Re:Share your ideas
by derefr on Sunday August 23, 2009 @12:21AM
(#780184)
I've thought about this one too. I think I can write less than an essay, though: the solution is basically tagging in reverse. Comment threads aren't attached to individual links, but rather to tags (thus there is a 1:1 correspondence between "tag" and "discussion"; the words can be used interchangeably.) Discussions keep a list at the top of all the articles that go into them. The score of a link isn't an independent variable, but rather the sum of the "relevance" scores for each link-tag pair (that is, the weights of the graph edges.)
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so, an IRC channel?
Not quite—it's about half-way in between a Reddit-like model and an IRC server. Unlike an IRC server, everything someone "says" (links to) must be cross-posted to all the threads/channels they think it's applicable to, instead of hidden within the context of the conversation being had at the moment. Unlike an IRC server, people can vote on the articles' relevances to each conversation. And unlike an IRC server, the articles with the highest aggregate relevances show up on a "front page." It would take about the same amount of work to make an IRC service daemon that managed voting and gave a "front page" listing as it would to extend a social-news/bookmarking service with tag-link-pair voting and move discussions to tags. Plus, I think the IRC culture would be less willing to accept the resulting "conversation bleed" than the social-news/bookmarking culture.