On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 08:26:34AM +0900, Miles Bader wrote: > 2006/2/1, Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > So I consider: how can you tell that a given person is *not* employed > > by such a company? > > Well in theory you can't, of course, but in practice, I think it's > pretty hard to do a believable job without a lot of effort (humans are > pretty good at detecting the sort of subtle inconsistencies that > result from a half-assed job), and I don't know if they're really > getting paid enough to put in that much work.
Well, that could kinda work, but - when I look at free software today, I see an awful lot of half-arsed jobs being done and a lot of people making excuses for that. So I don't think it would work very often. > Perhaps more damaging is the sort of suspicion and paranoia that may > result from knowing there _could_ be astroturfers around... Which is in itself an interesting problem: are false positives or false negatives the worse result? I can't see any possible outcomes here that aren't like the spam situation - no matter what you do, you're screwed both ways as long as there are spammers. It's a little worse (or, more developed) than astroturfing though - that's just when people try to gain political capital by inventing a fake 'grassroots' base that supports them. This is the active subversion of existing communities. It's a difference in kind rather than degree - but admittedly not a very big step.
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