A few short steps from here to the robot war

XKCD has come up with an ingenious new solution to moderating online communities. The problem, as they succinctly put it, is that

"When social communities grow past a certain point (Dunbar’s Number?), they start to suck. Be they sororities or IRC channels, there’s a point where they get big enough that nobody knows everybody anymore. The community becomes overwhelmed with noise from various small cliques and floods of obnoxious people and the signal-to-noise ratio eventually drops to near-zero — no signal, just noise. This has happened to every channel I’ve been on that started small and slowly got big."

The solution? A robot that automatically blocks any poster whose last comment wasn't completely original, initially for two seconds but that quadruples for every subsequent violation. Apparently it will take at least a decade for this to make normal conversation impossible, but will almost immediately stamp out the slew of cliches and babble that infest so many communities. The code is here, and the whole post is well worth a look.

(If it seems oddly familiar, the title of this post comes from my favourite XKCD comic, which is here.)

Comments

[PaulSweeney]

Have you seen sezwho? (www.sezwho.com)

[Seamus McCauley]

Hi Paul

More portable reputation management? The world definitely needs one such solution so they're in the right space, but my guess is that either Yahoo! will get there first with their plan to make email addresses a sort of portable ID or OpenID themselves will add something like this. Five years ago I'd have said eBay would own this space but they haven't had the sense to make eBay reputations portable and I'm now erring on the side of "if they haven't by now they never will".

It's been sort of tried before too, notably by Rapleaf who put together a sort of portable eBay reputation measure (but then got kicked off eBay).

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea. In a wired world your value is a function of the portability of your reputation. Sezwho solves a real problem. But it has to scale massively and very quickly if it's really going to own this space cos there isn't room for 20 of these things.

[Paul Sweeney]

I tend to agree with you. But google doesn't inspire with its progress in "comment-sphere", because as Umair says, community isn't in its DNA. But given that del.icio.us and tools akin to that appeal to the early users, perhaps the companies behind the bookmarking tools are ideally placed?