monastery memory

[mojotoad]

Well...though it's not directly addressing what you bring up, I feel compelled to dust off an old missive of my own:

Node Tension

I'm not claiming it's a total match to the topic, but it does discuss some of the dynamic.

It generated a moderate amount of interest at the time, but what level of interest engenders real change around here I'm not sure -- it's quite possible that today is a different climate from when I first wrote it.

But some of the ideas at least overlap with what you're suggesting.

Cheers,
Matt

[spiritway]

You know, that idea is something that's been tugging at my brain - couldn't really figure out what it was, but you said it so well. There really is tension over some posts - such as, the OP's in this thread. I'm not sure whether keeping track of tension would be worthwhile (or how much work it would create for the gods), but it's an interesting concept.

[Roy Johnson]

Interesting node, Matt, particularly the notion of reporting on tension in threads. For kicks, I threw together a little code to see how well the binomial standard deviation would work as a measure of an individual post's tension.
Read more... (798 Bytes)
The results didn't appeal to me, because a lot of votes in one direction and just a few in the other can make for a comparatively high result. So using the stddev of reps in a thread as a measure of tension in the thread probably wouldn't appeal, either.

Possibly counter-intuitively, it is the nodes of low tension (and low rep) that I would like to have warnings for, while I think that threads of high tension are most likely to include trolls.