Of course this is meant as a joke, but what if we take a look at it seriously.
Depending on the source, anywhere from 75% to 95% of e-mail is spam.
On blogs, like Wordpress, comment spam is also extremely high.
We can all agree that spam is annoying, distracting, and detrimental to the quality of the Internet.
Captchas were introduced first by PayPal and then made popular by Google to not only cut down on spam, but to also do some good at the same time.
Google's reCAPTCHA both verifies users as human and helps determine the difficult to understand words used in scanned books for the Google Books project.
A brilliant example of turning trash to treasure.
Now that bots are beginning to be programmed to find out ways to get around captchas, we need to reevaluate current methods of keeping out the junk.
What if XKCD's joke came true?
What if there was a way to simply make unwanted and potentially dangerous spam indistinguishable from and equally as valuable as human messages?
Granted, "valuable" comments, e-mails, posts, etc. are subjective, but at least they are not massively distributed or have an ulterior motive, usually for commercial gain.
It would truly be a magnificent feat if all spam was converted somehow to "constructive and helpful comments."
Doing so would be a major cleanup effort and preventative measure to keep online communication useful and relevant.
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