You Can’t Legislate Stupidity Away… But Can You Automate It Away?
November 9th, 2007
For years, we've pointed out that, as much as politicians try, you simply cannot legislate stupidity away. However, could you automate it away? Apparently that's what some programmers are working on, trying to come up with a spam filter-like system to automatically detect and quarantine "stupid" comments in forums and blog comments. As someone who spends way too much time reading the comments around here, there is some appeal in the concept of such a thing. But, the reality is that it's unlikely to work. Stupidity will no doubt route around any such filters pretty quickly. Besides, it sounds like it would really only catch the blindingly obvious stupid comments anyway, rather than the more frustrating and more common variety: which are comments from people who read what they want something to say, rather than what it actually says. What we really need is not a stupidity filter, but a comment troll filter -- or perhaps just a great big lesson in reading comprehension.
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