Companies Who Make Money: Datapresser

This is really really awful for the future of the Internet. Generating random content is specifically the kind of garbage that we don't want on the web. It's the definition of 'free-ridership' -- lets create a bunch of valueless nonsense programmatically, and massively destroy true value (real useful information) and then PROFIT.<p>Weak.

I'm not sure whether or not it's a joke<p>I'm not sure whether or not I hope it's a joke.

If its true, and the datapresser site seems legit (<a href="http://datapresser.com/generate_unique_content" rel="nofollow">http://datapresser.com/generate_unique_content</a>), it would explain so much.

There's a Philip K. Dick story that involves a machine like this that is used to generate political speeches. Can't quite remember the title. Anyone know?

Actually, datapresser sounds like a very interesting side-project to work on, involving natural language processing and machine learning. I'm pretty impressed, sounds like it could have been a side project turned into a viable startup business.

This reminds me of SCIgen: <a href="http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/" rel="nofollow">http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/</a> These guys entered their auto-generated research paper to a conference and actually got invited to present it at a seminar.

I kept looking at the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st, but this appears to be real.

Their volume of articles really does not seem implausible given their number of writers and the abundace of information. Sure, they put out quite a few articles a day, but if that is their mission, it is not surprising. What they do is far from inhuman.<p>That said, this product seems like it could be of use for them.

Anyway, this pales in comparison to the awesome power of the Twat-O-Tron, an automatic comment generator for the BBC's news website: <a href="http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o-tron/" rel="nofollow">http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o...</a><p>Also works on YouTube.

-1 shallow TC bashing<p>-1 feeds unhealthy TC obsession<p>-1 weak attempt at humor<p>-1 single joke stretched out too long<p>-1 ungrammatical headline<p>-1 awkward writing in article<p>In the News.YC of my dreams, everyone who upvoted this article would be disenfranchised.

Sounds bogus.

It might sound surprising but CNet also uses similar techniques to generate huge parts of their product reviews.<p>The technique is the biggest threat to the current crop of 'content' driven search engines (read Google and everyone else) and has the potential to wreak havoc with current ranking systems. Given the lucrative nature of the automatic content generation business, this is also inevitable.

Sounds like fun little subversive marketing campaign from datapresser.

Using such a tool sounds like a vast lie from the companies benefiting from it. Isn't impersonation a crime? It would be fun to sue for massive amounts one of the fake users and then the company that generated would be liable:))) If ever proven so through.

Well isn't that something.

No.