dev may look at it to try new solution for comments aggregation Edit : so, there are also works on comments aggregation. Even a Kaggle : https://www.kaggle.com/jeffkao/proc_17_108_unique_comments_text_dupe_count https://www.kaggle.com/jeffkao/proc_17_108_unique_comments_t... and https://github.com/sajacy/fcc-ecfs-scrape https://github.com/sajacy/fcc-ecfs-scrape Immediate solution would be to restrict comments, but new methods of comment aggregation maybe used in the future