I have to think about it for a while and will let you know, because there are 2 important things to consider: what will be visualized and how. In case of how yo

I have to think about it for a while and will let you know, because there are 2 important things to consider: what will be visualized and how. In case of how you've got plenty of options: colors, size and even some icons or graphs. But before deciding on the form the crucial part will be what. And that requires defining some kind of methodology for measuring the dynamics of what I've called 'the heat of discussion'. I personally (probably like mmatey) come to HN to learn something new and discover new opinions, reflections and reactions of the people. Some important metrics of a good thread might be: number of commenters, length of comments, number of 1-on-1 ping-pong comment exchanges where the answers are upvoted by other people. You know discovering the threads where people are actually discussing something, because current system of HN ranking doesn't differentiate such threads from topics where 200 hundred people comment "Yeah, me too" ;) Well, these were just few unstructured reflections, I'll get back to you later if I'll have something more interesting and you'll be interested.