Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?
Is there a place on the Internet for general -- including political and economic -- discussion that is filled with civil, insightful commentary?
Outside of specialist corners (such as HN), the Internet often appears to be filled primarily with hateful repetition of populist punchlines, providing little to no insight into the big topics that concern the world at the moment. This is such a shame, as the Internet really should be the enabler of discussion across borders and societies (which of course can become heated but should always be respectful and rooted in trying to understand each other!).
From what I have read, The WELL seems to have been such a place (or still is?) in the "old days", but where do you go today for such an exchange of ideas on a variety of topics?
(Note: It is allowed to cost money.)
240 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThe Geek topic is generally too non-technical for me.
You have much slimmer pickings if you're a conservative. http://gab.ai recently launched as a pro free-speech twitter alternative, I would also check them out.
IMO, it doesn't matter if the platform leans left as long as it fosters constructive and open discussion. You're correct that a lot of the heavy handed moderation (censorship?) is on popular communities that trend left, but that's just a money related trend imo. Companies want to make their product a "safe" platform for investors
I hope we have Karl Marx' corpse wired up to a generator.
It's not that it's leftist. It's that the people online tend to lean leftwards, and people investing in online communities want to grab the largest portion of the available population.
I will say, however, that the left in the US (namely the Democratic party) certainly seems to be willing to pursue a lot in the name of money (like taking millions of dollars from corporate and financial lobbying), and a lot of leftists online are totally okay with creating echochambers (though that's certainly not their pursuit alone).
And, if you look at channels like Fox News, it has huge audience. Granted, online audience is different, but in this time and place, it's not that different. It's not 1990s anymore, using the internet is not for the elite anymore, no more than having a cellphone. Everybody now does that (not literally everybody but demographically pretty much all is covered).
So, why many online communities lean leftwards? I'd say because their organizers/maintainers lean leftwards. Those are usually people that are young, frequently college or early post-college age, frequently with background in liberal arts - that demographics leans left. And those that don't lean the same way don't feel comfortable there (and modern college left made making people disagreeing with them feel unwelcome practically into a competition sport) and leave. That'd happen and does happen with no money consideration involved.
It's _much_ more insidious, but I'll leave it at that.
If you do, then it's like spam, it will become the "default" content of the forum. If you don't, it will end up left-leaning as a "safe space".
There are genuinely incompatible populations for audience/contributors and you have to pick one.
(And if you have a hardline free speech policy where you refuse to delete anything, you'll end up hosting child porn. You have to have a deletion policy in order to have a functional forum.)
Funny, I'd have considered them to lean right, since I'm left, and don't see myself represented in them either.
I'm sure there's a name for this sort of cognitive bias.
Link?
Not much political stuff on the past day right now but if you look at the past month's posts about the US presidential candidates you'll see what I'm talking about.
Going by the coverage of the refugee crisis (more relevant to me in Austria) a while back it was looking the other way around, and I mostly stopped bothering with political subs.
It seems to me that your current election is a bit of a special entity, so this data might be a bit skewed. I don't know a single conservative/right/center minded person who would support the current repuplican nominee if she/he could. I think this comes from the fact that he is a very unique candidate. Saying that anti Trump is anti right doesn't acknoledge this.
There are also more general issues. Most public political discussions are not so much political but mostly ideological aka not meaningful. People who follow ideologies are self imposing an anti discussion barrier. Your two party system enforces this.
If I want political discussion and/or information then I talk to friends or read/share interesting long form articles. Democracy is complex and full of kompromises aka hard, so "quick and dirty" just doesn't cut it.
Ah, but you do, unfortunately, in the same way that non-drinking drivers have skin in the game of DUI laws and enforcement.
Like Reddit where /r/TheDonald is consistently at the top of /r/all, and stories about terrorism on /r/WorldNews devolve into xenophobic rants that stop just short of containing phrases like "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim?" That's not too "left leaning" to me.
I suggest all of you do the same. You might find you are much better off, like I did. To be clear - by all means READ blogs and sites and stay informed. Just steer clear of the comments section. Vote at the ballot box and with your wallet. Not with your keyboard.
And as for discussions on Reddit or news websites, the typical tactic I see over and over is as soon as anyone who is in the minority viewpoint is starting to make any sort of sense, commenters whip out the laundry list of go-to techniques for intellectually dishonest attacks - name-calling, stereotyping, questioning motives, questioning knowledge/expertise/credentials, using incorrect assumptions and false premises, straw man attacks, claiming facts are just opinions, use of weasel words, or (my personal favorite) the claim of having "rights" that are not in fact rights at all (surprisingly common). None of these crap tactics address either incorrect facts or incorrect logic, which are the only two things that should matter.
