Purging The Stupid | Hacker News Reader

Purging The Stupid

sfgate.com

18 pointsksvs9 comments

See: StupidFilter

Also, when it comes to YouTube, I think a script that simply got rid of all comments would approach 100% accuracy for stupidity since the number of worthwhile comments is so infinitesimally small.

The only time YouTube comments have ever been useful to me was when they identify a song that is played during the video (as a soundtrack to something or part of a mixtape that was posted online.) Admittedly the videos that have these songs that I tend to look for usually have less than 1000 views, so your theory of getting rid of all the comments would still be pretty accurate.

I was hoping for a eugenics article.

I hacked up a quick GreaseMonkey script a while back to do something similar when there were a few trolls at YayHooray consistently posting gay porn in every thread.

The admins eventually got a nice karma system in and the gay porn stopped immediately.

hey there, YH buddy :D

The problem with censorship is where it goes. While some comments do indeed add little value, who should be the judge of value?

If it isn't you then who is to say that the person judging isn't removing value from you to reinforce their point of view.

Almost worse if it is you, then what is to say we aren't going to create a society of echo chambers, where you can tailor the internet to read what you want or expect it to read.

I'm sure we could expect a Conservofilter. Wouldn't that be a great day for humanity when schools can install something that removes all those "unscientific" comments about Darwin on a nice wholesome YouTube post.

Comments should still remain, primarily, about freedom of expression even if most of that expression is just there to remind you of the illiteracy of the majority of the population.

Like a bayesian spam filter: your blog goes through a training period in which one manually retrains the filter with entries one considers stupid. It could work.

I thought of doing this a while back. Call it "shiningarmor" and have a knight slaying a troll, or something. Seems like there's a need for it; I remember Mike Arrington saying he had to spend an hour a day erasing troll comments on Techcrunch.

The author lumps "mean as a snake republican" (doubtlessly, opposing Obama or Universal Healthcare) with outright stupidity and unreadability? I guess some stereotypes of San Francisco culture are true.

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