Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet Decide

Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by smcl on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @07:17AM (#11335665)

There was a similar situation a few years back - some local Hungarian government were running an online poll to decide the name of a new local bridge and more importantly you were able to submit your own proposal. Some internet community got wind of this and mobilised to vote the name "Stephen Colbert Bridge" until it was at the top of the standings.

Even though they never went with the name (they elected to use "Megyeri Bridge") Hungary got a bit of a PR boost when the Hungarian Ambassador appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss the issue. Sadly I cannot find a video clip, but the wikipedia description captures the moment nicely:

" On September 14, 2006, András Simonyi—the ambassador of Hungary to the United States—announced on The Colbert Report that Stephen Colbert had won the vote. Unfortunately for Colbert, Ambassador Simonyi declared that under Hungarian law, Colbert would have to be fluent in Hungarian, and would have to be deceased in order to have the bridge named for him. However, after saying the rules could most likely be bent, he invited Colbert to visit Hungary and view the construction in person and gave him a Hungarian passport and a 10,000 HUF Bill, with an approximate value of, as the ambassador put it, 'fifty dollars, fifty good US dollars'. Colbert promptly tried to bribe him with said money. "

Edit: yikes, Hungary has had a rough few years - I just checked the fx rates and 10000 forint is worth only $36 nowadays.

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by taneq on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @08:11AM (#11335862)

It's a bizarre world where an individual has more PR sway than an entire country.

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by jerf on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @09:28AM (#11336371)

Scott Adams has been musing on this theme lately: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/141428843311/social-media-is-th...

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by Falcon9 on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @01:27PM (#11338206)

I wonder if he actively realizes that the persuaders on Social Media are inevitably for sale to the highest bidder (albiet with veto power over things they may actually care about)? [I know how much it costs for Martha Stewart to send a tweet about your business... I don't love this world we live in.]

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by jerf on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @03:34PM (#11339327)

I'm reading between the lines, but I don't think he's advocating for social media becoming the government. I think he thinks he's merely observing what's already happening.

He writes a lot about Trump, but he explicitly says that he could deal with any of the current candidates becoming President. I have wondered if his logic is basically "Social Media is becoming the President no matter what so what 'meat robot' slots to the seat behind the desk in the Oval Office in matters little by comparison".

If you mean that it could in fact be worse than what we have now, you could model what we have now as still being essentially "media" driven, but with no way for anybody to break in the way social media does let some people now. Whether that's really a serious change once corporations do their second-order adjustments... dunno. I expect to still be chewing on these ideas for another few weeks.

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by soneil on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @10:56AM (#11337030)

This happened in Slovakia too, a couple of years ago. They had a public poll to name a cycle bridge over the Morava. Chuck Norris won, but they opted to call it Freedom Bridge (Cyklomost Slobody) instead.

Funnily enough, Chuck was also the fore-runner for Megyeri Bridge before Colbert got involved, too.

It's all good fun though - and good publicity. Do you think anyone would be talking about a new arctic research vessel if it wasn't for this?

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Re:Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet ... by ddorian43 on Tuesday March 22, 2016 @07:19AM (#11335677)

video: http://indavideo.hu/video/A_Stephen_Colbert_hid_sztori_vege

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