StupidFilter :: Main / FAQ
A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it's amusing.
Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.So what do you plan to filter?The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.How do you rate stupidity?Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid," -- based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity.
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So They are blocking freedom of speech now? and will probably make good money doing it too.. You know the thugs that got paid to sit in front of voting booths in the deep south that kept blacks from voting got paid pretty well too. Screw the constitution, this is F-ing America, Money and Power are more important than our founding father's out of date "ideas" on freedom. Good thing this thing is only in Beta mode.. it might filter posts like this someday.
I don't think putting a filter on a website is the same thing as blocking free speech -- even if the filter has arbitrary rules.
Any blogger could, if he or she wanted, delete all comments that have an odd number of words, or all comments that don't earn a certain number of reuptation points from the readers, or all comments that aren't written in iambic pentameter. Such a blogger would earn a reuptation of being closed-minded or obsessive, but it wouldn't be a Frist Amendment issue unless Congress were somehow involved.
If the entire internet enforced a StupidFilter, or somehow it affected anyone's right to vote, I'd agree it would be unethical.