Danonymous passes along this month-old story that nevertheless we really enjoy. The article headline boast of the end of online stupidity, and the subheading says, “Finally, software developers are building a filter that blocks unintelligible comments.” Among other nuggets: The stupid-filter team is trying to accommodate this behavior with a variety of rules of thumb. For instance, Ortiz, who studied linguistics as an undergrad, recently noticed a pattern in the way some writers use letter repetition. The clueless tend to repeat consonants: “This video is amazinggggg!!!” By comparison, says Ortiz, “when you repeat a vowel, you’re being sarcastic — ‘Yeaaaaaah.’ We’ll be using several different methods to try to mediate this.”
We’re very curious how this would apply to RandBall, and we’d like to get our hands on it immediately.

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