[PaulHoule]

I’m thinking about making a tool to do this, I haven’t quite gotten to loading a comment thread but I have loaded 250k images and also 400 from Evernote. Next in line is to load some unwieldy discussions, particularly from a site with a horrible comment UI such as Arstechnica.

I’m particularly thinking about how to make sense of badly organized threads from Mastodon and similar things.

[defrost]

With timecode metadata and heatmaps to highlight rapidfire back 'n forth and stuff?

Semantic scoring to rate quip chains Vs. slower, longer considered interactions?

Ways of highlighting high frequency commenters, perhaps rating frequent flyers by degree of interest in what they have to say and weighting threads by "participant rating".

There are many ways to go in this space.

[PaulHoule]

The best idea I have now is to scan HN and make a list of commenters who said something like “I am working on a PhD in this topic”.

[defrost]

If you're serious you might want to reach out and chat with https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jedberg for their thoughts.

There are a couple of angles, straight up representation of forum | subreddit threads after the conversation has moved on, "live" tracking comments as conversations progress, and moderation of live threads (including swatting | detecting trolls, spambots, griefers, etc) (oh, and retro sweeps looking for tail end spammers and their puppet networks eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800160 (with "ShowDead" on)).

In post analysis there's the whole ball of wax around decrufting chat threads to pull the meat best served to (various) AI, either for training, company | group intelligence, etc. Oh, and fingerprinting across multiple sources looking for common {group | individual} traits

The intrinsic issue with excluding all but those with a current PhD on chat would be the tossing of, say, those with dated PhD in theoretical physics or somesuch.

@dang obviously mods here and likely has a slew of lisp-y scripts | tools for giving various views, @jedberg was about for much of the early evolution of reddit and took part in a lot of discussions about presentation and implemented a few.

There'll also be useful input from any of those who've moderated | admin various largish forums | channels, etc over the years.

[PaulHoule]

I'm interested in fora other than HN but HN is a great target because it is easy to get at through the API. Other fora have the problem of atrocious interfaces such as

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/german-navy-still-us...

or the half-baked "threaded discussions" that exist on Twitter, Mastodon and clones that people abuse in various ways. Those forums need it more.

So far as the PhD I brought that up as one specific example. (Funny I have a physics PhD from a while ago, I still remember a lot about Hamiltonian chaos and its quantum manifestations, can understand something looking at the math from string theory, etc.)

My problem is related to the moderation problem but is different because I don't need to be fair to anybody or be perceived to be fair.

In general I am talking with a friend about ways to make the commenting experience online better that include everything from tools for power users to large-scale modifications of "the system" to change the incentives to change people's behavior. I can demo the first one today, the second is a bit harder.