ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me.
Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the channel is full of new folks coming in and playing with the bot. This is unavoidable and expected for these first few days, and ROBOT9000 is actually controlling the noise pretty well. Still, #xkcd-signal is a social channel — if you just want to play games with the moderator/concept, please use #moderator-sandbox. Thanks!
#xkcd has had about 250 chatters these days. Large communities suck. This problem is hard to solve, but we’ve come up with a fun attack on it — enforced originality (in a very narrow sense). My friend zigdon and I have put together an auto-moderation system in an experimental channel, #xkcd-signal, and it seems to work well, so we invite you all to take part.
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.
There are a couple of standard ways to deal with this, and each one has problems. Here’s an outline of the major approaches (skip down if you just want to read about ROBOT9000):
- Strict entry requirements: This is the secret club/sorority approach. You can vet every new person before they’re allowed to speak. This sucks. It reminds me of Feynman’s comment on resigning the National Academy of Sciences — he said that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in. The problems are apparent during sorority rush week on college campuses. Not only is the question of who does the vetting (and how) difficult, but the drama reaches horrifying levels as bitter counter-cliques rise up and do battle.
- Moderators: This is the approach IRC channels and forums usually take. You designate a few ‘good’ people who can deal with noise as it happens, by muting, kicking, banning, or editing content as need be. There are a couple problems here — the circle of moderators has to grow with the community. It eventually becomes fairly large, with complicated dynamics of its own, and the process of choosing moderators leads to sorority/NSF-esque drama and general obnoxiousness. I don’t like the elitism that inevitably develops, and prefer more egalitarian systems.
- Running peer-moderation: When it’s possible, this is a good approach. It’s used to great effect on comment threads, with Slashdot pioneering the whole thing and sites like reddit stripping it down to an effective core. But it doesn’t work very well for live time-dependent things like IRC channels.
- Splinter communities: This has happened on most IRC channels I’ve been on — small invite-only side channels sprout up with particular focuses. Often, the older core members of the community go off to create their own high-signal channel, which is generally kept quiet. But this is limited — it lacks the open mixing of the internet that often makes online communities work.
I was trying to decide what made a channel consistently enjoyable. A common factor in my favorite hangouts seemed to be a focus on original and unpredictable content on each line. It didn’t necessarily need to be useful, just interesting. I started trying to think of ways to encourage this.
And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.
There are a few obvious questions/objections, and I think each of them has been answered by experiment:
Q: Can’t you just tack a random set of letters on the end to ensure your line is unique (or misspell things, add in gibberish, etc)?
A: Of course. The moderator has plenty of holes if you’re acting in bad faith. But if you’re doing that, why are you in the channel at all? Folks who persist in doing this anyway earn (like any spammers) a prompt manual ban.
Q: Won’t it get harder and harder to chat as lines get “used up”?
A: You underestimate the number of possible sentences. We’ve been working off two years (2 million) lines of logs, and it’s not very hard at all — I expect the channel will be able to run for at least a decade before it becomes a problem, and probably long past that.
Q: What about common parts of conversation, like “yeah” and the like?
A: Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. In some cases, they can be done without entirely, and in others, you’re just forced to elaborate a little bit on what you’re agreeing with and why.
I talked it over with zigdon, a Perl guru, and he coded it up. We called the project ROBOT9000 (the most generic, unoriginal name for a bot that we could think of). Then we started a sister channel to #xkcd and put the bot in it. #xkcd-signal has been running for the last couple weeks (using the last two years of #xkcd logs) with about 60 reasonably active chatters, and it’s working beautifully — good, solid chat between relative strangers, with very little noise. (We’ll see how it handles the influx of people as we announce the experiment to the wider net.)
In zig’s implementation, the moderator bot mutes (-v) chatters for a period after every violation. The mute time starts at two seconds and quadruples with each subsequent violation, so you have five or six tries to get the hang of it. Your mute-time decays by half every six hours (we’re still tweaking the parameters). When looking for matches, the bot ignores punctuation, case, and nicks.
The big problem we ran into, actually, was meta-discussion overwhelming the channel. Every new person wanted to speculate about the rules and their effect, and every violation was followed by a long postmortem. At first, we had a scoreboard showing who was the best at talking without violation, but this quickly turned into a competition, destroying actual chat. When we took down the scoreboard and banished meta-discussion of the channel to #meta-discussion, everything worked out nicely. (And, of course, for discussion of the concept of #meta-discussion people had to go to #meta-meta-discussion, and for chat about how silly that whole idea was, we created #meta-meta-meta-discussion …)
You’re welcome to come hang out with us. The moderator bot is running in #xkcd-signal on Foonetic (irc.foonetic.net or irc.xkcd.com). But again, it’s a social channel; take discussion of the concept to #meta-discussion.
If you’d like to run this bot in your own channel, zig has published an initial version of the code here:
http://media.peeron.com/tmp/ROBOT9000.html (Perl bot, SQL skeleton)
January 14th, 2008 at 4:21 am
YOU SHOULD REALLY CALL IT #XKCD-ZIGNAL! BECAUSE YOU’RE AN ADORABLE TEAM
January 14th, 2008 at 4:29 am
I can’t express how brilliant this is. I wish this could be applied to non-electronic communications/conversations/lectures/publications. I may have to learn to use IRC.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:58 am
This is very interesting - one wonders if it should be applied to comments…
Would it work in a group devoted to a particular topic, though, instead of just general chat?
January 14th, 2008 at 5:07 am
To expand slightly on my previous comment about how this might come into trouble with topic-specific chat…
If you had a chat about “Canadian Law”, wouldn’t there be major precedent-setting cases that would continually be brought up, as they would be relevant to many discussions? Or sections of the Canadian Charter being quoted?
In the case of topic specific chat, it seems like there would be a sort of “standard toolbox” of things that would be totally relevant in many circumstances; but talking about things within this “toolbox” would get harder and harder.
I suppose you could designate sentences and specific elements within this “toolbox” as safe - but now you’re back at your original problem (who determines what is allowed? Groups and Counter-Groups clawing at each other, stating that something should or should not be allowed into the “toolbox”)
January 14th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Lol.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Nice idea…!
