Oh, xkcd got it right again <3



It's funny how The YouTube Comment has become in today's popular/net culture the paragon of internet stupidity.



See StupidFilter, a projet of software that would filter stupid comments; it used (at least initially) YouTube comments to build "a ranked corpus of stupid text".



In the same idea, see the YouTube Comment Snob Firefox extension that can hide YouTube comments according to a simple, customisable set of rules like :

• More than # spelling mistakes.


• All capital letters


• No capital letters


• Doesn't start with a capital letter


• Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)


• Excessive capitalization


• Profanity

Not to mention Metafilter vs YouTube comments : http://www.thatsaspicymeatball.com/comments/



~


On a totally related note, this month was the 15th anniversary of the Eternal September.

via wikipedia
"Eternal September is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993. The expression encapsulates the belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behaviour on Usenet and the wider Internet."

"Usenet originated among universities, so, every year in September, a large number of new university students acquired access to Usenet, and took some time to acclimate themselves to the network's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would theoretically learn to comport themselves according to its conventions. September, thus, heralded the peak influx of disruptive newcomers to the network.

In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. To many "old-timers", these "AOLers" were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university freshmen. This was in part because AOL took few pains to educate its users about Usenet customs, or explain to them that these new-found forums were not simply another piece of AOL's service. But it was also a result of the much larger scale of growth. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would soon settle down, the sheer number of new users now threatened to overwhelm the existing Usenet culture's capacity to inculcate its social norms."

Story of most internet communities, isn't it?

Take, for a recent example, what that research paper on the LULZ says (or quotes, actually) about the website that should remain unnamed :

"The long running joke that has developed over the past 3 or so years is that everybody on the website, (well, on /b/ anyway) whislt ADULTS, and reasonably intelligent ones at that, engage in moronic activities verging on the utterly stupid. The joke being that everyone acts like the same retarded individual. WHILST KNOWING THAT THEY ARE NOT. The joke is in the delivery.... Eventually, so many 14 year olds end up browsing the site that the original adult userbase has been overshadowed by the masses of underage people who have now turned the joke inside out, and the site has now literally become a place for 14 year olds to be retarded."

*sigh*