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Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse.

Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.

There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides built in (they became usable now, even small cities have decent descriptions where I live) and tiny things like that.

On the other hand, OSM-based tools are crushing commercial maps in... being a map ;)

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> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.

I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourcing datasets?

"Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea"

Thanks for the laugh.

> what's an extra field?

That is not a flag "is the crossing wheelchair accessible?".

It's user created picture or text. This can be any kind of content, abusive, regulated by law, spam, subjective for chat control "age verification" controls, copyrighted and so on.

Moderation is a hard topic. Only very small communities can do that well.

To be fair there are examples of freeform text tags in OpenStreetMap already, e.g. “description”.

Which is hard to get to, doesn't even render on some apps at all, it's easier to automatically or manually moderate as it has a more defined purpose and it's pure text (not meant for personal feelings towards the place, not meant for rating etc).

Absolutely, can be abused. But there can be thousands of reviews of a pizza place, with text, surprising languages, slang, pictures... But only one description.

The big difference is visibility and scale.

Sure, a 'description' or 'name' tag can contain something inappropriate (like a slur of defamation). If it has high impact, it'll be reverted quickly. If it has little impact, not a big deal. Many tools don't even show the 'description' tag

Pictures are a whole other level. You need to blur faces and license plates. What if someones house is photographed? How to detect inappropriate images? Should one study the laws of all countries? Even the freedom of panorama contains many differences between European countries, let alone privacy rights, ...

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