

Something has been bothering me about Data Science Central - swGooF
http://www.becomingadatascientist.com/2014/07/01/something-has-been-bothering-me-about-data-science-central/

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slocklin01
Why would anyone pay any attention to a garbage website like "data science
central" in the first place? Why should any sane person care if this empty bit
of internet flotsam puts fake widows and orphans in it? Newsflash: lots of
crummy websites fake like they're popular and fashionable.

You people do realize that mass hysteria over political correctness nonsense
is a way of driving traffic to your website, right? I mean, not that I've
taken advantage of this lemming-like behavior in modern culture or anything.

~~~
flatfilefan
[http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/)

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sp332
Is this bad? (The approach, not the contest.) I thought it was pretty well-
established that you can boost participation by posting under multiple
accounts to make it look like there's more activity. And since the point of
this was to make women feel more comfortable on the site, it seems like a net
positive.

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watwut
It definitely marks you as someone not to be trusted. And I do not think women
will continue to feel so comfortable on the site once she knows you use the
trick. After all, any women at that site can be paid/competing man posing as
women.

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webmaven
I've seen this approach used for evil (for example, fake female profiles on
dating sites), and the gender-neutral version used on social networking sites
of all sorts.

It's a hack, and not a particularly savory one. I'm not surprised it left the
OP with a bad taste.

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Houshalter
I remember reading that reddit started out with the founders posting tons of
stories under fake usernames to make the site look more popular than it really
was.

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webmaven
Yup.

A more savory version I've come across in an online game startup is saturation
bombing your daily AdWords budget within a very small window, thus ensuring
that everyone who shows up finds lots of other folks to play with, leaving
them with a good first impression of the game's popularity.

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vishalzone2002
Not too surprised. The blog is just a plain attempt to make money. Random
posts and a lot of them with huge number of ads.

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rsivapr
Have you looked into [http://www.datatau.com/](http://www.datatau.com/) ? It's
a user-curated list for topics related to data science.

Disclaimer: I started DataTau.

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chewxy
Another thing abut Data Science Central - I can't seem to unsubscribe from
their spam. They come in different forms, and I can't seem to get rid of them

