#5. Develop Anti-Troll Software

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Imagine a world where you get in a heated argument in a hallway, but before even one sentence can get fully out of your mouth, a robot voice pipes up and tells you to cool it. Well, what sounds like really stupid science-fiction in real life is entirely possible online. Of all the futuristic movies to turn out to be cruelly accurate, who would have thought it’d be Demolition Man?

I’m talking about programs like:

StupidFilter:

This highly experimental piece of software is in beta and will some day be able to recognize comment stupidity the moment it’s posted. They have a demo on their site you can play with.

You plug this code into your comment section and it’s like a strap of tape over the mouth of every teenager who can’t type a sentence without including the word “fail.”

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Robot9000:

This is a program invented by Randall Monroe, the XKCD webcomic guy that requires every post to be unique. If someone types “First!”, no other post can ever consist of just that.

This sounds pointless to anybody who’s never been in a chat room or message board before, but the rest of us know better. Mindless repetition of jokes (or “memes”Log in to see images! is one of the primary tools of bored trolls who want to fill a thread with noise to drown out the signal. For once, many will find themselves using keys other than Ctrl-V.

Audio Preview:

Linguists speculate that no single body of written communication in the history of human language has ever been as collectively very special and horrible as the comments under YouTube videos. After the aforementioned Randall Monroe suggested a feature to force users to hear their comment read aloud before they can post it, YouTube implemented that very thing (though only on an optional basis). Many a YouTuber has sat in dismayed silence after realizing that “lol wut”, when spoken aloud, did not sound as clever a they had first believed.

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Real-Time Voice Censor:

Now we’re in the realm of the real Demolition Man-type solutions. Want to know how bad Microsoft wants to control the trolls on Xbox Live? They’ve patented a real-time voice censoring program. Yeah. You curse into your headset and it bleeps it in real time. How does it know the difference between “The male reproductive organ crows at midnight” and “My male reproductive organ grows at midnight”? With technology. Don’t question it.

Of course, widespread use of this stuff will just kick off the same “DRM vs. pirates” arms race we see any time they try to control human behavior with software. The humans always win.

Also, the technology has to get a whole lot smarter before we can even try. Playing with the StupidFilter demo I linked earlier taught me that it doesn’t find any stupidity in the sentence, “lol, wut your mom farts lolcats.”

There are better ways. For instance, you can…