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Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are attempting to eliminate stupid comments from the Web with the open-source project StupidFilter. On first mention, it sounds great. We wish there was a StupidFilter for blog posts and magazine articles too. On looking into it, though, we realized that what we really need is a StupidFilter for startups like this.

The StupidFilter is literally stupid. The creators concede there is not sufficient artificial intelligence to filter stupidity. The filter focuses on "comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on." In other words, it's not a stupid filter. It's an automated grammar Nazi.

The StupidFilter's rules are arbitrary. One of the filter's creators provides this example:

The clueless tend to repeat consonants: "This video is amazinggggg!!!" By comparison, says Ortiz, "when you repeat a vowel, you're being sarcastic — 'Yeaaaaaah.'"

Yeaaaaaah.

The StupidFilter's creator posts stupid content. George Ortiz's own Web site describes himself as a "Badass MC." Links on the page include: "My Friends And I Are Pretty Good Cooks, "My Pretty Okay Photography," and "Trust Me, I'm A Professional" — that last one is for his resume.

The StupidFilter encourages stupid comments that sound smart. When the filter encounters a stupid comment, it warns the poster and requests that they restate their comment. Telling a commenter "This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it" will merely encourage comments that are even stupider, but phrased grammatically.

The utopian notion here, of course, is that we can somehow make the Internet a smarter place than the offline world. Right. That dream died when AOL loosed its users on the Internet back in the '90s. The endeavor is, on its face, stupid. We'll stick with our system: Force commenters to audition, and then ban them on the first sign of stupidity.