Just caught O’Reilley complaining about this on the top of his show.
Apparently he came down pretty hard on the Georgia segregated prom incident (see the pit thread on that for more.) So he had a poll “would you let your kids attend a racially segregated prom?” It was something like 65% no for awhile, but then suddenly it was skewed radically towards “yes”. Apparently, according to O’Reilley, the poll was invaded by members of Stormfront who purposefully voted numerous times to alter the results. He claims to know it’s Stormfront because he quoted some stuff about it from their boards. (Which I won’t link to because of SDMB policy, and please don’t go there, I only mention them by name because O’Reilley mentioned them by name.)
What the hell is the world coming to when white supremacists launch an actual invasion on an internet poll to alter the results?
(In the Pit so that you can use the words “fuck” and “Nazis” in sequence.)
I hope and pray that Bill does something to piss off the Slashdot crowd. He’d beg for something as tame as a poll hijacking. Plus I could root for the cyberkiddies with a clear conscience.
I’d love to see this happen regularly, though – take whatever slanted poll O’Reilly flogs and skew it to the anti-O’Reilly result. I don’t care if the question is “should people kick small puppies?”, it’d be worth it to see what Bill says when 90% respond with “yes.”
Did he learn nothing from the People Magazine “50 Most Beautiful People” online poll, where Hank The Angry Drunken Dwarf got a few hundred thousand more votes than anyone else?
Good to know that the white nationalists are spending their time skewing meaningless internet polls instead of doing something actually dangerous. I always wondered how stupid you had to be to waste hours voting over and over in one of these things just so people with no critical thinking skills would assume your position is more popular than it really is. Now I know: you have to be neo-Nazi stupid.
Premiere site for hard-core technogeeks. Self-described as “news for nerds, stuff that matters.”
Famous for the “slashdot effect” – where server hosting a news item linked to from Slashdot’s front page is brought to its knees from millions of cubicle monkeys clicking on it at once (The SDMB servers were bloodied but unbowed by the Slashdot effect when the “What if someone else had written LOTR” thread was picked up over there).
Also the home of hackers and hacker wannabes. My personal favorite Slashdot moment: when a story about the RIAA trying to hack into file-sharer’s computers made Slashdot, the first comment read simply (IIRC): “So that’s the way it’s going to be. OK, fine. Game on.”
Definitely not the place for intelligent discourse, though. Unless hot grits on Natalie Portman and references to site co-founder CowboyNeal’s sexual orientation counts as intelligent discourse.
You noticed that too! Very hard to follow any thread with all the witty ‘Anonymous Coward’ postings. It’s pretty much a site for people in love with themselves and their postings.
Oh, Oh, Oh, present company excepted, of course!
On a site note, I see the Grapist has been banned…that was quick.
To be fair, slashdot has an effective community moderation system. This means that low quality posts quickly get rated “-1: Troll” and disappear. Since slashdot allows you to set what level you want to view comments at, you can fairly easily choose to see it all unfiltered, or only the best posts highlighted.
Go to their site at www.freerepublic.com and click on any article. There will be a search panel at the top of the screen. Search the phrase “freep this poll” and see how many hits come back.
Didn’t the Freepers claimed 40,000 people showed up for their pro-war rally in Los Angeles, and it was later revealed they got that ultra-inflated number only by counting all the attendees of the Los Angeles Marathon being held that same day (their “rally” was along the race route)?
