I doubt I’m the first to think of that, but this idea might help cleaning the Internet of some spam. The idea is that people will install a small program on their computer that will send them from time to time (according to their preferences) some text that was publicly posted somewhere on the Internet. It could be anything: a blog post, a wiki edit, a forum post, a YouTube comment, whatever. The person will then click to say if this is spam or not.
The same content will be sent to multiple users, so that the system will not be easily gamed by people that are paid to create spam. If there’s a user that keeps marking almost everything as “not spam” he/she will be kicked out of the system (or even given data that is surely spam to test if we maybe have an “evil” bot.)
Hopefully we’re only talking about the “maybe spam” that was returned from an automatic spam filter, like Akismet. This will reduce the number of messages to check greatly. Regardless, this kind of system can only work if the number of “good” users exceeds by far the number of “evil” users, but since everyone hates spam and it’s a minimal effort I believe enough people will join in. Search engines can use this system to test if a fresh new blog is just a spam blog or a real one.
Unfortunately this will not work for any type of private communication, like email, simply because email is private and you can’t let other people see it.
So, do you think it’s a good idea, or did I miss an obvious way to game this Human Anti Spam system? If it’s good, maybe I’ll send it to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th.