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Funny story, I had almost exactly the same idea in 2013 and prototyped it in Mathematica (probably a lot of people have had this idea). Here's a screenshot of s

Funny story, I had almost exactly the same idea in 2013 and prototyped it in Mathematica (probably a lot of people have had this idea). Here's a screenshot of some random thread that I happened to visualize (comments were visible as tooltips in my rough and ready implementation): https://imgur.com/a/9xfw6cA https://imgur.com/a/9xfw6cA (color represents common authorship, size is comment length). I didn't have the Javascript chops to do anything usable, let alone as polished as the linked Chrome plugin; kudos to the author! Another thing I was doing at the time was visualizing Twitter and Facebook friend graphs, and the first insight there was to deliberately drop the 'ego' node, as it destroys any hope of effectively showing community structure of the friends themselves (it also carries no extra information as everyone is necessarily connected to the ego). So perhaps a similar thing would be effective for threaded conversations: if you drop the root node, disconnected discussions will become separate trees in the visualization, which will help with efficient use of space, and the tail of singleton comments that no one replied to will become isolated disks that can space-fill the background. Switching to an actual rectangular tree layout as I used in my prototype will also help in that one consistent direction (down) represents nested depth.

ventedfins 7y ago
I've talked to a few people who've had similar ideas! In fact there is a pretty long history of people in visualization/hci communities creating applications like this. There's an extended abstract that goes along with this work that details this history. Dropping the root node is an interesting idea!
- taliesinb 7y ago
  Do you mind linking to the abstract? Would like to read that history.
  - ventedfins 7y ago
    I'm trying to figure out if i'm allowed to post it publicly yet, in the mean time shoot me a message (on say twitter @_mcnutt_) and I'll send it to you
    - ventedfins 7y ago
      Follow up here it is: https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/blob/master/assets/forum-explorer-paper.pdf https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/blob/...
- jcims 7y ago
  Have you thought about extending the graph to include links found in the individual comments? Internal links to HN could surface those threads and external link nodes could show all stories with said link to find related content. Unrelated, might be fun to surface some kind of iconography to indicate semantics of the content (e.g. flames/smilies/etc)
jjtheblunt 7y ago
You could look up Prof Simon Kaplan's Conversation Builder effort at UIUC in 1989 and thereafter, for the earliest variant i know of. Mark Allender worked on it there, for instance.
- ventedfins 7y ago
  that's so cool! i had previously thought that the first link in this line of work was in '99 with Donath's visualizing conversation https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4/4/JCMC442/4584411 https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4/4/JCMC442/4584411

ventedfins 7y ago

I've talked to a few people who've had similar ideas! In fact there is a pretty long history of people in visualization/hci communities creating applications like this. There's an extended abstract that goes along with this work that details this history. Dropping the root node is an interesting idea!

taliesinb 7y ago
Do you mind linking to the abstract? Would like to read that history.
- ventedfins 7y ago
  I'm trying to figure out if i'm allowed to post it publicly yet, in the mean time shoot me a message (on say twitter @_mcnutt_) and I'll send it to you
  - ventedfins 7y ago
    Follow up here it is: https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/blob/master/assets/forum-explorer-paper.pdf https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/mcnuttandrew.github.io/blob/...
jcims 7y ago
Have you thought about extending the graph to include links found in the individual comments? Internal links to HN could surface those threads and external link nodes could show all stories with said link to find related content. Unrelated, might be fun to surface some kind of iconography to indicate semantics of the content (e.g. flames/smilies/etc)

jjtheblunt 7y ago

You could look up Prof Simon Kaplan's Conversation Builder effort at UIUC in 1989 and thereafter, for the earliest variant i know of. Mark Allender worked on it there, for instance.

ventedfins 7y ago
that's so cool! i had previously thought that the first link in this line of work was in '99 with Donath's visualizing conversation https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4/4/JCMC442/4584411 https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4/4/JCMC442/4584411