Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on: http://dem

Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on: http://demaws.net/projects/tldr http://demaws.net/projects/tldr Also, I wrote a very long essay on the problems of web forums (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000) which was covered previously here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682 In that essay, I tried to rethink what exactly moderation and comments/conversations meant. I like your approach of contrasting threads that are over- or under-moderated with threads that maintain an 'appropriate' moderation/reply ratio. But as noodle wrote above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856), it may not be able to distinguish between certain types of commenting. My current instinct is that moderation tells us more about the moderator than it does about the comment being moderated. I'm just not sure how to to operationalize that insight.