Have you seen the stupidfilter project? Inspired by the same frustration, aims to rid the world of stupid comments on forums and blogs!
http://stupidfilter.org/
..hmm…seems to be down… I was really hoping it was for real… :(
January 14th, 2008 at 6:09 am
With all due respect, ROBOT2000 is a much more generic and unoriginal name for a bot than ROBOT9000. Of course it’s possible that I’m just showing my age.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:10 am
I would love to see this applied to 4chan.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:13 am
This is a fascinating post. I am really interested in methods of increasing the signal to noise ratio without losing the positives of variability and mixing of ideas. If you’re generally interested in the topic as well, you may want to check out the “ephemeral interest groups” implemented at Bellcore (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=143457.143465&coll=portal&dl=ACM).
January 14th, 2008 at 7:06 am
If it works good for two year’s log, you can just continue - not scan the whole archive, but only last two years. So repeating of meaningfull stuff will never be a problem. And a channel can stand one “lol” every 2 years…
January 14th, 2008 at 7:13 am
[...] xkcd sagt: When social communities grow past a certain point, they start to suck. [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 7:48 am
XKCD\’s amazing solution to chat noise | Deliggit.com…
blag.xkcd.com have a great post called xkcd » Blog Archive » ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Att……
January 14th, 2008 at 7:53 am
genius, freaking genius! i’m there!
January 14th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Thought I should point out that Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical average limit on your direct social connections, not the sub-networks in it.
The biggest problem here is that sub-groups exist even in relatively small IRC communities, due to various factors. Time of day that a user regularly visits is the most predominate sub-group predictor in communities with less than 500 total individuals (this comes out to around 170 individuals on-line at any given time). With more than 500 individuals, at-least in the groups where I managed to collect the data, geography was a better predictor.
/Totally studied IRC social dynamics for my high-school Advanced Sociology class.
//Personally read over 15 million lines of chat logs to classify the sub-group relationships.
///57% of the studied communities had an average public “u wanna cyber?” rate higher than 1 per day.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Love the idea. Would love it even more if I didn’t see the moderation messages. The channel description says “Use /ignore for less status-change noise”, but then I’m told “IGNORE Unknown command”. I’m using Opera.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:03 am
[...] — ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Your mom jokes are still a problem. If someone manages to successfully say something, then adding “your mom” into it would likely be successful as well. Of course, this would force the creation of “original” “your mom” jokes, but “your mom” jokes are more noisy than signaltastic, even when they are original.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:21 am
You should name the bot “Anna”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boten_Anna
January 14th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This is pretty fascinating. For a case study, look at the subforum subcultures of the Somethingawful Forums, FYAD and BYOB in particular.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Now as a clickable URI: irc://irc.xkcd.com/xkcd-signal
January 14th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I still think there’s a problem. I think a lot of culture, and nerd culture in particular is based on repetition. Yes, tropes get old and dated (”there are no girls on the internet”, “hugahlugah”) but what this will do is stifle new tropes.
Look, if I want meaningful, thoughtful discussion I’ve got a campus full of fellow professors to talk with about damn-near anything. I come to the intarwobs for something other than port and walnuts in the sitting room, and I don’t think I’m alone.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am
John, speaking as someone with experience in both #xkcd and #xkcd-port-walnuts, I can assure you that the atmosphere in the latter is neither prim nor academic, most of the time. I’m able to keep up a pretty constant stream of dick jokes with only minor repercussions, mostly xkcd’s hurt feelings and diminishing professional respect.
Tropes, cliches, “memes”, and other shared cultural touchpoints don’t develop from char-for-char repetition, anyway. It’s precisely that attitude towards jokes–Just Repeat Them, Corpsefucker–that makes jokey communities so hard to take. As you can see from the good parts of YTMND and 4chan and SA and anything else you care to name, the reason these jokes stay alive is that funny people make an effort to put a new twist on them every time they’re retold. And ROBOT9000 doesn’t ban you for puns.
Maybe it should, though.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I’ve found that splinter communities work well - extremely high signal to noise ratio. The problem becomes attracting new members when all they see initially is the high-noise public-facing community.
Otherwise, creating a splinter community actually give cohesion to both - essentially splitting each into groups that fall below dunbar’s number, which on the internet is much smaller than in real life (there are far fewer distinguishing characteristics when all you know of a person is the text they produce).
Oh and the meta discussion eventually dies down once the ‘Oooh Shiny’ wears off.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:21 am
[...] xkcd creator Randall Munroe discusses a common problem with IRC channels in a recent blog post ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat. “When social communities grow past a certain point (Dunbar’s Number?), they start to [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 11:30 am
“But [peer-moderation] doesn?t work very well for live time-dependent things like IRC channels.”
If I gather correctly, Zed Shaw’s Utu project has this exact aim.
http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
January 14th, 2008 at 11:55 am
[...] Unique. Or Else. Randall Munroe, of XKCD fame, just posted a very interesting blag entry (sic) about an interesting way to ensure that IRC discussion remain unique and thoughtful. The idea [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
[...] Monroe of webcomic XKCD came up with a great idea for reducing the noise in the XKCD IRC channel: filter out all sentences that have been spoken in the past. A moderator bot scans two years worth of chat logs and blocks any repeated statements, forcing [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I agree with John Armstrong. I’ve been at the root of a few running jokes in my time, most of which were not Little Britain-style “corpsefucks” because their very format encouraged experimentation. Either way, their humour derived from context-based char-for-char repetition (many of them were similar to That’s What She Said jokes) and banning that would kill the very things that I find help me bond with people online.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
/ignore needs a username, e.g. “/ignore moderatorbot” to ignore messages from username “moderatorbot”
January 14th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
yeah
January 14th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I like this. The possibilites of people actually having to spontaniously communicate with a thought-out response is great. Only thing else I can think of like this is this podcast where they let people sign up to be random strangers or provide questions and then the moderators call the random strangers and provide them with a random question.. Makes for a interesting on the spot response. Check it out.
