It’s another business story that reveals something human the more you look at it. Huffington Post, which a lot of people think may be about to be sold itself, has bought up a small company that moderates comments from readers of web sites. Adaptive Semantics’ technology uses “supervised machine learning” to suss through all the comments people leave and figure out which ones are inappropriate. Tech Crunch reports,
“Not only can it detect abusive language or hate speech, but it can also help find commenters who may be topic experts.”
Wow. What are the implications for technology like this? In what other ways can it be used?
HuffPo is a hugely popular site and is swamped by comments. But the thing about comments on a web site is that it appears as content on the web site. So you can take the time to craft a really elegant piece of web content that fulfills the mission of what you, as the site’s proprietor, want it to be and then some goofball comes on with insane hostility and those rantings appear in the same space. I think this could be a jumping off point for a discussion about comments. Engadget recently turned comments off, some bloggers have never had them. You want comments to enrich the experience but sometimes they destroy it (looked at the horror that is YouTube comments lately?)
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
