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365degrees wrote

Yes, there'd be a lot of technical change.

Users would provide lists, users and other means of deciding that computers like that specify what they consider spam, trolling, or otherwise unwanted.

For example, I might have something like:

* titles containing dogs in /f/aww
* Joy Division covers
* a specific post where not-ziq makes fun of an excellent meme

(These examples are absolutely made up and aren't very computer friendly.) If anything matches those specifiers, Postmill/Raddle would not show it to me. Since these lists aren't easy or quick to make, I could optionally rely on other people's lists. Someone else could say these are unwanted:

* GNOME release notes
* sandwich recipes with tomatoes

The server could use majority logic or some other Boolean operator to decide, using both lists, what is unwanted.

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leftous OP wrote

That is a really cool idea. Basically a sort of custom filter. I wonder if there would be a way to implement that similar to the way emma implemented themes, where people make custom user-defined rules and views. It almost needs a programming/style language of its own, though.

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365degrees wrote

Nettle has two which are good for string operations and booleans.

The first was a FORTH, which emma and I agreed to design to write similar rule engines for Postmill and Nettle. Arithmetic was also there, but the order that arguments were supposed to be in got confusing, so we moved it around a bit.

The second, which is used now, is a Lisp and is written as 260 very verbose lines of Python, with functions that aren't very needed.

An intermediate would be easy to work with though. This is loosely based off Haskell, but with less syntactic magic:

canPost x = substring? x "Everyone say this or no posts!"
postDelay = * 7 + 3 3
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