This article does little more than pointlessly recycle the tired old trope of the "wisdom of crowds". Yes, the Boston police tried to create some sort of ad-hoc Mechanical Turk. With what results? The relevant video came not from a cellphone camera, but from a good old-fashioned department store surveillance camera. There is no mention of who did the analysis that identified suspects on that video; I suspect it was trained professionals and not the crowds. Meanwhile, we know the Reddit threads have resulted in a few false positives that only luckily didn't create a tragedy. I see no magical improvement in police efficiency with all this.
Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the front page of the NYT.
I don't know about that last claim. The live news feed on reddit was very well curated, documented, sourced, and community driven for accuracy. Most developments came straight from the police scanner and people close to the scene PLUS a combined gathering of the mainstream news stories to accompany or support items. Some of it was I'm sure had flaws but a lot was pretty accurate from what I could tell.
>Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the front page of the NYT.
I would argue that Reddit is no longer a news site. Go compare the front page of Reddit to the front page of Digg. You'll instantly see the difference. My current hypothesis is that as a community becomes more insular the quality goes down. Though obviously if there is a theme for the discussion board then veering off topic is bad.
Now compare both of those to the front page of HN. My current theory is that as the community becomes more popular, the technical content goes down and the social thought-pieces and popular references go up.
Reddit became just another aggregator. Flooded with legacy media content and meme photos with a pinch of porn and a junk commenting system. All of the peer generated content is lost in the sea of irrelevance.
The front page is just a collection of the most popular submissions from the default subreddits if you're a new user or not logged in, so yeah, it will be a worse source of news because it's not intended to be a source of news. However, the news subreddits do a really good job at linking to popular news stories and providing rapid updates to "breaking" situations, e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th... The comments on submissions can provide a lot of value too, where there's value to be had.
To add to old-fashioned surveillance cameras is old fashion witness questioning. It seems that at least one witness was able to provide a description which probably filled in a lot for the who, what and when to focus on.
A BI piece claiming the "Reddit hive-mind" essentially did the lions share of work in identifying the bombers [1] rolled across my FB feed an hour ago.
I typically don't put much stock in anything that comes out of Business Insider, nor have I attempted to verify their claims. Certainly grain of salt worthy.
The FBI had already identified the suspects at that point. The practice of presenting an image - possibly of poor quality - to the public and asking for information to help apprehend the suspect is pretty old and standard police practice. Yes, Reddit makes it easier for the public to respond - but there's nothing fundamentally revolutionary here.
Which is total bolocks redit is damm lucky they dint get anyone killed as the Guardian headline says it all "Boston bombing identification attempts on social media end in farce"
I am not a "crodsourcist" or pro vigilante but I think better platforms can be built to help on a criminal investigation. To prevent false crowd revenges a kind of anonymization must be applied to the data.
The takeaway for me is if you want to murder folks, make sure you do it in a mundane way so the hive mind does not get involved and your case just shuffles off to an overworked homicide desk