crowds – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "crowds"

Tech And COVID-19: MLB Rolls Out Remote Cheering Function In Its MLB App

from the 3-cheers dept

As we continue navigating this new world full of COVID-19, mostly alone due to the laughably inept response from our national leadership, there’s a certain humor to the ongoing push for a “return to normalcy.” What makes it so funny is how completely clear it is that “normalcy” is going to be anything but normal. Go back to work, but wear a mask and stay the fuck away from your coworkers. Get your kids back to school, but maybe not, also masks, and remote learning, and they have to eat their lunch in their classrooms. Restaurants are open, but only outside, with less people, and there will be temperature checks.

And then there are the sports. Collegiate sports are shutting down with the quickness, but the professional sports leagues are opening. The NBA is back, but only in Orlando, which is basically coronavirus ground zero. The NHL is coming back, except a ton of players are testing positive.

And then there’s baseball. Yes, Major League Baseball is back, but masks make an appearance and, most importantly, there are no crowds. If you aren’t a baseball fan, I’ll forgive you for not understanding this, but crowds are a huge deal for baseball. Part of the ambiance of the game, be it in person or on television, is that low level din of crowd noise, vendors yelling out, and the like. Not to mention the roar or boos of crowds during peak excitement. With no crowds, the soundtrack of the summer is just the lead singer with no instruments backing him or her up.

MLB’s solution to this was to pipe in crowd music. With audio files at least in part from Sony’s MLB The Show video game series, teams were encouraged to add their own flavors to the audio files and then pipe them into stadiums. This helped, of course, but how was the crowd noise supposed to artificially change based on what occurs on the field?

Turns out that MLB actually has a solution for that. And it’s awesome.

Fans will have the opportunity to boo the Houston Astros during the 2020 Major League Baseball season after all.

As Darren Rovell of Action Network shared, the league will incorporate how many fans are using its app and cheering or booing a specific team into the piped in crowd noise it will use in empty stadiums amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

New innovation from Major League Baseball will allow fans to cheer or boo in their app, ballpark staff can then match that up with the volume in the stadium. pic.twitter.com/YxqKTR7lYt

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 20, 2020

Very cool. Essentially, MLB’s app will let users note which team they’re supporting and then allow them to “cheer” or “boo” via the app. Their choices will then be reflected in the crowd audio that is piped into the stadium and heard on television broadcasts. Staff at the stadium will reflect viewer choices in near real time.

“Ballpark staff uses the ‘real-time’ fan sentiment to control/vary noise variation/levels at the ballpark,” is how the league described how teams will use the feature.

It won’t exactly be the raucous environments of Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, but it is at least a way for fans to express their loyalties while they are watching from home instead of the bleachers.

I love this sort of thing. Still, one wonders if MLB is prepared for the potential of rival fuckery. After all, it might just be possible to setup an automated system that created a bunch of accounts for a rival team and then simply choose to boo all the time, ruining the broadcast. Hopefully the league has a method to guard against that sort of thing.

But if they don’t, this is me soliciting a guerrilla hacking group so we can go screw around with White Sox crowd levels.

Filed Under: baseball, covid-19, crowd noise, crowds, fans, pandemic, simulated noises
Companies: major league baseball, mlb

Why Do People Trust Wikipedia? Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture

from the source-please dept

I’ve never really understood the debate about how trustworthy Wikipedia is compared with once-printed, more “official” encyclopedia volumes, like the old Encyclopedia Britannica. What rarely made sense to me was the constant assertions that an information system to which anyone could contribute was inherently unreliable because anyone could contribute to it. Sure, you get the occasional vandals making joke edits, but by and large the contributions by the community are from informed, interested parties. The results tend to be close to, if not on par, with traditional encyclopedias.

But if I can’t understand the comparison between Wikipedia and printed encyclopedias, I’m completely flabbergasted why anyone would be shocked to find that the public trusts Wikipedia more than their traditional news sources.

The British public trusts Wikipedia more than they do the country’s newsrooms, according to a new poll by research firm Yougov. Sixty-four percent of respondents said they trusted Wikipedia pages to tell the truth “a great deal,” or “a fair amount”—more than can be said for journalists at the Times or the Guardian, and also slightly above BBC News.

Well, no shit. That’s because, as I’ve been trying to scream at you people for the past three years, the corporate mass-media news industry sucks. More specifically, the once proud fourth branch of our government has been reduced to screaming-head opinionators formulating commentary on the basis of politicized ratings. In other words, Wikipedia and the news are in two different businesses: one is about facts and the other is about shock and spin. Argue with me all you like, you know it’s true.

But perhaps even more importantly, the general public trusts crowd-sourced Wikipedia articles more than the news because an argument is always more trust-worthy than a lecture. That’s the real difference. If you want to know how good a teacher in a school is, you gather up the best student, the worst student, the principal and the teacher and then analyze what they all say together. You don’t ask the school’s PR director. Wikipedia, even when it comes to contested or hotly-debated articles, does this extremely well, even concerning itself. The linked article above discussed a number of articles about how reliable Wikipedia is, some of which disagreed with others, and all were found on the Wikipedia page for itself.

Regardless the disputes over individual studies and their methodologies, how I found them is almost as telling as their results. I came across them because Wikipedia provided external references, allowing me to corroborate the information. This is one of the site’s great merits: the aggregation of multiple sources, correctly linked, to build a more complete picture. As the results of the Yougov poll perhaps suggest, this surely seems more reliable than getting the coverage of an event from one newspaper.

The truest answer to a question can rarely be told by a single source, which is what makes the sources section of a Wikipedia page so valuable. What is the corollary in a news broadcast? Perhaps a single expert? Maybe once in a while they’ll have two sides of a debate spend five minutes with one another? They’re not even close. The argument itself can be instructive, but that argument never happens on most news shows.

This doesn’t mean you blindly read Wiki articles without questioning them. But a properly sourced article is simply more trustworthy than a talking head telling you how to think.

Filed Under: argument, crowds, discussion, knowledge, learning, lecture, trust
Companies: wikipedia

Free Riding Isn't A Bug, It's A Feature

from the ditching-the-myth dept

Whenever we write about various business models around here that involve using free infinite goods to get people to buy some kind of scarce good, we always get some people who self-righteously exclaim that if they got content for free, they would never, ever buy those scarce goods, and somehow this disproves the model. This is similar to the common refrain that all of the “free riders” would destroy any such business model, to which I usually ask whether or not all those “free riders” who watched a BMW commercial and didn’t buy a BMW somehow destroyed BMW’s business.

In response to a similar question, concerning all of the “free riders” on Wikipedia, Tim Lee has done a fantastic job explaining why the whole concept of the “free rider” problem is a myth in most of these scenarios. In the case of Wikipedia, for example, all of those “free riders” who don’t contribute are actually what makes it worthwhile for the smaller group of contributors to take part. Those “free riders” aren’t a negative: they’re the audience. If you set up the model right, then any free rider actually becomes a part of the solution, not the problem. The more “free riders” on Wikipedia, the more people want to contribute. The more “free riders” who listen to a band, the more other people want to hear it — and the more some of those people will be willing to pay for scarce goods to associate themselves with that band. In other words, if you set up your model correctly, free riding isn’t a bug, it’s a feature that helps drive your model forward.

Filed Under: crowds, free-riding, value