

This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers - roundfounder
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/boston-data-manhunt/?cid=7304634

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zeteo
This article does little more than pointlessly recycle the tired old trope of
the "wisdom of crowds". Yes, the Boston police tried to create some sort of
ad-hoc Mechanical Turk. With what results? The relevant video came not from a
cellphone camera, but from a good old-fashioned department store surveillance
camera. There is no mention of who did the analysis that identified suspects
on that video; I suspect it was trained professionals and not the crowds.
Meanwhile, we know the Reddit threads have resulted in a few false positives
that only luckily didn't create a tragedy. I see no magical improvement in
police efficiency with all this.

Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the
front page of the NYT.

~~~
unimpressive
>Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the
front page of the NYT.

I would argue that Reddit is no longer a news site. Go compare the front page
of Reddit to the front page of Digg. You'll instantly see the difference. My
current hypothesis is that as a community becomes more insular the quality
goes down. Though obviously if there is a theme for the discussion board then
veering off topic is bad.

~~~
nwzpaperman
Reddit became just another aggregator. Flooded with legacy media content and
meme photos with a pinch of porn and a junk commenting system. All of the peer
generated content is lost in the sea of irrelevance.

~~~
rdl
Subreddits seem strongly resistant to this, but maybe that doesn't help the
un-logged-in or new user.

I read r/gundeals, r/til, and r/iama. None of those have crappy external
links. There are the obnoxious memes within comments, though.

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lifeisstillgood
The takeaway for me is if you want to murder folks, make sure you do it in a
mundane way so the hive mind does not get involved and your case just shuffles
off to an overworked homicide desk

