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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you have a company that just launched and you're scared to read the HN comments about it, I know the feeling. Ping me, and I'll read them for you and pass the nice ones and the useful ones along.

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If there's going to be a human being in the loop reading the comments anyway, why not take it one step farther: Community management as a service.

I know of companies that pay salaries to full-time community managers. If you can't justify dedicating a person to it full-time, or don't have the expertise in house, why not contract it out?

An interesting idea for a service, could call it filterhatemail.com

This idea is stupid and you should feel stupid!*

* Not necessarily true, who filters for the filterers?

If you think I would pass dumb comments along, don't ask me to read comments for your company.

I agree that this is the worst startup idea ever.

At least it subscribes to the "Do things that don't scale" mantra. Can you imagine trying to run that sort of operation but for the sake of argument instead of HN comments, YouTube comments.

On that note I'm surprised nobody's using the YouTube API to do some Akismet-like auto-filtering already.

From http://stupidfilter.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Status:

[For StupidFilter, w]e've gathered a fairly large (225K+ comments) database of comments, primarily from Youtube, that ever-inspiring font of stupidity. We've implemented a web-based comment ranking system to seed our stupidity corpus and that's proceeding nicely.

Apparently it's now in beta...

This kind of makes me happy, that this exists.

This must be the saddest AI ever, though. Or at least the most pessimistic about humanity, being trained on YouTube comments...

Is it? Maybe not just as a hatemail filter, but someone who actually collates responses, tries to get the reason for criticism without getting into arguments, and tries to extract actionable ideas from overall internet response could be an interesting offer. Sounds almost like it could be uservoice.com's premium offer.

I agree - doesn't scale, but it's far from a bad idea. I've done it for someone who takes reviews very personally. I abstracted the useful criticism and didn't make mention of the petty stuff.

They had that in a Southpark episode; it didn't end well for the filtering kid.

Writers sometimes utilise literary agents (or friends) for a similar filtering role.

Keep the most hateful stuff out, provide useful / insightful criticism and commentary.

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