Being a somewhat erratic reader here, I find the Daily/Weekly/Monthly Best Nodes helpful to find high quality content in my limited time. (AFAIK, Daily Best does not have it's own page, but is derived from Best Nodes, and there's more info at About the Daily Best Nodelet.)

But I often feel I'm missing out on the OPs that have lots of good discussion, while not making it into Best Nodes.

My question: Is there a "Best Thread" mechanism? If not, is there enough interest to consider making one?

Of course, this begs the question of what a "Best Thread" is, because we don't vote on threads. Given the current scheme, we'd have to compute some thread score, such as Sum_of_Node_Votes / Number_of_Nodes. Perhaps throw in a multiplier for unique responders, or unique readers.

I did a quick search here, but of course "thread" comes up with the other kind, and I didn't find anything relevant. Please point me to any previous discussions.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Daily Best Thread?
by LanX (Saint) on Sep 29, 2014 at 09:36 UTC
    The definition of "best" post depends on personal taste and is highly disputed, let alone for threads.

    Theoretically one could define a set of preferred contributors and rank the threads after their appearance.

    This set could be derived from your voting history.

    Even better if there was a way to rank posts after the votes of those preferred monks.

    Saying so I doubt this will ever be realized cause it's not only a technological question but needs plenty of tuning with unknown outcome.

    The best I can recommend to you is to write a script to regularly pull Best Nodes and to construct a ranking on your own which is displayed on your website.

    Cheers Rolf

    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)

[reply]
Re: Daily Best Thread?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 29, 2014 at 10:12 UTC

    I seriously doubt that I could come up with a set of objective criteria, that would match my own subjective judgment of the days best thread, for any two days on the trot. (Can you?)

    So I'd not even try doing so for any substantial subset of the membership.

    If you can do so for yourself -- try picking one out for a few days and then examine what you think makes them so and what commonalities they have -- then you might be able to program such a metric for your own delectation.

    With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
    Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
    "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
    In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
[reply]
Re: Daily Best Thread?
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2014 at 09:09 UTC
[reply]
      Searching for any post with 10 levels of replies (assuming no one has retitled them) is probably negatively correlated with quality of thread, as far as I can tell.

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

[reply]

        Searching for any post with 10 levels of replies (assuming no one has retitled them) is probably negatively correlated with quality of thread, as far as I can tell.

        It probably isn't :) But if you think it is, pick your threshold Re^11, Re^9, Re^8, Re^7, Re^6

        Anything worth reading that isn't a tutorial goes past Re^3 at least

[reply]
Re: Daily Best Thread?
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Sep 29, 2014 at 15:03 UTC

    Well, you could probably do something with upvotes/downvotes, particularly if the system tallied these two counts separately, which (AFAIK ...) it currently does not.   If an article received upvotes, and whether-or-not(!) it received downvotes as well, I think it would be a “best.”

    This would more-or-less mimic the behavior of other forum systems, which normally allow you to say that you “like” an article but not that you “dislike” it.

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