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.
Thank 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