http://dialastranger.com
January 14th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Seems like the bot needs to make special cases for IRC commands (like /bye)
January 14th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Anyone who is or was part of the Youtube community is aware of a similar occurence. The noise level is so high hence the community no longer appeals as it used to.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I have a question about the implementation. Is there a scanning function for TAKE OFF EVERY ZIG recycling a partial word or phrase? It seems to me as MY FRIEND ROBERT SAYS HE SAW A NINJA TOTALLY UPPERCUT SOME KID though you could embed a repeated word or phrase in some random noise OMGWTFBBQLOLPXPLZKTHXL8R or even parseable language. On the other PS3XBOXWIIRTEHSUXORZ hand, maybe that would actually increase the VELOCIRAPTORS signal-to-noise ratio.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Brilliant. A suggestion:
Add a karma calculation scaling factor that biases the muting function. The goal is to blunt (to some extent) the immediate application of chat mute delays for frequent chatters that are never muted much, if at all. The Karma scaling factor could be a product of the chatter’s submission frequency * chatter’s learned probability of contributing an acceptable comment. This way, the most valuable contributors are cut some slack when they otherwise wouldn’t get it. If a chatter with high +karma starts making a lot of mutable comments, they start spending their karma quickly. All new chatters start with -0- karma. Excellent chatters earn their way toward a higher positive karma. Bad chatters move into negative karma quickly. Negative karma means the muting algorithm is more aggressive. High positive karma means less aggressive muting. And don’t let human’s rewared subjective karma points to other chatters - keep it machine oriented.
Like training dogs… :-)
January 14th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I love the new approach to this problem.
Also, thanks to you and Zig for publishing the source code. Many people will find that extremely useful.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Please apply it to forum here at XKCD, where people leave ridiculous comments like “that was funny” after every comic.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
You’d get way less meta-discussion if you put the functionality in your IRC server rather than a bot: just don’t broadcast the identical messages, and have a bot message the individual informing them of their violation. That way everyone else in the chat room doesn’t have to watch the newbies learning.
Your current system depends on punishment & learning in order to increase signal, which is an interesting experiment, but the punishment might be too painful for most participants. Make the reward structure more like Quake and less like Counterstrike.
Of course, my suggestion might mean that people just retype their stale messages differently, while making them pause encourages them to rethink whether it should be said at all.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I managed to get muted by a operator before the bot. What does this mean?
January 14th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Hey - park from LJ - uh - don’t 1337 5P33K and misspellings completely doom this effort? I can become the human spam-engineer of my own comments quite trivially:
lol walrus
lol eskimo
lol peanut winkle
|o|
y34h.
uniqueness++, content–
January 14th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I was going to post something but I couldn’t think of anything that hadn’t been said. It looks like moderator is making me post more thoughtfully even outside #xkcd-signal.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
wait, what about “hi” and “brb”? and other statements whose intent is to inform about a current state/event, not so much… provide entertainment or interesting information or something…
Or is “the current state” of one individual not important enough? :P
January 14th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
All you need now are rules for hesitation and deviation.
[If you didn't get that, go here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/justaminute.shtml and select "listen again" from the panel on the left. You won't regret it.]
January 14th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Interesting about ROBOT9000 is the way it handles weblinks.
You know… when news of another natural disaster, another american attack or whatnot hits the air links of the news will be all over irc. People will want others to know..
[08:21] JohnDoe: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/
[01:42] JaneDoe: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/
Jane would receive a -v for her efforts of trying to educate people.
While this will definately cut down on the crap links people post it will also hinder informative linking. Or am I missing something here?
January 14th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Couple thoughts occur to me. First, a white-list of common short phrases (or maybe not so short) might be a good idea. This would allow for simple responses like “Yes”, “That’s correct”, “I agree”, etc. as well as not entirely negating common phrases that are often useful to new users such as “Please read the channel topic before commenting”. The point is, there are many phrases that either through their short (simple, KISS) nature are difficult to express without resorting to linguistic contortions that are really rather pointless.
Another nice feature would be the ability to vet a sentence with the bot before actually saying it. A simple implementation would be something like “/t check ” and it could reply whether that phrase had been used in the past. Of course this also opens up some room for abuse, but could also help prevent unnecessary mutings caused by ignorance.
Also as someone pointed out, this could destroy certain meme and running jokes that often become part of the “flavor” of a particular group (such as slashdots many memes like “you must be new here”). Admittedly some of these would tend to get old rather quickly, but at the same time having a common in-joke often helps with building a sense of community. Of course, given the white-list idea from early this could easily be gotten around by simply adding select phrases to the whitelist.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Just realized the commenting software ate part of my previous post. The bot check command was supposed to be “/t <botname> check <phrase>”.
(I hope this posts correctly this time)
January 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I heard about a better mild form of punishment in discussion groups: The Disemvoweler. It removes all vowels from your message if it find the message offensive.
Isn’t better to disemvowel messages or users which are unoriginal than kick/ban users?
January 14th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Interesting, but that just limits what people can say. Your real problem are the people in the channel. When I used to idle there I just saw constant flaming and constant crap-talking aswell as all the childish speak. Those same people will still be there.
The only difference is they will start to say the same old rubbish, but using different sentences.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
@Someguy:
In a static context such as a forum that might be possible, particularly when combined with some sort of preference system that can allow you to never even see the disemvoweled posts in the first place, but it’s much less effective for a real-time system. Essentially the issue is one of eliminating noise, and all the disemvoweler does is to increase the noise level in an already noisy post.
The approach suggested here on the other hand is attempting to create a negative feedback system for generating noise. That is, it attempts to make is undesirable to generate noise, rather then attempting to remove or filter the noise in the first place. This is arguably a better approach as concerns the community because it attempts to shape the behavior of the members into a more positive direction. It of course does nothing for those out to game or otherwise disrupt the system, which are the ones the disemvoweler is meant to deal with. In the context of IRC however there is already something more effective than the disemvoweler for dealing with people attempting to disrupt the community which is the voice and ban systems.
January 14th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Can you design a bot that detects tautologies and applies suitable punishment, as well?
January 14th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
[...] xkcd » Blog Archive » ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat Typisch xkcd — zu gleichen Teilen geisteskrank und brillant [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
[...] This is not food. Please don’t eat it. http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“I would love to see this applied to 4chan.”
It would bring it to its knees sadly :(
January 14th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
CHECK IT.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat…
‘#xkcd has had about 250 chatters these days. Large communities suck. This problem is hard to solve, but we’ve come up with a fun attack on it — enforced originality (in a very narrow sense). We’ve put together an auto-moderation system…
January 14th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
The bot should also punish bad typing skills and I don’t mean typos, but “netsp33k” and streams of consciousness with no punctuation.
For example, just check out the comments on YouTube or yahoo answers.
Here’s what I got from an open YouTube window:
“wtf happens?”
