In case you don’t want to read the link, ROBOT9000 is a chat monitoring utility that prevents you from saying anything anyone else has said in the history of the chat room. If you do, your message is blocked and you are muted for a period of time starting at two seconds and doubling after that. The theory is, if everyone types full, thought-out sentences, this will not be a problem for communication until at least a decade of constant use. It was developed by Randall Munroe of xkcd for its IRC chat room, but now even 4chan has a board based on it. (I’m not going to link to it, but you can find it easily.) The only major downside is that moderators have to watch for people posting random characters at the ends of their posts to force randomization.
I think that this is a really interesting idea, and I was wondering what you all think about it. Will it work? Will it actually improve chat?
Why would we want something like this? Monday morning are for whining and to know that someone in the UK has the exact same problem on a Monday morning. Or I like your Dog. I like your dog. No I like your dog…
I’m not sure why we would need a utility like this?
It’s a very interesting concept, but in practical terms, I think it’s going to end up throwing the baby away with the dirty bathwater.
Yes, sometimes repetition and parroting is annoying and inane.
Other times, it’s completely unintentional and occasionally, it’s hilariously comic in a way that I would not want to see absolutely excised from life.
To want to do this is quite OCD-ish (which is bread and butter for XKCD, of course).
I think this is an insane idea, and I don’t want to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ther are certain short sentences that everyone uses without thinking, and which will mrapidly get dinged by the Gestapo-Bot.
I like that
Count me in
I agree
…and so on.
Pretty soon all your regulars accumulate long quarantines. This forces them to come back under other names. It makes others shut up altogether, except for the occasional long sentence, out of fear of Time Outs. Soon a lot of your regulars bail out. Those that remain learn to pepper their comments with the occasional misspelling or out-of-place letter or suymbol to avoid being dinged by the Gestapo-bot, who knows repeated sentences but not good spelling or grammar, so* you$ end@ up with sen+tences like% this, or ones filled with leet-speak, or something.
So that;'s your legacy – trying to use a simple-minded tactic to shut out simple bonehead chirps like “lol” will result in lost customers and even MORE bizarre chat-room behavior.
My point exactly. I didn’t mean it in opposition to what Cal was saying. I agree completely with what he said, and was just imagining this place without the in-jokes.