The One Huge Issue That Is Going To Kill Tag-based Reading Systems

Louis Gray pointed out a new reading system yesterday called Lazyfeed,
and overall I am pretty happy with it, but like all tag based reading
systems, spammers and other miscreants have so corrupted the general
tag base to get their message in front of people that tag based systems
need something else to make sure they are delivering good valid content
for the search strings provided.

Tag based systems have always had one huge Achilles heel, and that
is that people often either overuse, misuse, or abuse tags to try to
get their message in front of as many people as possible. And while
lazyfeed is absolutely awesome, it suffers the same problem that many
tag based systems have, spammers have pretty well appropriated the tag
system making it nearly meaningless as a way to get good information on
the internet.

Here is case number 1 – tag hacking started coughing up page after
page of the best Xbox 360 games to get your hands on. I was more or
less looking to see what was happening in the hacking community with
the new Firefox 3.5 Zero day and instead got a pile of link farmed Xbox
360 stuff that I really didn’t need to or want to see.

Here is case number 2 – same tag, hacking, but further down the
page, I like this one because it shows that you get some really
interesting nonsense dealing with tag based systems that are auto
generated by spammers (or systems engaged in spammy behavior) like the
first entry in this picture. The context of the message is meaningless
verbal nonsense, but entertaining to attract attention from other major
systems and devoid of any real content.

Lazyfeed is not the only ones who
have this issue, we have seen this with Technorati and other tag based
systems. What needs to happen though is add a bit of human intelligence
to the system, or allow someone to flag the entry as spam and let the
community do the filtering for you. I also sent this along as feedback
to Lazyfeed, but I also think this is important enough that people who
are developing tag based systems need to have a way for the community
to filter content, or put a process/human in place that will also
filter out content based on the actual abuse of tags.

Tag abuse is something that is fairly common and seen far too often,
people who are developing systems that rely on tags should work on a
way to filter/limit/community reporting the abuse and a way to black
list blogs/people that overuse/abuse tags in their entries.

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)