StupidFilter Beta Release

July 25, 2008 11:58 AM

StupidFilter Beta Release
So, I'm not sure who remembers my little StupidFilter project-- the one were I decide to cure stupidity on the internet with fancy-pants algorithms, but we kind of actually did it. It's not quite perfect, but it really works. So, without further ado, here's The Press Release and The Demo.
posted by signalnine (14 comments total)

Yay!
posted by cortex at 6:42 PM on July 25, 2008

Nice! I'm glad to see "You're hitler." was classified as stupid.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:04 PM on July 25, 2008

I can has cheezburger was not classified as stupid.
posted by fnerg at 1:03 PM on July 26, 2008

But 'You're Hitler' isn't stupid. Hmmmm
posted by theichibun at 5:08 PM on July 26, 2008

Nice! I'm glad to see "You're hitler." was classified as stupid.

This was clasified as "Text is likely to be stupid."
posted by OwlBoy at 12:18 AM on July 27, 2008

This whole page is classified as "Text is likely to be stupid." :)
posted by 31d1 at 8:26 AM on July 27, 2008

Strangely, "They need to do way instain mother> who kill thier babbys. becuse these babby cant frigth back? it was on the news this mroing a mother in ar who had kill her three kids. they are taking the three babby back to new york too lady to rest my pary are with the father who lost his children ; i am truley sorry for your lots" was classified as "not likely to be stupid."
posted by Navelgazer at 4:35 PM on July 27, 2008

Keep in mind that we're *only* looking at gross syntactical structure. We're looking at doing some dictionary lookups, but that's not implemented just yet, it's tricky getting that running fast enough.
posted by signalnine at 8:48 PM on July 27, 2008

None of my tested comments* were classified as likely to be stupid. However, some comments from other people were classified as likely to be stupid. Therefore, the system works!

including this one
posted by davejay at 2:13 PM on July 28, 2008

but my forgetting to put an asterisk before my footnote, that is stupid.
posted by davejay at 2:14 PM on July 28, 2008

Snark aside, I love the idea of this, and would love to see a Greasemonkey implementation wherein MetaFilter comments received their likeilhood of stupidity rating inline with the thread. I would imagine that would crash your servers, but it couldn't be worse than Cuil, right? That, or a way to submit a comment thread to your demo to get that flagging done.

I wish I had the time to take your code and do it myself, but I do not, and only partially because i am lazy.

In the meantime, may I respectfully suggest you update your (awesome, totally functional, and speedy as hell) demo so that the result is written into the same page you submit from? Having to hit the back button each time is a bit of a drag, and negates the awesome speediness of your demo.
posted by davejay at 2:18 PM on July 28, 2008

Oh, and one more thing: how is it that you're able to set this up on a nice, simple web site with pleasant design and decent usability (my previous request notwithstanding) -- when people with tons of funding don't seem to be able to do this? Plus, there's no Flash. Obviously you're underfunded and so are forced to fall back on common sense.
posted by davejay at 2:21 PM on July 28, 2008

Once a version that returns floating-point stupidity rankings is released, someone needs to feed a wodge of text into a genetic algorithm and evolve the stupidest comment of all time.
posted by decagon at 6:51 PM on July 28, 2008

(And then once it gets really good they can try it the other way around. Maybe generate some unified field theories or something.)
posted by decagon at 6:51 PM on July 28, 2008