“i didnt think it was THAT bad… i thought 2 girls 1 finger was the worst, but it only upset me @ the end… i dont know why it would make you barf unless you had just eaten chocolate ice cream or something”
“I SO WANNA SEE IT, But I’m fucking afriad xD”
“what happens in 2 girls 1 finger, i’ve seen 2 girls 1 cup btw… those girls are fu*king sick in there minds man….”
“obvious u dont kno about searching for qqqqq & clicking im feeling lucky in google..”
..
January 14th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
While affirmative phrases are often more noise than signal, negatory ones are not. While “No, because…” might sometimes be more illuminative, other times a simple “no” is all that needs to be said. It also keeps conversational flow feeling more natural whenyou can simply agree.
Allowing phrases that have not been used in a longish period of time (maybe six weeks?) might also be useful in keeping it relatively easy for users to keep talking. Yes, there are a grillion possible sentences, but there are only a few thousand words that people use frequently in conversation. We tend to use these words in only a couple dozen different types of sentence. Someone could easily want to use the same sentence, especially if the bot ignores punctuation, but in regards to a different subject or whatever. It could reduce user frustration if they need to say something different from only the last 10,000 things said, rather than everything anyone’s ever said.
But it’s a fucking brilliant idea! Well done.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I think the major problem here is URLs. http://xkcd.com will be banned quick as a flash, any other Cool Thing? will be banned within 30 seconds.
Perhaps you can also bias based on ‘karma’ and previous usages of that sentence? (I.E., if it was used once 6 months ago it should not have the same impact as if it were used 5 times today and 65,535 [ooh, one more and it overflows] times the past month.)
January 15th, 2008 at 1:12 am
I have to agree with our furry friend Bob.
How about making it a bit less extreme? Maybe hang on to log entries for a year instead of forever (bot performance would be better!) and give more leeway to nicks with a good record. Good users should be allowed *some* noise, simply because “noise” often serves a social purpose: greetings, good-nights, etc. Those sorts of messages are not thought-provoking, but they’re important for social animals like humans.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:36 am
I was talking in there happily for weeks, can everyone go away now? ;_;
January 15th, 2008 at 3:23 am
why not take it one step forward (and loose simplicity): block not only the same exact utterances but all utterances that carry a similar meaning.
use some levenshtein (edit) distance or check the information gain…
but seriously - what about ironic utterances and the like?
or, more theoretically, things like ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’ where menard re-created the Quixote in the same exact words but with a totally different meaning?
January 15th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Awesome idea. BTW, what did you use to generate the color-ized HTML version of the Perl script?
January 15th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Thanks for publishing the code. I think I may need to port this to .NET and pay a visit to my company’s exchange server.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Can you banish stupid shit like “LOL” (or the even stupider “lol”)?
January 15th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand your trousers.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Quite a solid idea, I’d say chaps!
(trying for an original way to say “COOL!”)
also - i thought that your captcha was an ad. almost ignored it.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:46 am
People here seem to be conjecturing problems and advocating less harsh systems.
I counterconjecture that they’re overstating their case. But naturally none of us will log on to check.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:07 am
[...] IRC bot, from XKCD no less! 15 01 2008 Here is a very interesting blog post from Randall (of XKCD fame) about a new form of IRC bot, which [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 8:53 am
[...] go check out their article, here. [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:43 am
can’t connect to irc.xkcd.com!
irssi says:
11:39 -!- Irssi: Looking up irc.xkcd.com
11:39 -!- Irssi: Connecting to irc.xkcd.com [216.93.242.10] port 6667
11:39 -!- Irssi: Unable to connect server irc.xkcd.com port 6667 [Invalid
argument]
any ideas?
January 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am
When will you deem this a success or failure? Currently you have created a splinter channel, so unless the splinter grows as large as the main channel currently is, or you move the bot to the main channel, any success could not be pinpointed for certain on the bot.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure it’s complete or how well it’ll work. I’ll drop by this evening and see how it’s going. Part of me likes the idea of applying this to URLs, as every now and then someone discovers something two years old that everyone else has seen and announces it loudly as the coolest thing ever, only to our disappointment when we click. On the other hand, if someone linked a really important/interesting/funny thing when it was 5 o’clock in the morning my time, it would be nice if someone could “repost” it at a more sociable hour without getting punished.
The idea of making it server-side rather than a bot to decrease noise was a nice one by the way, Ben.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Can I run this on my email? ;-)
January 15th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Adarsh, I would think that running something like this on email might be counter-productive. I’d guess that useful messages like “See you at 12″ would be blocked, and spam would be waved through (since most spam contains random garbage nowadays).
January 15th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
TtTTttTTTtttTTTTttttTTTTtttt
January 15th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
i am trying to enter wrong things in captcha and it is still accepting them.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Ok the words clearly are
Areene ROWARTH
I entered
Aremme ROVARTH
Comment Still accepted?
January 15th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
If you Google “recaptcha” you will find out why! :)
January 15th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Getting muted for a few seconds really isn’t the end of the world. If you really want to just reply with a simple yes/no to some statement, it’s only going to be a few seconds before you can speak again. unless of course you’ve been unoriginal a lot, in which case you’re probably not going to be missed.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
This rules! Robin Dunbar’s a pompous idiot, though, as an aside.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
While discouraging outright repetition, it may encourage use of snowclones… Hell, it might even become a research tool for identifying them.
“I love the smell of ROBOT9000 in the morning. It smells like… originality!”
January 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
if you look at that new, fresh, never repeating examples of stupid comments on youtube, heheh i dunno if this would work for everybody, but it sure is an amazing idea…
January 16th, 2008 at 9:38 am
I think this is a neat idea eventhough I think depending on everyone to be fair is a bit harsh, and the build-up of frustration may turn away chatters not into the ‘gee whiz’ factor who simply want to have a discussion. The humorous part is by getting rid of those people, you probably create a community that will not exceed Dunbar’s Number.
That all said, I think it is disgusting how some of the commenters, and most of the ping-backers grovel before Randall. I mean, I am sure he is a great guy, and in a sense he is ‘living the dream’ of geekdom, but I feel like there is a subset of the xkcd population who take it too far. Maybe I am just jaded by geek culture.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Why not keep track of usernames and timestamps for each line in the line table?
Also, why not use a honeypot instead of captcha? Pa-lease…
January 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
It’s a great idea. I only wish I could connect to the server. X-Chat seems to want to connect to localhost. Did you set a redirect because of traffic?