It's amazing to me how ugly things have become. And it's not just politics. Go to virtually ANY youtube video with more than a few thousand views and read the comments. There are an inordinate amount of hateful/angry posts, even for the most subjective things like music. And somehow anything related to news devolves into a political debate.
Also /r/worldnews is HEAVILY censored to remove any criticism against islam in particular. If you see it it's probably because they missed a spot.
Can you give me an example of some content from gabai that wouldn't be on twitter? It's quite hard to get banned from twitter for mere opinion.
I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people there are aerospace engineers (and some are SpaceX employees), so you can expect detailed, up-to-date and to-the-point news.
My general observation is that the more specialized a community is, and the further it is from ego-involving topics (politics, economy, religion), the more civil the discussions are there. So I'd focus on finding many specialized discussion places instead of one general.
Check out the top comment under SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’. It was at least generating some good debate, but HN decided to flag and bury it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125896
See the dominant and buried comments for 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512830
Why was Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems flagged to death? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304414
Hell, even this post has been quickly taken off the front page despite having better numbers (70 votes in the last hour) than many items that are there now.
Politics and economics points of view are heavily filtered here. Rarely if ever does a challenge to the status quo make the front page. If one does it is then killed, ironically, for inspiring debate!
I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym.
I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and even pg wrote about the need and how HN will need to evolve (I can't find that post of his right now). What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If the API exposed votes, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment rankings.
I often get the sense that anonymous and unexplained downvotes carry a sense of "this post is so obviously wrong it defies the need for explanation," which means that nobody learns anything from the exchange.
EDIT: I got downvoted for this comment and I have no idea why
Though I do wish HN could distinguish between "I subjectively don't like or disagree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively flawed or rests on false data".
We never hear complaints about people not distinguishing between "I subjectively like or agree with your point" and "Your logic is objectively sound or rests on good data".
I agree with you though, on both points.
I would like having strong AI driving HN too. Because humans are very bad at distinguishing those two and confuse them all the time. Once we invent the AI that allows people to separate them I'd be all for using it here on HN.
2: You can still collapse threads.
Let's say I see a post that is clearly not contributing to the discussion (on my personal opinion of course, not that I have any other one :) or is too misguided to even argue with, or lacks any redeeming merit, etc. Now, I want less of this on HN, so I am going to downvote it.
Now, let's say I'm forced to comment on it. I can't really say anything useful about it, and maybe even if I could I don't want to bother - if it was worthy discussion-wide, I wouldn't want to -1 it in the first place - so I'd say something like "this is just stupid". Or "-1 for not presenting a sane argument" or something like that.
Now, what happens when the comment author sees it? He comments "no, your face is stupid!" of course. And so we get a whole mess we wanted to avoid.
And now people see this whole mess and want to bury it so it doesn't stink up their nice discussion. But they are forced to comment too, so instead of removing the mess they are making it worse and make people hate each other for no reason but disagreeing on who started this mess.
Does not look like an improvement to me.
Hacker News may be Arc's most successful implementation (may not be, I don't know) but it does seem as if there's potential being wasted in keeping it a black box.
This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions.
If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort.
Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's not the prevailing cause for burying comments.
Well to me at least. After all, I'm just a single user that reads arbitrary threads, I have no data to reinforce my opinion.
But observations, even with high grade citations that criticize the libertarian narrative are also regularly down voted to oblivion.
Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered.
[edit] likewise pointing out either of those two problems
So yes, poor post are down voted very efficiently but there is still a genuine problem with downvoting to hide information that parties don't want spread.
I'm having an equally hard time finding the libertarian angle in the top comments to the other threads you referenced.
But whether I personally eat babies or not does not change the problem I have pointed out.
There is a problem that I and others have taken the time to point out, and rest assured if one person points it out, far more don't bother. So whether anyone wishes to address the problem or just downvote the complain itself is not really my concern.
In the end the site is an advertisement for ycombinator and in practice it's really a question of how they want their organization perceived. I had assumed having NY Times articles that point out Russian interference in Swedish politics swiftly whooshed from the front page does not serve that end.
That doesn't seem to be my experience - I've criticized Russia many times without any problem.
Unless I've misunderstood what you're saying, this simply isn't true.
I suggested to Daniel back then that HN should let users with penalties know that they have them, and show them what earned those penalties so that they can adjust their behavior. Feedback loops only work when the user understands the feedback. He agreed.
