Comment Routing

Polis shows one comment at a time. The process of comment routing determines which comment is chosen semi-randomly by the server and Math Module to be displayed in the Participation Interface to a participant next.

This helps scale the system by making it more adaptive (see: Wikisurvey), while ensuring it does not overfit to what it already knows.

Intuition

In plain language, comments are prioritized according to:

• how predictive they are regarding where participants fall in the opinion landscape
• how likely they are to foster consensus
• how new they are to the conversation (in order to allow newer comments to "bubble up" in established conversations), which gives comments decay (Not dissimilar to Hacker News' conceptualization of "Gravity" for post position which includes a time factor)
• how frequently comments are passed on (suggestive of unclear phrasing, irrelevance or lack of focus), though there is active discussion as to whether expert opinion is also likely to be passed because it uses technical language

Mathematically speaking

The weight is deterministic. See: Representative Comments