January 16th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
[...] xkcd » ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat - xkcd’s Robot9000 attacks noise in real-time chat. a parallel IRC channel only displays lines of conversation that’ve never been spoken before. [...]
January 16th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
The sandbox version should have a smaller ban time…
January 16th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
MySQL? Really? Ugh. No ‘import irc’ for python then?
January 17th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Just so you know, we’re using the Signal bot on our IRC network.
irc://irc.hackthissite.org/signal
Check it out. It’s actually working remarkably well.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:54 am
I just wanted to share this:
Stallman doing Soulja Boy,
http://www.thenewfreedom.net/wp/2008/01/16/richard-stallman-cranking-dat-soulja-boy/
This is both, funny and sad XD
January 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am
[...] ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat “what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said.” (tags: irc chat xkcd perl chatbot) [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
[...] xkcd » Blog Archive » ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
[...] an attempt to cease the madness, Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) and his friend zigdon have coded a rather awesome little bot and named it ROBOT9000. It’s designed — get this — to mute the messaging [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
in signal, I declared that we needed a text based game of russian roulette
each person types a word
just one
there’s a chance that they get muted
that’s amusing
the less letters it has, the higher the chance, but the higher the points
it is, but I’m muted for another 2 minutes
ironically, my word was Roulette
January 17th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
jptix> user: try #moderator-sandbox
-moderator:#xkcd-signal- jptix, you have been muted for 1 minute 4 seconds.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:17 am
[...] xkcd » Blog Archive » ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat An interesting solution to the signal to noise problem in many chat channels (tags: algorithms chat moderation) [...]
January 18th, 2008 at 7:31 am
ZOMG!!!!
A 4chan killer!!!!!
Quick! Sacrifice some loli’s!!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 10:09 am
[...] Moderating large IRC channels with a bot that only allows you to say things that haven’t been … - a very clever technique indeed. [...]
January 18th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I think a worthy thing to try for this project beyond “gee whiz” if you just desire to get rid of the constant reposting of memes would be to only look back a week or so.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I wonder if this same technology could be used in other areas of life, perhaps conference calls. :)
Still it is a great idea. Crap I didn’t read everything above this to know if people already told you it is a great idea.
I wonder if noise is ever helpful.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
[...] to keep us up to date on video disk formats and social networking news. My son Tom just sent me a piece about methods of eliminating noise in online communities. Here’s a line or two: When social communities grow past a certain point (Dunbar’s [...]
January 18th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Thou art creative.
January 19th, 2008 at 12:19 am
If you wanted to keep forums small with a large userbase you could split in into many fora, randomly assign each ip adress to one of them, if someone is a mature enough poster they get promoted to the next one, imature enough and they get demoted. Say you could see any thread you have visited and it will stay with you for the rest of your fora going but the only new threads you will see are the ones that are posted in your new forum.
you can follow all links and PMS work crossfora.
January 19th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Hey, nice words. I dunno if a comment already passed about it, but you can create localized sister channels like #xkcd-fr #xkcd-es … this creates new communities where some grows some other stagnates.
Now looking for the irc server.. :)
mike
January 19th, 2008 at 3:41 am
I just wanted to throw in a comment that you guys are amazing. I’ll no longer have to deal with the dregs of internet society. You’ve saved perhaps the most vulnerable part of my community.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:06 am
While it’s a neat idea, I’d suggest what you’re trying to do is very much against the spirit of IRC: or, rather, that this is a problem very endemic to IRC and there’s simply no real way to combat it. The problem isn’t just signal-to-noise: it’s also volume-to-IRC-window-length (since the moment things scroll off screen they lose immense value) and readability/connectivity (since with 250 people, no matter what they’re saying to each other, you will struggle to pick out one specific conversation) which are both major problems that occur in any large channel regardless of how intelligent the discussion in there is.
Ultimately, splinter factions are what channels were made for. Focus in one channel getting too big? Split it. Let people decide where they want to go. Sure, maybe have one room that’s the catch-all, but then people should expect that the signal ratio will be low there and in the meantime a notice or public directory on a site (since new users won’t know /list) to the effect of ‘if you’d like specific intelligent discussion on topic X, consider heading to #channelX…’.
tl;dr but I have to admit that’s a neat bit of work. Though personally I’d just add random nouns to the badwords filter and leave it up to people’s imagination as to what all those ’s are hiding.
January 19th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I don’t understand why people are named ‘Randall’. That’s pathetic.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
hi
January 21st, 2008 at 1:58 am
They’re changing sex at Buckingham palace,
Christopher Robin is now called Alice.
January 21st, 2008 at 7:00 am
Concerning the current comic: Of course no supernatural powers exist, but there might be physical effects not yet known or understood blah blah blah… er, sorry. What I want to say is, I think it’s possible that, for example, telepathy is a real effect based on physical laws. There HAVE been scientific confirmations of telepathy (search for “Ganzfeld experiment”). The quality of these experiments and the results are controversial, though.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Man, that bot is on STEROIDS. Or something. You shouldn’t make the ban time add up so fast! That’s just cruel. Also, there was an interesting idea on the chat, wich goes, the more often something is said, the more time you get banned. So repeating something like “i still don?t see why such a state of affairs logically necessitates the nihilation of metafisics ” would ban you for ten seconds, and saying “lol” bans you for a few hours. ¿good idea or not?
January 21st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
In the interest of ruining good concepts and playing devil’s advocate, I suggest a channel #xkcd-noise where you get kicked for being original and unpredictable. However, each new sentence is added to the log, so eventually every sentence will be usable. Eventually.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:29 am
KMeist: The channel exists already. No idea if it works as specified though.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:58 am
It does bring an interesting atmosphere to conversations, I’ll give it that. Maybe time will tell if it brings much value to communication on the channel.
I’m sure Edward Tufte would love making a visual representation of all of this.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:06 am
[...] read more [...]
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Had a thought while contemplating how my workplace might be able to use this. What if the bot read back the context from the log to an offender? Then if you asked a question that had already been asked it might provide you with an answer.
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
@shMerker:
The ubiquitous Purl bot in the semi-official Perl channel of freenode has a feature similar to that. You can teach it associations, and it auto-responds if anyone posts a question in the form of “what is x”.
