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Billions in quarterly revenue doesn't allow Apple to solve the halting problem. I can't begin to imagine how they would do what you're suggesting. They need to detect when a website changes in kind, but ignore day-to-day changes or normal UI revamps.


I'm honestly unclear on how you can't see how Apple could solve this with billions. It is definitely a "throw money at it" situation, no question.

Moderation is a hard problem because it isn't just a matter of someone filtering between the polite posts and the less polite posts, it's a matter of filtering between the polite posts and the content that will sear your soul, no joke.

But that's not what this is. This is just, is the website still there and look correct? With the correct software setup it's roughly a person-month by my estimate to gets eyes on every site in the list.

(Though most people usually don't set write this sort of software very well, making someone laboriously click this, scroll around some, click some more, click a tiny radio button, click the tiny submit button, wait for the next thing to load, etc. It'll be longer & more work with this style. Someday I hope to have the chance to write some sort of classification program and implement the UI I've wanted for a while, which amounts to "right -> ham, left -> spam", and everything as pre-rendered as I can get it before it gets to the human. I'm sure some people out there have done something like this, but it makes me honestly sad how few I've seen.)


> Billions in quarterly revenue doesn't allow Apple to solve the halting problem.

That would be a good point if this were the halting problem. It's not. It's a list of domains that you're suggesting to users.

For starters, a VERY basic solution might be to look up the domain name ownership information and see if that has changed. If so, flag for review.

Secondly, you can store the public SSL certificate and make sure that's still the same. If it changes, flag for review.

Thirdly, screencap the site, save it, periodically re-cap and compare how similar the images are. If it changes, flag for review.

> I can't begin to imagine how they would do what you're suggesting.

Did you try?

> They need to detect when a website changes in kind, but ignore day-to-day changes or normal UI revamps.

The solution doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be good enough.


There is a service called Visualping that basically does this. It takes a screenshot and sends you a “diff”. You can set it and say by what % things need to change.

They could use a similar tool plus human review to maintain the list.




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