It’s also important for transparency. It isn’t very honest to show us our positive karma scores but also keep a separate negative karma hidden.
The downvotes are most likely due to the negativeness of the post, coupled with an ambiguous argument.
If you want to discuss those things, you'll have to find some people who want to discuss them -- clearly, the majority here does not, and they have every right to downvote stuff they don't think belongs on the front page.
HN needs fewer polemics, not more.
"Inequality in tech" is a subject that's guaranteed to get flagged into invisibility.
This post hit the flamewar detector (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flamewar%20penalty%20dang&sort...), and we removed the penalty when we noticed.
Also, experience suggests there are topics that generate almost no useful discussion and very quickly descend into a shoutfest, outgroup shaming and virtue posturing. It is possible that this one discussion on the very topic will not follow the pattern that thousands before it did, but usually the risk is not worth it.
Not every debate is good. And so, generating debate by itself is not a virtue.
True. But why can't we just let not-good debates die on their own, instead of not giving them a chance at all?
Therefore there are are many IRC channels where OldSchoolJohnny could find those discussions.
Oh wait, did he say "for civil discussion"...
> The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral.
There's a cognitive bias where everybody thinks the slant they disagree with is the one that dominates this site. If you held opposite views, you'd be arguing that HN is dominated by liberals or what have you. Perhaps that's not obvious to you, but it is to us whose job it is to oversee HN as a whole. HN's archives are full of people complaining about this from all sides.
The point of view you describe (or, to be fair, caricature) does exist on HN, of course. But the community is politically divided, most claims people make about who dominates it are just a rhetorical device, i.e. to score cheap points in arguments.
You are implying that you have no cognitive bias yourself, that it is not possible that your bias prevents you from seeing truth in my point of view.
That there are "people complaining about this from all sides" does not make it symmetrical, does not prove that all those sides are equal in standing.
That "this community is deeply politically divided" does not mean that divide goes right down the middle. America is deeply politically divided, yet it is overall to the right of much of Europe, such that our left is considered a European center or center-right. In other words, America has an overall slant, and Europe has a different one.
Are you not dismissively caricaturing me? It's one thing to agree to disagree, but your dismissiveness is rather astounding, especially given you are the site moderator. Perhaps you are engaging in tit-for-tat dismissiveness, in defense of the site you are responsible for. But still, that doesn't bode well coming from the site's moderator.
Do you believe that Y-combinator and HN moderators are representative of society as a whole? Or that somehow they are a non-representative set that is somehow free of slant? Perhaps you believe that if HN users, or its moderators, were predominantly women, or African Americans, or Latino Americans, that HN moderation, content and comments would be much the same? You must believe this if you believe HN has no slant. I certainly don't.
Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on this: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330325
I agree. But how could it be made better?
Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. Look at the experimentaion that the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.
If making votes publically visible in the API is a no-go, there are other options, such as Y-combinator accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and produce alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.
I'm not sure anything can be done, which is why I ask.
If you search you can probably find some more subreddits with less general content. And HN is of course a really great website for such discussions, with a lot of highly intelligent people that post quite lenghty comments. HN is probably my favorite website when it comes to discussions.
The obvious problem with that is now stories are filtered based on populist mass appeal, instead of insightful or expert appeal.
Populist content is very different from expert content. Clickbait headline is populist content. A peer-reviewed journal headline is expert content.
Which one do you think is going to be upvoted in a place like Reddit?
the problem with politics is there's not black and white, clear cut right a wrong, but there's a never ending pile of people who insist there is.
True Reddit is decidedly not heavily moderated:
> This subreddit is run by the community. (The moderators just remove spam.)
If you fail to understand what the preset rules of engagement and opinions are you're going to have a bad time. Worse still, if you happen to disagree with the general consensus of a sub your opinion will simply be downvoted and your voice will not be heard. You're very unlikely to be educated by existing sub members as to why your opinion is wrong with any real sense of perspective because the hive mind has kicked in and you're not aligned with it.
The larger the sub, the more this problem is exacerbated as there are more people ready and waiting to hit the downvote button. This means that you're very unlikely to encounter a balanced and sensible (aka civil) discussion on Reddit.
Example: /r/@theymos/bitcoin. Now, instead of looking like Reddit's canonical Bitcoin discussion forum, you're reminded that it's just one person's forum at the mercy of one person's agenda.
This way everyone can comment, and the low effort jokes etc. can still exist but you personally only see them if that's what you enjoy.
Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.
Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr.
Only showing downvoted authors would, going by my Reddit voting statistic, expose me to 95% dick jokes and 5% authors that have valid points I disagree with (mostly on such disgustingly controversial topics like "Lenovo makes better Thinkpad laptops than IBM did").
