[pkoiralap]

DAG does seem natural here. Having a LLM add metadata to the nodes can make this even cooler. For instance, person A presents statement Sa. Person B comments on person A's statement, Sba and person C comments on person A's statement, Sca. The viewers now, especially new parties that are joining the conversation, would be able to see that Sba agrees to most of Sa said, but refutes a fact said by Sa. Sca doesn't agree with anything Sa is saying. Another example would be, nodes getting more weight as more people agree with it and smaller as more people disagree. Obviously, the implementation and implications are boundless.

[basil-rash]

An idea I’ve been playing around with in my head for some time is to have LLM’s play a role in somehow generating an idealized debate structure of any given topic. For example, given the prompt “Namespaces are one honking great idea – let's do more of those!”, many actors (LLM’s, humans, etc) would submit top level replies to a hidden container. Eventually, an LLM would look over all the replies and cluster them into a small number of “essential responses”. The process repeats with each of these responses being new top level nodes. Eventually, a tree/dag/graph/something is created that recursively contains all the things one might have to say about the topic at hand.

[dleeftink]

Although the discussion structure may be different from Fb/Twitter-like platforms, how does this approach mitigate or go around algorithmic curation issues? It's long been know that posts or comments that are visible 'above the fold' promote certain (popular) ideas while occluding the varied long tail. Discoverability, in a way, still needs to be taken into account.

[brody_hamer]

I really like this idea.

Maybe it wouldn’t work for internet chats, but for discussing complex topics as a team? Yes!

[brabel]

I think this would basically kill debates about a lot of things (which is a good thing).

Because when you read enough of the common things people debate, like whether dynamically typed languages are a very bad idea, or how we should address global warming, or stuff like that, you quickly realize there's only a few clusters of arguments which can probably be summarized in a few words each. If you know those clusters, it becomes increasingly hard to add anything different to the discussion... but most people have already heard each of the cluster arguments but did not accept it, which is why the topic remains unresolved - despite the fact that, if everyone agreed on the factual nature of each claim, there would be a mathematically optimal answer. I think the problem is not finding the answer, but accepting the arguments - which you can't get people to do in any case where some judgement is needed.

[_bent]

Considering how debates tend to go in circles, I'm not sure if a DAG is the right data structure

[AnimalMuppet]

The comments are a DAG. The ideas go in circles.

But I'm not sure you can get an automated map from comments to ideas, no matter what data structure you use...

[Nevermark]

HN just doesn't have enough controls. I don't just want to reply to you, I want to elevate this comment so your comment is a reply to it...

(Perhaps you could edit in a circular quote of this... :)