Something has been bothering me about Data Science Central | Hacker News Reader

Something has been bothering me about Data Science Central

becomingadatascientist.com

48 pointsswGooF11 comments

Why would anyone pay any attention to a garbage website like "data science central" in the first place? Why should any sane person care if this empty bit of internet flotsam puts fake widows and orphans in it? Newsflash: lots of crummy websites fake like they're popular and fashionable.

You people do realize that mass hysteria over political correctness nonsense is a way of driving traffic to your website, right? I mean, not that I've taken advantage of this lemming-like behavior in modern culture or anything.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Is this bad? (The approach, not the contest.) I thought it was pretty well-established that you can boost participation by posting under multiple accounts to make it look like there's more activity. And since the point of this was to make women feel more comfortable on the site, it seems like a net positive.

It definitely marks you as someone not to be trusted. And I do not think women will continue to feel so comfortable on the site once she knows you use the trick. After all, any women at that site can be paid/competing man posing as women.

The only mistake was telling people they were doing it and being flippant about it.

Most people can't handle the truth as we see here where as you point out it is a net positive but some people are up in arms.

Most big companies are as bad or much worse but are not foolish enough to show behind the curtain for the lower masses to see.

I've seen this approach used for evil (for example, fake female profiles on dating sites), and the gender-neutral version used on social networking sites of all sorts.

It's a hack, and not a particularly savory one. I'm not surprised it left the OP with a bad taste.

I remember reading that reddit started out with the founders posting tons of stories under fake usernames to make the site look more popular than it really was.

Yup.

A more savory version I've come across in an online game startup is saturation bombing your daily AdWords budget within a very small window, thus ensuring that everyone who shows up finds lots of other folks to play with, leaving them with a good first impression of the game's popularity.

Not too surprised. The blog is just a plain attempt to make money. Random posts and a lot of them with huge number of ads.

Have you looked into http://www.datatau.com/ ? It's a user-curated list for topics related to data science.

Disclaimer: I started DataTau.

Another thing abut Data Science Central - I can't seem to unsubscribe from their spam. They come in different forms, and I can't seem to get rid of them

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