[dredmorbius]

I've been looking for intelligent conversation online for over 25 years. For a time it was Usenet. I mostly missed the Well, though I caught mailing lists, Slashdot, and for a brief moment, G+ (it's still there, and I've cultivated a useful community, though the reach is small).

I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies, and frankly was surprised at the results: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

The methodology uses the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.

As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.

Facebook beats G+, largely.

Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.

The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it exceptionally good.

But blogs suck for exposure and engagement.

This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)

One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the default "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly ignore would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.

As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design (http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.

[FiatLuxDave]

Very interesting post. I've also been looking for interesting content online since Usenet days, although my interests are a bit more .sci than .soc.

If you ever do a similar analysis using say, science Nobel Prize Winners or some other similar list, I'd love to see it.

[dredmorbius]

More to the point: the FP Global 100 list was simply a proxy for "what's a list of search tokens that's likely to indicate meaningful conversation?". I picked the FP list as it was available, comprehensive, and Not Mine (that is, I didn't select the names, and disagree fairly markedly with several inclusions).

The individuals named cover a range of backgrounds, from natural and social sciences to politics, religion, and a few authors, artists, and other creatives.

[dredmorbius]

I suspect the patterns would be strongly similar. I've not posted raw data, though they're somewhat in line with the overall trends. A few exceptions -- forums or publications who cater strongly to a specific name. Richard Dawkins is hugely popular, and NY Times is grossly skewed (for obvious reasons) to mentions of Paul Krugman.