> Currently we give every comment a single universal score. It's hard to come up with a simple set of rules that encourage useful participation long-term, but this system would highlight the insightful stuff through the noise.
/. tried it, did it ever work out? (Honestly no idea, I've never been deep enough involved in it.)
Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too.
I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.
How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.
I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic?
The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views.
The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.
On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude.
What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view.
Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?
The one-click assessment would be closer to slashdot's 'interesting', 'insightful', 'funny' etc. approach, which could be an improvement but still runs into trouble because what is 'interesting' still varies too much between people.
My idea is that as you continue to vote, you teach it what insightful means to you personally.
I think it would mean I could avoid an echo-chamber of ideas because I could avoid being swept along by the status quo of group-think voting, and instead follow more thoughtful people. See my other reply to creshal for more thoughts about this.
And Facebook.
So all those crappy first post and Natalie Portman posts were easily filtered out, and good (at least better) comments were left visible.
EDIT: Other things they did well:
Moderation was based on karma, a hidden score. Karma was calculated by several things, but the two key things were:
Meta-moderation: This was a really neat concept. Basically, people went back and (anonymous to both of you) rated a post's moderation as good or bad. That is, if you posted something genuinely useful or interesting but someone gave it a negative moderation, the meta-moderation system would (in theory) catch this. It didn't change the moderation, but it rated the moderators.They also only allowed you to moderate in discussions you didn't comment in. If you commented, all your moderation was undone. And you had limited (5?) moderation points to use at a time. This prevented anyone from going on an abusive moderation streak (fuck that Jtsummers guy, I'm going to mark all his stuff down).
You can filter on comment length. Apparently right now I filter out all one-line comments that don't have +4 or better. So "+1", "this", etc. won't show up, but "Oh hey, that reminds me of <useful link>" will.
EDIT: Seems I was wrong. https://slashdot.org/my/comments lets me see and change those settings, but getting here was non-obvious so I'm not certain if this will affect anything or if it's merely a legacy page. You'll need to be logged in to see anything. But this offers score modifier options for comments by how they're moderated (troll, offtopic, funny, etc.) and friends/foes.
I think you could set +1 or -1 for
I had a few "foes" set to -1, to attempt to filter out some frequent, crazy commenters. But I stopped reading the site when extreme opinions became the only opinions.https://slashdot.org/faq/friends.shtml
I stopped reading it when I couldn't find interesting articles [EDIT: 0]. I think the firehose style of HN or Reddit is, in many ways, better than the curated submission system of /.. User directed submission moderation + scanning /new is usually enough for me, paired with going to direct to certain news sources (for whatever particular topic or category).
The comments were also pretty annoying. For those not familiar: See the strong anti-Microsoft posts that periodically show up here, and imagine that as the only thing that makes it to +5 when MS announces something. A ton of rhetoric with no substance.
EDIT:
[0] There were interesting articles. But there was a period (not sure about today) where the updates to the frontpage were incredibly slow. Perhaps I could've dug more into the topic areas or set some different display options, but things changed too slowly and I'd end up seeing the same articles for most of a day, or days.
On the one hand, this is a good format for some sites (and maybe for /.) as it allows things to remain visible for extended periods. On the other hand, it wasn't good for my usecase. /. was an aggregator, I wanted to see it update frequently. If I wanted a news magazine that totally cycles its front page only once a week, I'd be on that site.
I think advogato tried something similar with its trust metric: http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html but advogato is effectively dead - on the front page is still a poem about the death of k5.
Really the nearest thing is to get on twitter and curate who you follow.
Here are some comments I wrote on that topic (or a closely related one):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12139112
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390514
As mentioned in some of the comments, there are probably some technical hurdles (keeping score of every edge in the network), but can't they be overcome?
People tend to come up with the same objection: echo chamber, filter bubble, etc. but I think they miss the point.
Things we usually discuss (and we have at least 1 person who is more knowledgable/an insider so they can teach others and give context) - Tech, Economics, Geopolitics, Culture, Cinema, Photography, BioTech/Energy etc. The goal is _in depth_ discussions, not just water cooler commentary. But since it's friends, it also becomes your usual facebook chat replacement occasionally.
I know it's not the answer you're looking for (since it's actually private/friends and their friends etc for now) but just thought I'd mention this in the context. Trying to create and maintain a community has been an interesting experience so far. :)
It's the classic "I don't want to be in a club that wants me" vs "I want to be in a club that doesn't want me"
I'd kill for a /pol/ that bans low effort posting like that.
