Has Japan Today's moderation gotten even worse?

[Hijinx]

What a bunch of wankoffs. I've got to get a T-shirt printed up: Japan Today's Moderators Are Fuckwit Retards.

Basically, the allowable comments have become so bland that all that's allowed is: That's tragic. That's great. That's good. That's bad.

[Russell]

Now there is a great place on the web where the moderators allow you more freedom.

It's called FG, I seem to remember.

Posting your gems on Japan Today is like Doug Stanhope preaching in front of an evangelical congregation...

[Taro Toporific]

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What a bunch of wankoffs...Japan Today's Moderators Are Fuckwit Retards.

The new(ish) owner, GPlus Media, is realizing the liabilities of brain-diseased commentards of Japan Today far outweigh the click-bait value. Sooner or later the need for moderation of Japan Today will cause it to go the way of GaijinPot (another GPlus Media property).

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[Coligny]

Sooo... it could in fact get worse...

[Russell]

OK, let's first start with the article in JT.

Kidnap suspect said he threatened to kill girl unless she got into his car

More details emerged on Monday in the kidnapping of an 11-year-old girl who disappeared while on her way home from school last Monday in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture.

Police found the girl, Sakura Moriyama, on Saturday night in the home of Takeshi Fujiwara, 49, in Okayama, about eight kilometers from where she was last seen.

On Monday morning, Fujiwara, who is a freelance illustrator, was sent to prosecutors. Police quoted him as saying that he followed the girl home in his silver car on many occasions in May and early June, TV Asahi reported. Sakura’s mother had spotted Fujiwara’s car and contacted police. However, she was only able to provide four digits from his number plate. At that time, she bought her daughter a cell phone with a GPS tracking system.

Fujiwara was quoted by police as saying that he approached Sakura a few hundred meters from her home on July 14, threatened her with a knife and ordered her to get in his car. He told her he would kill her if she didn’t obey him, police said. Along the way, Fujiwara said he threw the girl’s cell phone away.

Acting on information from a local resident about Fujiwara’s car, police visited his home on Saturday night at around 10:20 p.m. They knocked on the door but there was no answer, so they broke a window and entered, TV Asahi reported.

Police said they found Fujiwara and Sakura in a room with no windows. Sakura was lying on a futon in her pajamas watching TV. They asked the girl if she was Sakura Moriyama and she said yes.

Police said the house was renovated last December and some windows were removed. The room where Sakura was found had also been soundproofed, leading police to suspect that Fujiwara may have been planning the crime for some time.

Fujiwara told police that whenever he went out to buy groceries and other items, he locked Sakura in the room.

So far, he has given no statement about his motivation, other than to say he liked Sakura and wanted to be with her, police said.

Now some comments from readers and the moderator...

Freak. What a big man he is to kidnap a little girl. Castrate the mongrel and then we'll see how much of a man he is.

Readers, please refrain from posting grisly suggestions for the suspect's punishment. It lowers the level of discussion and makes you look like savages.

However, she was only able to provide four digits from his number plate.

... hang on a moment, there are only 4 digits (defined as numbers 0 to 9) on a number plate. In other words, all she was missing was the hiragana character, and she had all the numbers.

If the cops couldn't find the car with an 80% match on the number plate, plus car type and colour then they DEFINITELY did not follow up this lead until AFTER the girl was kidnapped.

Readers, please do not turn this discussion into an anti-police rant. They did their job.

Ahum...

It's almost funny...

[yanpa]

Readers, please do not turn this discussion into an anti-Japan Today rant. The moderators are doing their job.

[wagyl]

I was trying to find reports of a psychology experiment from a few years ago looking at the effects of these web 2.0 style comments sections on people's reactions to news stories -- I seem to remember that the result was that vox pop comments like these, whether positive (surprisingly) or negative, seem to make the reader lose confidence in the veracity of the original article, so the best thing you can do is never read the comments sections...

but...

online search results being what they are, any hope of finding the original study or a report on it using all likely keywords have been swamped by the Zeitgeist of the manipulation of FB newsfeeds experiment.

We are slowly crushing our civilisation and body of knowledge under masses of ephemeral scurf. And me posting here isn't helping!


Although, looking at this from another perspective, the wholesale harvesting of big data by our mutual spying organisations must be facing a similar situation: how do you sift through the noise?

[Coligny]

Readers, please do not turn this discussion into an anti-Japan Today rant. The moderators are doing their job.

Yea, so does my Johnson...

(in true Japan Today fashion, this comment would totally woooooosh over the moderation team)

[GargoyleTS]

WARNING: Threadjacking ahead

Wagyl that's pretty much the point of every techie out there opposed to NSA data collection...by grabbing everything you may as well be grabbing nothing. The military intelligence communities have known for decades that there is such a thing as too much information. Heck, this is why torture is considered generally an unreliable information gathering method, you cannot confirm the story with more torture they will begin to tell you anything you want just to make you stop.

