Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.
Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.
As the site notes in its blog, this move comes after a number of other attempts at thwarting spam submissions, including adding moderators to handle spam. But at each turn, the site found that the traffic became overwhelming and false positives, that is, valid content that set off the filters but should not have, became an issue.
In addition to these problems, the site also found that the generally American make-up of the moderators left those of you in Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the future stuck with valid submissions sitting in spam boxes, as the moderators were fast asleep.
Thus, Reddit has “deputized” its users, enlisting them all in the battle against spam submissions by including a box that will appear “at the top of the front page every once in a while”.
