Comment Snob
What a brilliant idea. Some technical cove has come up with a Firefox browser extension called “YouTube Comment Snob“. All you have to do is download it, restart your browser and - hey presto! - all the illiterate, half-witted, foul-mouthed comments on YouTube disappear.
Like so.
It’s simple, really. Comments are filtered out if they:
- have more than a specified number spelling mistakes:
- are written solely in capital letters
- have no capital letters at all
- don’t start with a capital letter
- use excessive punctuation (!!!! ???? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
- use excessive capitalization
- contain profanity.
Which rather set me thinking. Maybe, just maybe, the author might be willing to collaborate with me to create…
Comment is Free Comment Snob
The idea is simple. Any comment that falls into the following categories will automatically be removed from the page:
- Dreary, half-baked tosspottery about Israel and/ or Palestine. Especially on articles that have nothing to do with either - like heavyweight pieces on West End boutiques or guides on staging operas in your own home.
- Patronising dismissal of any logical argument (and thus defence of one’s fondly-cherished prejudices) with phrases like “the beauty of your argument is its simplicity”.
- Accusations that other commenters are Tories, simply because they don’t drool at the thought of Ken Livingstone.
Indeed, before I get carried away, why don’t we go the whole hog and invent a browser extension that deletes articles by anyone who falls into one or more of these categories?
- A banger on about the plight of the poor who earns a six-figure salary.
- A relative of someone else who works on the Guardian.
- An occasional, non-journalist contributor who has been on holiday with anyone who works for the Guardian.
- An environment bore who buys a car the moment they actually need one.
- A columnist who is secretly indignant that they’ve not been poached by The Times, where they’d get a fatter salary and a wider readership.
I could go on, but I think that’s enough to make the thing readable once again. I could just about face leafing through something like this over my morning tea and toast:
Or maybe I’ve been too hasty. A browser plugin that pastes Simon Hoggart’s latest parliamentary sketch over any Comment is Free page would do the job perfectly.
I only wish I knew how to write it myself.
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Don’t miss the articles about the evils of tax avoidance published by someone whose employer can afford to pay her a three-figure salary by means of using every legal loophole possible to minimise its tax bill.
I would extend the feature to the Torygraph site in which anything by pompous ginger-haired right-wingers or blonde girls with not much to say for themselves gets zapped into oblivion.
Comment by bill — 26th August, 2008 @ 8:40 pm
“Comments are filtered out if they contain profanity”: have you read the first one left in?
(It’s OK, but it does contain what the Yanks quaintly and misleadingly call “profanity”)
(I would go on to point out that the anti-Livingstone mobs usually are de facto Tories - and nowt wrong with that - just those that aren’t honest enough to admit it annoy me - but that would turn my comment blank, so let is go as understood)
However bad the British Press may be, the Russian, particularly in its online variants, is immeasurably worse (and prone to excess hysteria, possibly in a counter-reaction to the historic tedium of its paper-based precedents); fave headline of yesterday, from Argumenty i fakty “If Saakhashvili isn’t assassinated in September, he’ll be brought to trial in December” (this over an article by a “numerologist” who concluded that Misha’s irrational hotheaded lunacy and lack of restraint or reason was attribuable to having been born on a date with no number “3″ in). This, in a serious and generally respected paper. Far worse than anything at CiF
Comment by Dominic — 28th August, 2008 @ 10:51 am
I would go on to point out that the anti-Livingstone mobs usually are de facto Tories - and nowt wrong with that - just those that aren’t honest enough to admit it annoy me - but that would turn my comment blank, so let is go as understood
Precisely the sort of self-deluding nonsense over which it is kinder to draw a veil, Dominic. The old “if you don’t agree with x you must be y” is the favourite debating tactic of simpletons, charlatans, bores, bullies and creeps the world over.
You could add a couple of very topical examples: Obama supporters who claim that anyone who doesn’t like their man is an evil racist, or McCain fans who claim that all those who back the Obamamessiah (geddit? eh?) are deluded, fawning groupies who go weak-kneed at a nice speech. Blank ‘em all out.
As for the anti-Ken crowd, as one of the leading Tories4Ken you must surely really that given the heterodox nature of his support, his opponents are likely to be a similarly diverse lot. If someone was attacking him for being an evil socialist or using typically Tory arguments and language about tax, the role of the state, law and order etc then, yes, they probably are Tories.
But if they’re criticising him for, say, the cronyism and alleged corruption in his administration, his love of skyscrapers, his views on communal relations, foreign policy, the environment or what have you, to make assumptions about that person’s general stance makes you either a fool or a knave.*
*Both Ken or Boris are clearly one, if not both, of these things. But if we could tell which was which we’d know everything.
Comment by bill — 28th August, 2008 @ 10:19 pm