Title text: And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ...oh.
For every online community to thrive and for constructive discussions to be had, it needs to have a certain number of friendly, polite and helpful people. Spammers are opposite of that; they are people or organizations trying to sell certain products, with no regards to the rules of community or any discussions being made. In fact, some of them use automated scripts to simulate human beings, allowing them to quickly post identical "advertising posts" in multiple threads under multiple names, flooding the forums and stifling real discussions. Therefore, it is vital to prevent them from posting non-sequitur posts with links towards their websites and to prevent bots from registering.
Captcha is one of the methods used to prevent lots of automated registering of fake user names used by bots and spammers. It consists of asking a person to prove that they are human before registering them as user and allowing them to post on sites or forum topics. That is done by using pictures of words and letters that humans may recognize, but bots and OCR software have trouble with.
Now, artificial intelligence (AI) of bots have advanced so far, that Cueball has invented a new system. It asks of the users to rate a slate of comments as constructive or not, then asks them to reply with comments of their own. Megan asks what will happen when spammers find a way around his system, such as making bots that make constructive and helpful comments? Well, it turns out that is what he is trying to accomplish in first place, a thriving community helping its members with constructive and helpful comments, as well as coming one step closer to the singularity.
The title text investigates the consequences of such system further by thinking of people unable to give constructive and helpful comments, which are sort of people you don't want in your online community anyway.
- [Cueball is talking to Megan.]
- Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional Captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive."
- [Close up of Cueball.]
- Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.
- [Megan standing next to Cueball again.]
- Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
- [Close up of Cueball again.]
- Cueball: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.