Submission + - Attacking Chat Noise with Original Statements
Googling Yourself writes: "Randall Munroe has an interesting post on his xkcd blog on a new approach to keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high when social communities grow past a certain point. While many forums use moderators to deal with noise as it happens, and communities like Slashdot use running peer-moderation, these methods don't seem to work very well for live time-dependent things like IRC channels. Munroe has put together an experimental auto-moderation system on the #xkcd-signal that uses "enforced originality" to keep content original and interesting. A moderator bot only allows members to say sentences that had never been said before and the bot mutes chatters for a period after every violation. "There would be no "all your base are belong to us", no "lol", no "asl", no "there are no girls on the internet." Just thoughtful, full sentences," says Munroe. So far the method seems to be working well with good, solid chat between relative strangers and very little noise. The Perl bot is available if you'd like to try it."