A typical way to use it would be:
user: purl, orange is both a color and a fruit
purl: ok user.
anotheruser: what is orange?
purl: It has been said that orange is both a color and a fruit.
It also has a bunch of other features. I’m thinking it could be fairly straightforward to make a new plugin for the bot that implements the rules of the bot on here, possibly with exceptions provided for statements that trigger another handler, such that you could ask a “what is” style question without triggering a mute or kick.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Interesting concept and I am sure you two have already thought of this, but a fresh pair of eyes could never hurt:
In a cataloging sense, how long does this bot retain the used sentences? And how easily can one remove the entires it stores? Basically, what I am asking is how would the bot handle someone who might jump in and post common phrases. You said that the phrases excluded punctuation, so would common word groupings trigger the bot, or does it examine the entire post from front to end?
[Person 1] The rocks are in the box, baby!
[Person 2] Wow, ‘the rocks are in the box, baby’ is going to be the coolest new internet catch phrase ever!
[Person 1] I know, that’s why the rocks are in the box!See where I’m going with it? I don’t know…maybe I’m just looking at it from the stance of spam management. You want to kill off certain phrases, but you can take the whole sentence because it’s too easy to manipulate the fluff. On the other hand, you can just take certain word groupings, because then a person could get in and post sentence fragments just for the purpose of tripping-up the bot. Even if the person is banned for it, does this attack on the dictionary stay, or is the list of acceptable phrase managed on a daily basis…essentially just reverting one back to the position of being a Mod. Which would, inevitably, still have to expand with the size of the community. Granted it’s no longer 1/10…but is 1/100 that much better?
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Reading this, I can’t help but be reminded of a wonderful Radio 4 programme, ‘Just a Minute’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/justaminute.shtml
January 24th, 2008 at 4:40 am
Oooh. ROBOT9000 is my new second-favourite IRC bot, after qwok (who I think hit elvis-mode and is too fat to run anymore, sadly).
ROBOT9000 is the un-swibble. Well, almost.
(thanks for xkcd all these years, since it’s my first post, too)
January 24th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I think although the Dunbar’s Number comment on the size of a social population is correct, it is incomplete. Obviously if people only had one main social community (fraternities and such?) You might get to as much as half Dunbar’s number. It seems that most peoples real friends and such would take up at least 2/3 of the persons they can know. For me, nearly all, but I don’t hang out in the chat rooms.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Portal for the em effing win!
January 25th, 2008 at 10:56 am
@Christopher:
There seems to be some misconception as to what the purpose of this bot is. It isn’t designed (near as I can tell, I had no part in writing or deploying it, just extrapolating from the sidelines) to prevent spammers, or other general bad behavior. In fact it’s trivially easy to game the bot to get around the rules it uses. Ultimately the job of keeping griefers and general undesirables out of the channel falls on the moderators and the ban privileges they get for just that purpose. What this bot is attempting to do however is apply a restriction on the channels content to encourage the good members of the community to continue providing good content, and to provide a semi-automated feedback system to indicate when undesirable content is being provided (in this case defined as something someone else already said). In my first couple posts I outlined some ideas I thought might be improvements to the general idea, so you can go read those if you want, but otherwise the bot seems to do what it’s designed to do rather well.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
We modified ROBOT9000 for our “#bizzaro-chat” to be more forgiving by eliminating a single “*”. The first 2 hours we spent time, ’sniping’ people by posting commonly said statements, user specific or otherwise, so when they would join later on they would be muted.
The chat already is very engaging though the metadiscussion can be bad sometimes. But sometimes they pull off amazing ’snipes’. Frankly you can make a game out of it by looking at the database for which users have accumulated how much time.
This bot is an amazing achievement and at only 731 lines very compact. The thing is there is some discussion about how slow the bot would get as our log file after only a few hours was approaching a meg.
January 26th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
[...] rather than a question and reply. On a completely different track, earlier today I stumbled upon this which after a brief trial seems a great idea and the range of things that were being discussed [...]
January 27th, 2008 at 7:59 am
I suppose the 9000 comes from HAL 9000 ??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
I’m waiting for the day it asks “Will I dream?” (D:
January 27th, 2008 at 9:51 am
for those of you who ever get devoiced from #xkcd-signal for a very long time (>30mins) come along to #signal-fail, where all the failiures go….
i control it, and will be happy to invite you. it runs on a completely different set of rules, based on the robot9000 rules:
1. No new stuff, everything you say must have been said before on either #xkcd, #xkcd-signal, #bots, #uk or #signal-fail.
2. All new stuff will get you devoiced for a random amount of time…
January 27th, 2008 at 11:22 am
tl;dr
January 27th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
[...] interesting experiment in social interactions has been attempted in an IRC channel (Internet relay chat) in which chat participants are not [...]
January 28th, 2008 at 2:20 am
It occurs to me that an effective, yet perhaps slightly more evil alteration to the mute policy could be implemented. Instead of calculating mute times based on the number of times a particular user reuses a phrase, the time could be multiplied based on how many times a particular phrase has been used. In this scenario, using an uncommon phrase that happens to have been said before will result in a slap on the wrist, yet using a phrase likely to be a known violation will incur a longer punishment. Pity the unfamiliar user who says hello and is immediately muted for seven years….
January 30th, 2008 at 12:19 am
[...] away. They expect a channel to continue function roughly normally for a decade…Check it out: xkcd ROBOT9000If you want to try it on your own channel, the code is there. It’s a Perl bot, with sql [...]
February 1st, 2008 at 7:06 pm
http www youtube…
Good work. Keep it up….
February 1st, 2008 at 11:07 pm
The first few times I read any xkcd I thought it was a by a woman and I was very excited. Then I found out it was just another dude writing a great internet comic and I was disappointed. Again with this post I immediately thought female, maybe because of the sorority references.
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:14 am
cool, although I think you should wipe it’s memory after every year just in case some phrazes get used again.
February 2nd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Fantastic Idea. I’m going to try this out.
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:21 am
[...] webcomic xkcd and also very interested in language issues, so xkcd creator Randall Munroe’s recent blag post concerning an irc bot named ROBOT9000 which temporarily mutes users in a chatroom if they say [...]
February 4th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
[...] never knew this. (Via xkcd.) Wikipedia defines Dunbar’s number: Dunbar’s number, which is very approximately 150, [...]
