The net has vastly broadened the level of discourse in the world, noone can deny this. However, much of that discourse involves inane behavior, kindergarten level banter, and lots of "You suck troll!!". It's clear that since the onslaught of Eternal September back in 1993, the net has become a much dumber place. It's with this in mind that Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr started a new Open Source initiative, StupidFilter . StupidFilter promises to leverage techniques such as Beyesian filtering and rules processing techniques to allow blogs and browsers to detect stupidity in progress. We think it's pretty ironic (not to mention damned hilarious) that a few lines of code could out think your average testosterone challenged uncivil netizen. Maybe computers are smarter than we thought? Or perhaps people are just dumber than we ever imagined.
The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.
It's time to fight back.
http://stupidfilter.org/main/
