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New Project To End Stupidity Online
mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."
You AOL whores
"the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people"
First, BWAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Second, it's not 1978 anymore.
... too bad it'll never be able to detect irony. As a sarcastic person, I rely on savage mockery to let my hatred of idiocy show.
OMG U CN'T BLOCK M3!!!!!!!1111 I R SMARTER THAN U GHEYFAGS
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
And you didn't link the actual website in the post. It's http://stupidfilter.org
Go ahead, slashdot me. I dare ya.
Skip the ad-laden overloaded blogodreck site and go directly to StupidFilter. The concept is straightforward - they're training a naive Bayesian classifier, like a spam filter, on a set of text excerpts rated by humans. You can look at random samples from the training set for amusement.
Wikipedia already has some 'bots that do somewhat similar things, looking for totally bogus edits and reverting them. Yahoo's "commercial intent" filter also does something like that, to separate commercial and non-commercial sites. We considered something like that for SiteTruth, where we need to distinguish non-commercial sites so we don't rate them by business criteria.
This approach to filtering will probably need domain-dependent filters. A political site, a social site, a sports site, and a game site all need different training sets. I'd go for a two-stage classifier, one that divided sites into about ten to twenty major categories, and then a stupidity filter trained for each of those categories.
Applying such a filter at blog posting time should be interesting.
And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up. - Tom Lehrer.
I bailed on kuro5hin.org a couple of years ago. Basically, it had become popular enough and let people vote on enough things (what got published to what pages, etc), that it seemed that the teaming masses of idiots were running the place. And basically they were.
/. may suck, mostly the crap sinks to the bottom, and good responses float to the top. Especially if you change your modifiers so that responses marked mostly "Funny" are given -2 in your personal filter.
As much as some of the editors here are idiots. As much as they fail to edit. As much as they abuse their editorship (quips in the article, changing article text), they are also answerable to someone. And I think that's probably a good and important thing.
And as much as the mod system here at