xkcd bot enforces originality on IRC channel
By Tim Finin on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 10:21 am.xkcd has an IRC channel where its strange fans talk about even stranger things, some of the anyway. 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 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.”
After laying out the standard approaches to controlling the problem (entry requirements, moderation, side channels) Randall describes a novel approach that fits oh so well with the xkcd community.
“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.”
The idea’s implementation as a Perl bot sounds workable — when you violate the xkcd protocol by uttering a non-novel statement you are muted to prevent chatting for two second and the mute time quadruples for every subsequent violation. The bot forgives you after a while — your mute-time decays by half every six hours or so. You can read more about it on the xkcd blog or experience its tight rein on #xkcd-signal at irc.xkcd.com.
Not surprisingly, the channel is currently overwhelmed by chatters testing the bot to learn the finer points of its rules and how to subvert them. Hopefully, this is just a transient phenomenon and the robotic enforcement of novelty will evolve into something truly useful — a kindler, gentler moderator who can keep discussion from degenerating. But some serious tinkering will be required — common and repetitious utterances (”good morning”) are part of our social protocol, so this needs to be allowed to some degree.
Related posts: • XKCD Blagofaire; • First post from another reality; • The XKCD data died in a blogging accident;
UMBC eBiquity Blog
January 19th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
No more memes?!
You fail it!
January 20th, 2008 at 2:13 am
TheGabe was kicked from IRC for repetition.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:32 am
This post is not very novel, by the way. I’ve seen several of its sentences before. You have been warned.
January 21st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
What a splendorous instrument of novelty, many praises are to be raised to the infinitesimally interesting conversation that must be birthed by such an idea.
Original enough?
Also, THIS IS SPARTAAAAAA!!!
January 21st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Originality is a concept that too often people can’t grasp. Everything anymore becomes an inside joke between friends and is uttered between them far too often. Its like “thats what she said” jokes. They are always funny, regardless of situation if pulled off correctly, but you have to realize there is always another joke, always another path to walk. This bot is a great idea, but the implementation of it might become unrealistic. There has to be a degree of leniency to the frequency of use of certain phrases, simply because it is human nature to revert back to the familiar when it seems as though originality is not an option. Certain jokes, and memes have place in conversation if not overused, and that right to use them should not be taken away from anyone. Out of norm original ideas grow, and it must be understood that originality is a symptom of normalcy. Falling back into the commonplace and familiar sometimes stimulates creativity, so you can’t remove the familiar entirely to make creativity grow.
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Killing all the cockroaches doesn’t kill all the rats, but at least it kills all the cockroaches! I bet there are some people working really hard to come up with brand new ways to say the same old retarded crap, and that alone would make it worth watching. Love xkcd. Mwah! Mwah!
January 24th, 2008 at 3:03 am
There is no need to allow inane pleasantries into the conversation. They are just noise, contributing no meaningful information. “Good Morning” brings nothing more to the conversation than “I can has cheezburger?”
The bot is not hard to bypass, but you do have to think for an additional half second to get around it.
Unsurprisingly, when the bot dies, for whatever reason, the room immediately devolves into ROFLCOPTERS, AYBABTU, and a seemingly endless stream of LOL’s. Human nature, I guess, is to rebel against arbitrary rule, even when the people strongly approve of and support that rule.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Uniqueness can be done computationally. Just generate a UUID, convert it to a numeric base in which words are used as digits, and add to the end of your message:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID
Given the pervasiveness and adaptability of such methods of subversion, I’d suggest it isn’t uniqueness that’s should be sought here. There’s an infinite amount of unique but uninteresting material. Instead, you want “rare but probably meaningful and not overused”. One possible test would be that your phrase would have to contain a Googlewhack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack