Would it be possible to analyse a database of comments and votes on them to mathematically determine the coalitions among the members of the forum (LW or other)? Could this be used to inform politics, counter politics or otherwise improve political dialog?
In general there should be a way to outsource forum moderation tasks like these, rather than everyone in charge of a community having to do it themselves.
Absolutely there should be! But do you know of anyone providing these tools? Reddit has certain mod bots, but I’ve never heard of an anti-sockpuppet one. By comparison, there are blockbots, so people who are politically blue can block the greens if they hate their enemies and refuse to see the other sides POV, but since we don’t have subreddits, anything of that ilk won’t work here.
Use something like the reddit system for ranking posts with a twist.
If you drew a directed graph of all users who have upvoted each other and weighted upvotes based on the previous distance between the 2 nodes.
So 1 upvote from someone very dissimilar to yourself who’s a long way from you in the graph who rarely votes becomes far more valuable than 1 upvote from someone who votes on everything, always upvotes every post you make and who’s posts you always upvote.
Would it be possible to analyse a database of comments and votes on them to mathematically determine the coalitions among the members of the forum (LW or other)? Could this be used to inform politics, counter politics or otherwise improve political dialog?
Yes, but I don’t know how helpful it would be. It could however, unmask sockpuppets which would be useful.
In general there should be a way to outsource forum moderation tasks like these, rather than everyone in charge of a community having to do it themselves.
Absolutely there should be! But do you know of anyone providing these tools? Reddit has certain mod bots, but I’ve never heard of an anti-sockpuppet one. By comparison, there are blockbots, so people who are politically blue can block the greens if they hate their enemies and refuse to see the other sides POV, but since we don’t have subreddits, anything of that ilk won’t work here.
Omnilibrium tries this, so certainly possible.
hmm… perhaps.
Use something like the reddit system for ranking posts with a twist.
If you drew a directed graph of all users who have upvoted each other and weighted upvotes based on the previous distance between the 2 nodes.
So 1 upvote from someone very dissimilar to yourself who’s a long way from you in the graph who rarely votes becomes far more valuable than 1 upvote from someone who votes on everything, always upvotes every post you make and who’s posts you always upvote.
That is some awesome proposal because it is relevant, specific and likely efficiently implementable. Thank you!