End of leftist discussion boards
Well, technology is finally keeping up with the needs of intelligent discussion on the internet (from the Wall Street Journal);
Though frequently compelling, online message-board discussions can also be inane. Gabriel Ortiz thinks this is a problem, so he has a simple proposition: Ban stupid comments from the Web.
Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes. He has turned this idea into a project called Stupid Filter. After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.
Ortiz compared YouTube comments to literature to define “stupid”.
Here’s how the process works. Mr. Ortiz compiled a library of more than 225,000 comments gleaned from YouTube. His volunteers—he says he has 800 of them—view comments and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most stupid. (Example of a 5: “This song was sooo sick at projekt rev.”) While no single volunteer could wade through all those comments, Mr. Ortiz says he hopes to have each one in his library rated at least twice.
Once rated, these sample comments are then compared to “smart” text from a body of work on sites like Project Gutenberg, an online catalog of great world literature. Mr. Ortiz says he took snippets from classics by such authors as Jules Verne and J.D. Salinger to serve as a baseline for “the edited English language.”
Well, you can bet Democratic Underground won’t be installing it – there are no budding Jules Vernes over there.
It’s interesting that politicized writers seem to assume that anybody who disagrees with them will be filtered out.
You, of course, are either joking, or (like many before you) have deeply misunderstood the scope of the project.
Jonn wrote: Of course I was joking, for pete’s sake.
Frankly, this won’t work. There is no dependable measure of stupidity except maybe in extreme cases. In most instances, one person’s stupidity is another person’s reasonableness.
Hi, Joanne.
Frankly, you’ve missed the point or didn’t read the project page. It’s not about measuring subjective stupidity, but rather measuring objective deviation from standard written English prose.
The rationale being that if you can’t be bothered to write correctly, what you’re saying probably isn’t worth reading.