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Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by duxup on Friday May 21, 2021 @02:22PM (#27237888)
Vigilantism is scary stuff.

I was on reddit and ran across a video that the submission claimed to be of someone poisoning local pets. The video showed someone pouring something on the ground from a distance. We never see what it is.

Later we get a video where the camera person is screaming at the person they are recording. The person just walks away as the camera person follows them yelling.

I was a bit horrified that when I expressed in some skepticism I was meet with a lot of arguments like.

"Why didn't they stop to talk if they're innocent?"

"They didn't deny it."

"You know people really do this."

"You don't have to defend a dog killer you know."

People just took the text claims at face value despite the video showing nothing that it claimed, because they were upset by the claim in the text.

Apps that just have text and a photo, not even an image of a crime, people will believe it whole hog.

A during riots in Minneapolis a local social media apps and sites had rumors spread fast about drive by shootings by people on pickup trucks with assault rifles. These rumor spread several nights in a row despite it never appearing in the news and it being obvious that the previous night's rumors were 100% false.

One city council member spread the rumors of a full on Klan rally in a park with robes hoods and all... a completely absurd claim, folks bought it and spread it.

So back to the app, we have an app whose audience wants to hear this kind of information. That's a scary audience.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by agency on Friday May 21, 2021 @02:25PM (#27237940)
I mean this is the same forum that whipped itself into a frenzy trying to track down a random kid they collectively decided must have been behind the Boston marathon bombing.
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by tolbish on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:09PM (#27238528)
HN loves to sneer at reddit, but reddit (and HN) is just a microcosm of humanity. If you want to see groupthink/mobs on here, enter any thread about the benefits or drawbacks of cryptocurrencies.
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by duxup on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:10PM (#27238556)
Everyone deserves a good sneer now and then but I come to HN because people generally look closer / think about second order effects and so on.

Reddit generally not at all.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by sangnoir on Friday May 21, 2021 @07:58PM (#27241536)
> Everyone deserves a good sneer now and then but I come to HN because people generally look closer / think about second order effects and so on.

Wait until you encounter HN's incorrect hot-takes that get upvoted to top-comment in a niche field you have expertise or personal experience in - especially if it's in a non-tech field. I wouldn't bet on HNs superiority over Reddit, except for a very narrow band of fields. A comment doesn't have to be correct - it just needs to conform to audiences biases in a seemingly cogent way, right or wrong.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by generalizations on Friday May 21, 2021 @09:30PM (#27242322)
Yeah, I've seen this before. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the collective wisdom of hn.
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by tolbish on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:19PM (#27238664)
That's generally true of the large/default subreddits with no community guidelines.
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by wearywanderer on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:24PM (#27238742)
Those poor hapless cryptocurrencies, wrongfully accused of murder. I implore my fellow HN participants to please consider the feelings of cryptocurrencies before engaging in vigilante justice against them.

Seriously, maybe some of the criticism of cryptocurrencies here is over the top, but it is not even remotely comparable to what reddit has done.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by IgorPartola on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:31PM (#27238816)
Did I miss something? IIRC Boston police asked foe help finding the people who carried out the bombing and then found them with the help of the general public. The two individuals did carry out the attack, one is dead and one went to court. Was there more to this?
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by resoluteteeth on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:40PM (#27238921)
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by IgorPartola on Saturday May 22, 2021 @08:05AM (#27245713)
Well fuck. Come on Reddit!
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by shkkmo on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:39PM (#27238915)
Reddit started a media driven frenzy over this missing person that further hurt an already tramatized family: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi

As far as I am aware, crowd sourcing via social media did not assist with indentifying and catching the suspects.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by strathmeyer on Friday May 21, 2021 @09:14PM (#27242206)
Oh, how did Reddit do that? Or are you all just full of shit? Do you think there are people who don't use both sites?
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by shkkmo on Friday May 21, 2021 @10:12PM (#27242635)
Feel free to do your own research as the whole process by which this misinformation was created and then spread is pretty well documented. There are quite a few sites and journalists that bear responsibility, but reddit is where it all started.

Your tone is not appropriate to HN.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by ilikehurdles on Friday May 21, 2021 @03:38PM (#27238903)
Yes, there was. Reddit went after the wrong person.
Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by wnevets on Friday May 21, 2021 @02:30PM (#27237993)
> People just took the text claims at face value despite the video showing nothing that it claimed, because they were upset by the claim in the text.

It seems like a lot of content on reddit is like this.

Re:Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt f... by duxup on Friday May 21, 2021 @04:18PM (#27239371)
Yeah there's a large volume of sort of 'choose your own adventure / cause and add your own title to this video / pic' content.