I recommend gathering a group of "morning cup of coffee" people with an intellectual bent. This works particularly well among more academic neighborhoods, but can be done elsewhere.
Get 3-10 people you know (or get to know these people) that are generally aware of the world, from different walks of life/professions, and start meeting a few days a week at a local coffee shop. Ensure the shop has a copy of better publications across the political spectrum. Talk shop. Talk the world. Talk whatever.
The internet is good at information. It limps quite a bit when asked to do conversation.
If intelligence = analysis, then I must disagree.
That's the reason I still bother to scan comments, for those moments.
Moral of the story: Choose your friends wisely.
Further, the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory [0] applies -- taking away the complex risk calculations involved in face-to-face conversations causes people to discard social inhibitors like civility rather quickly.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/RkSu1kn.jpg
I got an account probation, after posting something a few years back about how a specific poster was being disingenuous (and this on the GBS board, which is pretty toxic anyways), and wound up unable to post for 8 hours. Haven't been back since.
That and I find "goon" humor really smarmy and tiresome :/
Quora - There are pockets of intelligent thought, but discussion is limited to an answer and maybe a couple comments. And there's a ton of noise and not nearly enough moderation. But some of the content is really good and the Quora Weekly Digest remains one of the more interesting emails I get every week.
Newsvine - I haven't been active here for years (since 2008-2009), but it used to be a great community with good discussion and a strong focus on politics and recent news. I think it's gone downhill.
I haven't waded into sub-Reddits yet. I really got out of arguing with random people in the internet. I have better things to do with my time, and (echoing the OP) most comment threads are filled with assholes and comments like: "Wow. You must not have finished elementary school."
I also can't do reddit, partially because of it's negative reputation, but also I just don't have the energy to deal with it's terrible UX and having the wade through the crap to find the gold.
I am interested in one topic now that more and more school districts are going pork-free these days but don't know where to discuss that, so yes I'm unsure where to discuss civil topics outside of local issues.
CrookedTimber is the last of the oldschool blogs-with-comment-sections that I follow for this purpose, although it has some serious problem posters.
HN isn't really politically or economically focused so you kind of have to slip under the radar.
Sure, probably an outlier. Bad luck. But I still hate thinking back to that experience, and I survived Usenet flamewars just fine.
I'm contrasting that with Imzy, advertised as a "kinder, gentler Reddit", but which in my experience has been among the more vile, toxic, abrasive, and hateful hellholes on the Internet. I'm not a connoiseur of such spaces -- /b/, 4chan, and the like -- but I've seen what does work.
This set of guidelines from Google+ (unofficial AFAIU) are also useful. Communities with similar tools and principles tend to do better:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnSkeats/posts/F86Hv3L6kE3
In a series of investigations trying to assess the size, scope, and vitality of discussion at G+, I hit on the model of searching for names of significant authors or other authorities as a proxy for meaningful discussion. Foreign Policy has a list of "Global 100 Thinkers" published annually which provides a pretty broad-based, multi-ideology, and current basis for finding same, and a set of Google searches (looking at site match totals) along with an arbitrarily selected string to indicate potential conversations not of interest ("Kim Kardashian"), gives an FP:KK index.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
As earlier comments have noted, Metafilter has a staggeringly high FP:KK index, though low overall traffic. Reddit is also quite high, and blogs, most particularly Wordpress.com, perform quite well.
This is the sort of tracking I'd like to do over time and across more sites -- it would be particularly useful to have a web search which would simply return the top n domains and hit counts rather than having to parse results and insert search delays (about 45-60s seems to be sufficient) to avoid Captcha prompts.
Conversely, you could find some good search tokens for topics of interest and see where results tend to pop up.
Looking at the detailed results (which I've not posted, the tables simply become too large for convenient presentation), some pretty clear patterns of distribution across both sites and identifiers turn up. Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict, for example, were both highly popular, though on different sites.
There's a huge amount of public Web activity at several private educational institutions, in particular Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell University, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins. By comparison, the University of California system, which I'd have expected to be more significantly represented, is tiny. European educational institutions are also sadly anaemic, with largely UK schools represented, also Maastricht and Unibo (Italy).
I did a follow-up search through major Libertarian organisations which was pretty disappointing. Having discovered virtually all are part of the Atlas Network might improve my search space a bit, and might make an interesting follow-up.
I've also become fairly convinced that good conversation scales poorly. I'm experimenting with a set of smallish groups, probably ~30 - 300 people, though that remains to be seen via empirical results. These are "knitting societies" in an effort to both be un-cool ("cool" and &qu...