February 4th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Looking at this idea from the viewpont of constructing Concept Maps I see it could greatly help prompt new ‘propositions’ even though one or two of the three terms are being reused.
Are you encountering combinatorial explosions when processing these semantic nets with von Neumann machines?
Jack Ring
February 5th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Ripoff. I have a MediaWiki bot called “ROBO-BOT 2000″.
(But seriously: this is quite nifty. I’m always interested in new ways of keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio and generally building awesome online communities. Thanks for a happy good work fun time de luxe!
February 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am
what a way to promote elitism to the fullest extent!
well done, assholes.
February 8th, 2008 at 3:47 am
They’re not elitist, they’re just better than you. Plus which, they wouldn’t have to implement it if you guys weren’t savage fucktards in the channels.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
>When we took down the scoreboard and banished meta-discussion of the channel to #meta-discussion, everything worked out nicely. (And, of course, for discussion of the concept of #meta-discussion people had to go to #meta-meta-discussion, and for chat about how silly that whole idea was, we created #meta-meta-meta-discussion ?)
You should just create a channel called #xkcd-ascent-into-meta for all meta discussions beyond the first one. Including discussion of #ascent-into-meta and all its related discussions.
Haha, this is a joke of course. I doubt you get much meta-meta discussion nowadays.
February 10th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
[...] We?ve put together an auto-moderation system in an experimental channel, #xkcd-signal, and it seems to work well, so we invite you all to take part….View Full Story [...]
February 15th, 2008 at 5:29 am
[...] Signal to Noise: I really like the idea of enforced originality in forums. Or generally, at least as an intriguing linguistic experiment. And it might stop annoying calendar quotations. [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 2:28 am
I’m glad for #xkcd-signal. They’re flooding #xkcd with “<3 thunder”, and this provides a safe haven from that.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am
I want to reply too
February 20th, 2008 at 6:16 am
Dear Robot 9000,
I do have to say this is an interesting idea but I don’t believe it will work. Implementation of such a bot will provide some relief in the coming days or weeks but the larger communities will begin to feel pressure as the number of common but very useful phrases are taken. Honestly, with this system on a certain unnamed image board with a certain unnamed, hated moderator, I’ve been ‘muted’ many times in a row out of pure ignorance with what has been said. While at first the times are nothing to worry about, they add up quickly and can cause headaches for frequent posters. Sometimes, your best people contributing to a ‘community’ repeat things said before, especially by others.
This brings me to my next point, this system becomes a target. It provides incredibly unoriginal people the opportunity to make the original seem unoriginal by spamming boards and channels with content that may come up due to general behavior of the ‘community’. This system is too outspoken. In my opinion, a quieter, more subtle system will attract less attention and far fewer trolls. If this system had a way to slowly remove phrases after a somewhat short period of time (I’d say between 2 weeks and 2 months personally), a way to have a certain threshold of unoriginal posts (to signal the end of a topic with Godwin’s law), and a white list of common phrases (with a maximum threshold for each user to prevent the ‘copypasta effect’), it would be vastly improved as even a visible or ‘loud’ system.
And “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
Your pal in wires and numbers,
HAL_9000
February 20th, 2008 at 7:44 am
For those who are alarmed that useful urls might penalise people unjustly, remember, there are a myriad of ways to say “hey, check out http://www.xkcd.com - that webcomic is neato!” or the like.
For the argument that ROBOT 9000 will destroy awesome memes, I’m sure that a time-delay can be added to when lines are added to the database. A day, maybe a few days, would probably be enough to nurture memes. (This has the added “benefit” of making important, time-sensitive urls safe for the duration of their utility without having to add explanatory text). Lines that are repeated a lot could be made safe in a #meme channel. I suspect that if you want to make a meme garden, this kind of implementation would nurture it rather than destroy it.
Then again, I’m basing all of this off of sheer speculation - I have not played with the bot in IRC or in code.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:05 am
*did a barrelroll*
February 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I spilled my grape juice all over the carpet while reading this, and you know what?
I blame you.
DO A BARREL ROLL IN HELL.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:05 am
A barrel roll is the (recommended|suggested|correct|indicated|pertinent|optimal|best) action (to (take|perform|engage in|attempt|use|utilize) )?(at (this time|(the )?present)|(for (your|this|the|our)( (presumed|tactical|current))?( (circumstances|situation|environment|engagement))?[.]
February 20th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I LIEK XKCDKIPS
February 20th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Hey xkcd, please close comments in this post. You’ll get lots of insightful observations from Mr. Anonymous B. Tard that may not interest you.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I knew ROBOT9000 was brought up here first.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
[...] ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat is a description of a novel system built for the XKCD community chat that attempts to balance the needs of the community to keep the quality of discussion high with the overhead of moderating a community. (Tip of the hat to for On Message editor Jeff Ubois) [...]
February 21st, 2008 at 7:24 am
Oh god, 4chan listened!
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:57 am
4chan listened, and I for one think it’s great. They’re going to stress-test the hell out of the system, so we’ll know within a month if it’s viable.
Carry on, Anonymous.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:44 am
You are a god. /r9k/ has now permanently replaced my visits to /b/. Thank you.
February 23rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
[...] the folks at 4chan have implemented the Robot 9000 concept in what promises to be a mid-to-long-term replacement for /b/. I’m mildly tempted to see how [...]
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 pm
r9k is awesome
February 24th, 2008 at 1:56 am
dude you brought life back to 4chan
thanks ol’ chap
February 25th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
BYAAAAAAAHAHHHHHHHH
Shit, I can’t believed that this robot thing actually works.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:32 am
[...] folks over at xkcd decided to try something new to control the mundane-ness of their IRC channel. They implemented an automatic moderator that only [...]
February 26th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
[...] 4chan has an experimental board up, /r9k/. Interestingly, it uses the system designed for the #xkcd-signal channel, where only unique posts are allowed and repetition results in a temporary silencing. New trend? [...]
February 26th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
niggers
February 26th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
You should make a phpbb mod that uses this technology
February 27th, 2008 at 12:09 am
This brings me to my next point, this system becomes a target. It provides incredibly unoriginal people the opportunity to make the original seem unoriginal by spamming boards and channels with content that may come up due to general behavior of the ?community?.i want to tell your my first-hand experience.I have found my best friend and my true Love. I have found my match on this site, Sugarmommymatch.com. It was an instant connection for rich women seeking handsome and charming men. Good luck to all who are looking for true and real love, I am blessed.