And today an article i read said its worse than previously addressed, there is an Executive Order the NSA has been using to intercept even more data on Americans and others. Not gonna go into those particulars (look up EO 12333 if you want to) but it just more evidence the NSA has no idea what it is doing anymore. They believe far too much in those magic electronic boxes and the people who program them. There is a point at which there is too much data to sift through and they are getting there faster than anyone on the planet. Soon they are going to start seeing that, if they have no already (and they kind of have with the Boston Marathon). All that data and no idea they have the evidence they need until after something happens and they go back in and search with the relevant terms. You cannot search for what you do not expect to find. Creativity trumps programmed responses.

With Google, its harder but we see this sooner precisely because of Google's PageRank algorithms, search indexing, results clustering, and the power behind the Search Suggestions. Its already scaling your results upwards based on your IP address, search history if logged in, search history of other people in your IP block range, geolocation area, etc. On one hand we need all that stuff to come close to finding what we are looking for, but the sheer amount of stuff being created and indexed daily makes even those AI's begin to fail and this is literally Google's primary job. (some would argue Advertising is, but they get those eyes via search, search is primary to that. Kill search and eyes go away)

Also i could not find that article you asked about, but i swear I have read the same one.

[Russell]

After I read Japan Today's moderation policy, it all started to make sense.

IMAGES NOT ALLOWED
[...]

• Nipples visible on women - not allowed, not even a little bit of nipple showing
• Nipples through see-through clothing - not allowed

[...]

Not allowed:


Not allowed:

IMAGES ACCEPTABLE

• National Geographic Pics of naked women - acceptable
• Nipples standing up under non-see through clothing - acceptable
• Shirtless men - acceptable
• Nude painting - acceptable

Allowed:


Allowed:


Allowed:


Allowed:


Not that I care.

But yeah, I got myself a new set of moral standards.

But how about these?

[Coligny]

WARNING: Threadjacking ahead

Wagyl that's pretty much the point of every techie out there opposed to NSA data collection...by grabbing everything you may as well be grabbing nothing. The military intelligence communities have known for decades that there is such a thing as too much information. Heck, this is why torture is considered generally an unreliable information gathering method, you cannot confirm the story with more torture they will begin to tell you anything you want just to make you stop.

And today an article i read said its worse than previously addressed, there is an Executive Order the NSA has been using to intercept even more data on Americans and others. Not gonna go into those particulars (look up EO 12333 if you want to) but it just more evidence the NSA has no idea what it is doing anymore. They believe far too much in those magic electronic boxes and the people who program them. There is a point at which there is too much data to sift through and they are getting there faster than anyone on the planet. Soon they are going to start seeing that, if they have no already (and they kind of have with the Boston Marathon). All that data and no idea they have the evidence they need until after something happens and they go back in and search with the relevant terms. You cannot search for what you do not expect to find. Creativity trumps programmed responses.

With Google, its harder but we see this sooner precisely because of Google's PageRank algorithms, search indexing, results clustering, and the power behind the Search Suggestions. Its already scaling your results upwards based on your IP address, search history if logged in, search history of other people in your IP block range, geolocation area, etc. On one hand we need all that stuff to come close to finding what we are looking for, but the sheer amount of stuff being created and indexed daily makes even those AI's begin to fail and this is literally Google's primary job. (some would argue Advertising is, but they get those eyes via search, search is primary to that. Kill search and eyes go away)

Also i could not find that article you asked about, but i swear I have read the same one.

Too much data is worthless when you are trying to be proactive or do you job as intel service. But for reactive/revenge justification/blackmail...


The parallel with google don't really work. They do many sources to many queries all automated, while at the same time caring only about shoveling ads.
No mater how many sources the NSA deals, the queries are much less. To the point where even a stupid keyword index would work.

Look at MH17, no intel method would predict or prevent that crash. Meanwhile a full recording of all coms in Crimea would quite quickly tell the whole story. Even by hand... Just select everything from 1h before the crash to the next day at most, then comms to official buildings or military freq, depends on the number of translators available...

[GargoyleTS]

That's my point though Coligny, its only useful after the fact, but these data collectors are trying to sell it to us as useful before the fact.

Its the "pizza joint review" syndrome...

When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA’s turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

“He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy,” says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. “Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops.”

Use the wrong keywords and you tie together a lot of people with no actual ties, just a location in common such as a pizza place. Use too tight a keyword set and you rick missing important ties altogether. And that is why too much information is a bad thing, the less information you have, the more relevant it actually is to what you are looking for. Digging into the lives of suspected criminals leads to this relevant information. Its work, real work, and honestly yes, it takes enormous amounts of resources to do it. There are no shortcuts to quality, relevant information.

And the Google parallel is just with the searches for information, the AI presort, the rankings, etc all are the same thing, its Google's programmers and AI sifting the data before you ever run a query against it, meaning that you only see some results. its bad at natural language queries, its bad at targeted keyword queries cause you cannot change the prefiltering yourself.