There are a couple of angles, straight up representation of forum | subreddit threads after the conversation has moved on, "live" tracking comments as conversations progress, and moderation of live threads (including swatting | detecting trolls, spambots, griefers, etc) (oh, and retro sweeps looking for tail end spammers and their puppet networks eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800160 (with "ShowDead" on)).
In post analysis there's the whole ball of wax around decrufting chat threads to pull the meat best served to (various) AI, either for training, company | group intelligence, etc. Oh, and fingerprinting across multiple sources looking for common {group | individual} traits
The intrinsic issue with excluding all but those with a current PhD on chat would be the tossing of, say, those with dated PhD in theoretical physics or somesuch.
@dang obviously mods here and likely has a slew of lisp-y scripts | tools for giving various views, @jedberg was about for much of the early evolution of reddit and took part in a lot of discussions about presentation and implemented a few.
There'll also be useful input from any of those who've moderated | admin various largish forums | channels, etc over the years.
I'm interested in fora other than HN but HN is a great target because it is easy to get at through the API. Other fora have the problem of atrocious interfaces such as
or the half-baked "threaded discussions" that exist on Twitter, Mastodon and clones that people abuse in various ways. Those forums need it more.
So far as the PhD I brought that up as one specific example. (Funny I have a physics PhD from a while ago, I still remember a lot about Hamiltonian chaos and its quantum manifestations, can understand something looking at the math from string theory, etc.)
My problem is related to the moderation problem but is different because I don't need to be fair to anybody or be perceived to be fair.
In general I am talking with a friend about ways to make the commenting experience online better that include everything from tools for power users to large-scale modifications of "the system" to change the incentives to change people's behavior. I can demo the first one today, the second is a bit harder.
