Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Halfbakery speedometer

Inspired by "Sex vs Cancer"
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This is not a request for implementation, though i suppose it could be done off the HB. It's also the first time i've ever posted a meta-idea, so i'm a newbie all over again. Please be gentle.
Some of us have recently witnessed a certain page on the halfbakery increase in size over a very short period of time. This led me to wonder what the biggest pages on here are, and also how fast they have grown. "Sex vs Cancer" may of course be deleted soon, but right now it's four hundred and ninety-one kilobytes in size and it's seventeen days old. That means it has grown at a velocity of about one byte every three seconds. Picking a random idea, "carpool bay" was created five hundred and fifty days before its most recent anno and is twenty-three thousand two hundred and forty-four bytes in size, so it grew at a rate of roughly one byte every half hour.
The most active ideas on the HB are not, so far as i know, viewable. An indicator of their rate of growth would enable a user to go where the action is, or, on the other hand, care for neglected ideas.
Not so much a feature as a script a user could run though. Or is it part of "view"?
nineteenthly, Jan 07 2009

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       The vast majority of ideas are "neglected" (nothing wrong with that; we'll get back to them when something interesting happens). You don't need a tool to find them, just hit "random"; chances are, it'll be neglected. Hooray.   

       Conversely, the majority of the recently annotated ideas have been on the recent page for a while (i.e. keep popping back up); go to any one of those, and chances are it's "hot".   

       The only thing that the new speedometer would allow you to find over just random/recent is ideas that have been very active for a while, but haven't been so recently - i.e., died-off flame wars.   

       Now, why on earth would I possibly want to highlight those?
jutta, Jan 07 2009
  

       Quantity of annotation is not an indication of quality.
WcW, Jan 07 2009
  

       True to both. I don't envisage it as a feature on the actual site.
Maybe there´s a log-normal distribution, in that twenty percent of the ideas get eighty percent of the annotations.
nineteenthly, Jan 07 2009
  

       marked-for-tagline   

       "why on earth would I possibly want to highlight those?"
normzone, Jan 07 2009
  

       Surely 'Sex vs. Cancer' is a one-off anomaly. It's annotations multiply rapidly because (a) they're breeding and (b) their telomers aren't functioning properly. How often would you get both of those things in one idea?   

       <edit> ;---) </edit>
pertinax, Jan 08 2009
  

       That idea is certainly not an anomally. It is a recurring phenomenon where, once-in-a-while, a 'discussion' breaks out in an idea about the merits of the science used or some 'comments' appear about religious leanings. Sometimes it looks like trolling, sometimes it is bang on topic.   

       <edit>Well, *duh*!</edit>   

       I'm not sure that going 'where the action is' is such a great idea per se.
Jinbish, Jan 08 2009
  

       [Jinbish] - sorry, I should have included a smiley on that last anno to acknowledge the total absence of any substantial point on my part. I'll go and do that now.
pertinax, Jan 08 2009
  

       OK then, how about we all come up with a way of indicating whether we're talking bollocks or not, and the script can then edit out all the garbage?
nineteenthly, Jan 08 2009
  

       Oops, [pertinax[, my fault for just not being with it today (again!) - I've counter-edited.   

       [19thly]: An indication if we're talking bollocks!? Isn't that just generally assumed?
Jinbish, Jan 08 2009
  

       //the script can then edit out all the garbage?// leaving... ?
pertinax, Jan 08 2009
  

       [UB], at the risk of veering wildly off-topic, i've seen a really excellent and accurate Wikipedia article which i knew for a fact referred to a real phenomenon (not a supernatural or marginal one by any means) deleted because the consensus was that it didn't exist. Clearly my whole life has been an hallucination for the past thirty years.
I'd prefer it if the obviously true bits didn't get deleted. Anyway, that's a subject for a different forum.
nineteenthly, Jan 08 2009
  

       I think it can work if an article has no connection to reality as perceived through the senses, so for example something mathematical or logical can be tested through thought alone, or a reference to popular culture will be OK if it is of no practical consequence. But yes, i share your exasperation. I suppose this place is at least definitively inaccurate, as a certain awesome SF author once said. It's reality which has got it wrong.
nineteenthly, Jan 09 2009
  

       what was the phenomenon, [19thly]?
po, Jan 10 2009
  

       Was it ASMR? I remember that article got deleted under circumstances like that.
notexactly, Apr 29 2019
  

       If we had access to the time as well as the date of annotations, we could make some interesting speedometer graphs. It would be interesting to plot all ideas as a line on a graph of length-of-annotations-in-bytes vs time-since-idea-first-posted. Some ideas, like the now-deleted mostly-lame-taglines idea, would increase by very small amounts but consistently over a period of many months. Others would have spikes of activity and then lots of silence. Might need a log-scale to accommodate the decade bumps.
mitxela, Apr 29 2019
  
      
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