The problem for any music-related service that’s got scale is that it attracts spammers. Not to mention slightly over-excitable fans whose enthusiasm may cross the line into comment-swamping. SoundCloud has been working hard on tackling these issues with an in-house tool called Sketchy, but now it’s open-sourcing it for other companies to use. “Every email service has its own spam-fighting system, and every web company that reaches the scale of SoundCloud has to solve this problem one way or another,” developer evangelist Erik Michaels-Ober tells GigaOm. “What we’re trying to do by open-sourcing it is to make it free and customizable so that everyone can use it to solve this problem for once and for all, so companies don’t have to build their own.” The software detects behaviour that seems like spamming, but then reports it to humans on SoundCloud’s community management team so they can decide what action to take. “We obviously have users who exceed our expectations, so … we’re constantly tuning these things,” says Michaels-Ober.
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In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…