February 28th, 2008 at 1:11 am
[...] of the channel’s I pay a lot of attention to is #xkcd-signal ( for xkcd’s blag post). The channel’s designed to be a new way reduce the amount of noise typically found in irc [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:20 am
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlord.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:42 am
This is the most twisted fuckin’ autistic shit I’ve seen in a long while, and I read 4chan threads where dorks jack each other off while blubbering in self-pity about how they can’t get a girl. What the fuck, your damn fool IRC channel — an IRC channel devoted to a webcomic that recycles the worst of repetitious horse-beating nerd culture — is so irretrievably damaged by a “hi all” that you have a little computer program to punt anyone who, horror of horrors, says something that was said 23 months ago?
What kind of basement-bound poopsocking dweeb is so scared of normal human interaction that he writes a script — probably in fuckin’ Perl or Ruby on Rails or some such bull-fuckin’-shit — to slap someone on the wrist because they didn’t say something 100% original? Originality ain’t a thang. Student-style OMG SO RANDOM ‘humour’ like ‘ninja pirate monkey cheese!!! !! velociraptorz lol i luv dinosaur comix XKCD & jerkcity’ won’t show up in any automatic filter but it’s still BOOSHIT I wouldn’t want in any Goddamned channel of mine.
Also, the guy who wrote this ‘blag’ (lollariously original neologism there, d00d) is totally contradicting himself. He says that the bot works and splinter channels do not. Then he says that the first thing that happened when he started the bot was that the channel exploded into a firestorm of metachannel navel gazing. Effective! And what did he do to solve the problem the bot created? He moved meta-discussion into a splinter channel, which worked. But I thought he said splinter channels don’t work…?
In sum, this is a classic case of a geek making transparent excuses to half-ass a technical solution to a social problem so he can make people kow-tow to his latent Asperger’s. He’s not even honest about it, and all y’all wang-polishers who’re donating saliva in this thread are just beta dorks who get your rocks off watching a webcomic e-lebrity acting out in public. You dicksucks make me sick.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
enjoy your endless stream of unoriginal bullshit regurgitated over and over on all your forums and channels, then!
March 11th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
hi all
March 11th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
enjoy your endless stream of unoriginal bullshit regurgitated over and over on all your forums and channels, then!
March 16th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Wait i have a question… why Nine-Thousand?? Why not 9001? i mean, at least 9001 is over 9000…. and then you could have a funny joke included in your awesome program! ^^;; just a suggestion….
March 18th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Afraid I tl;dr’d this much past about the 20th comment (i know, i know, hypocritical) … but there may not need to be quite so restrictive with it to get the effect you desire. Never, ever having something repeated is a nice experiment, but it’s not exactly a way to get much useful signal. Often “signal” can itself be something repeated amongst purely random “noise” (a song, for example …)
And how can we effectively pass on knowledge to anyone who isn’t immediately present, without repeating ourselves, or repeating said by someone who was around at a previous time but has now left, before some new people have turned up?
Rather than going back two years, setting the filter at, say, an hour may be sufficient to kill off the mindless meme-ing, without driving people absolutely stir crazy. There’s every chance you may be trying to say something perfectly useful to somebody (e.g. asking what time you should meet up) and just happen to clash with a previous example of yourself or someone else asking the same thing. One too many of those in a row (getting unlucky) and you’re muted for several hours. Not good.
Course, you can always go to another channel or use private chat, I suppose … so long as requesting this with the people you’re talking to doesn’t count as a repetition from the previous time it happened also.
Setting the bot just to kick for certain annoying things might work as well… kind of like an auto-mod but more wide-ranging than the ones usually used to filter out viagra spam, or endless short-term repetition (e.g. once a second) of the same post. Like you could kickban someone for saying Desu more than once every 15 seconds or whatever, or any instance of an idiot meme that was past it’s sell-by date. But you’d have to take votes and get a certain representative sample of the community to agree to each entry, which itself could get out of hand. Tricky. Just like all human communication.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
incidentally, Knil? i kinda think *that was the point*
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:29 am
I suppose it works the same way as the old phrase you mother taught you:
“If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all.”
March 23rd, 2008 at 5:17 pm
[...] - Today, 21:08 xkcd Blog Archive ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat I would love to see this implemented as a vbulletin [...]
March 25th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I don’t think Dunbar’s number is the limit of the size of a community. It’s not very likely that the people in the community knows only people in the community, is it? :)
April 19th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
on 4chan Dunbar’s number is equal to 1
April 21st, 2008 at 2:22 am
Now all we have to do is wait for someone to write a mutating spam script which changes what is posted after every post.
Wouldn’t be that hard,
define $text “a”
post $text
define $text “$text + a”
And Repeat. Mind I know nothing of coding. (HTML doesn’t count in my opinion)
Also, on 4chan, Dunbar’s number is equal to 0.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:09 am
The beautiful thing about forcing originality and creativity is that it basically culls the herd down to those who actually physically are creative and original - it totally eliminates the factor of people parroting bullshit catchphrases and one-note jokes only other non-original one-note parrots find amusing.
I’ve been considering a similar concept to this for the longest time - in fact, while I was still in high school I designed a rudimentary version of it in C++/Oracle to analyse all incoming TCP/IP data… worked well to minimise incoming bullshit sent by classmates, but the CPU cycles it stole were horrifying. This one however seems to be, as they say, “the duck’s nuts”, so kudos for pushing to develop such a tool. I’ll definitely be playing around with it in the near future, I think.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:35 am
increase website hits…
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June 15th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Jack…
My brother was mentioning something like this the other day….
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
[...] great when you needed a university email to sign up and there were no applications. Now it’s all noise and no signal. They’ve opened the floodgates to clutter for fools. The only real use it ever had was to see [...]
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 pm
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July 10th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Uhhmm, this isnt;t a blog about buying stock online . :)
So, @# off
July 15th, 2008 at 9:10 am
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How do you come up with so much material to blog with?…
July 26th, 2008 at 4:12 am
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July 29th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
it sounds like an interesting idea, although it could perhaps work better with a score keeping system.. Commonly said phrases lose you big score/ new phrases gain you some score. If you get into negative, you cannot speak but slowly regain score over time until you are back in the positive.
This might mean people can actually afford to bring in new discussions on old topics without being muted on the way