Tonight Top Comments is proud to turn the diary over to a very special guest: our Purveyor of Fine Top Mojo, mik
“Daddy, where does Top Mojo come from?” Are snakes better than oysters and what the heck do they have anything to do with spiders? * All these questions and more shall be answered tonight during A Very Special Top Mojo.. er I mean Top Comments as we share some of the history and future of the mojolicious.. the mojomatacular... the total mojonitudinousness of the top mojo scripting! Yes, it'll be a little geeky and there might be a bit of statistics as well as a few cryptic references to stuff that nobody but computer programmers will be likely to grok, but we'll keep the beanie spinning to a minimum. I promise! So follow me below the doodle um.. data flow diagram of the top mojo program after a word or few from our sponsor...
Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Okay, first things first: What is Top Mojo and why does anyone care? Well, if you’ve been reading TC for any length of time, you’ve seen the “Top Mojo” section near the end of the post between a list of nominated comments and the pootie picture quilt. It is simply a list of the 30 or so comments posted yesterday site-wide that garnered the most “mojo” (recommends). Getting lots of mojo is good as it is an indicator that others appreciate your brilliant insight (or perhaps are merely awed by the magnificence your household specimen of Felis silvestris catus) and, of course, mojo maintains your Trusted User status (because, well, who wouldn’t want to see all the troll comments?). Being selected for “Top Mojo,” however, confers no bonus standing and offers no direct benefits to the commenter… garners you no extra TU status, and no bonus respect (let alone beer).
So then why do we bother? Well, much like the nominated “top comments” that appear in each TC edition, the TM list is a way for you to see some more probably good, occasionally great, comments that otherwise would have escaped your notice. This is why we try to keep the tip jars and such out of the TM list: not because we’re trying to be mean, but because they usually don’t do much to advance the goal of telling people about stuff they might be interested in. Of course, the other major point to make is that Top Mojo is an entirely automated process that is the result of running a small program (a “script”) that basically pretends to be an anonymous reader of DailyKos using the search function to find comments worth reading. In early 2013, I wrote another diary: FAQing Top Mojo that attempted to answer lots of questions that keep coming up about Top Mojo. For the most part, that diary is still relevant. However…
☆ THINGS CHANGE ☆
Sometime in the first age of DailyKos (okay, okay - it was 14 June, 2006), Carnacki posted the first Top Comments. There is a comprehensive history of TC written by our own Sardonyx here on the fourth anniversary of TC, but while Top Mojo wasn’t initially automated or posted in the body of the diary, it showed up almost immediately and, rather poetically, in this comment. Soon, Top Mojo was a regular feature, where all the diarist of the day had to do was to copy and paste one of a set of cryptic incantations into the search bar, show the HTML source of the page, copy out just the right subsection, paste it into an excel spreadsheet, bow toward the nearest deep ocean trench, scream “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!” and pray that the result was valid, postable diary fodder, and not a heaving mass of pestilent flesh emerging from the darkest shores to consume the world of humanity (yes, I’ve been reading H.P. Lovecraft inspired fiction recently… why do you ask?)...
And then, on 13 February, 2011 DK4 was rolled out to the unsuspected masses and Winter stopped merely threatening to come, but actually came. The new DK4 search UI no longer supported the process that had been used to produce Top Mojo. After a time of nightly weeping into our collective beers, we girded our loins and stepped back into the fray, eventually producing a new TM script written not in Excel, but in Perl which was capable of handling DK4 and so on 9 August, 2011, we we back in business! But while we’re still using that top TM script (well, not for THIS Top Comments, but in general), all is not well: yes, the script usually works, going out and executing as many searches as needed to get the data and converting the results into a form ready to add to TCs. But it does the job with a steaming pile of fragile regular expressions that break every time the DailyKos gods change the formatting even a little and DK5 is coming soon. Furthermore, it still really does pretty much the same thing that the original Top Mojo does.. and ONLY that. So (drum roll)...
Tonight is the first unveiling of a new Top Mojo script. It isn’t really live yet to diarists, but it does seem to be rock-solid so it will not be long. Whereas the perl script is 164 lines of code, the new one is around 400 lines of Python. I’ll decline to get into a Perl-vs-Python war (“oysters and snakes”... get it? oh, nevermind), but suffice to say that I’m much happier with the result. Times and dates are handled better and I can run a top mojo for any number of comments, across any time span. Instead of those nasty regular expressions, the script processes the HTML using a full DOM parser with XPath to match elements (sorry, sorry!). Even more fun, is that it can follow threads and make use of the comment history and mojo statististics of the parent diary (more later): aside from much cleaner code, I can do much more with it.
But here’s where it gets a little sticky - the goal is still the same: identify comments that are worth your while to read but that didn’t, for whatever reason, get nominated. While the new script can do much more, should it? And this is actually the point of tonight’s TC… well, beyond the usual TC point, of course. We’re soliciting your inputs on what would be useful. To get the ball rolling, I’ve implemented a few new features for tonight’s Top Mojo:
- Comments are properly labelled so that ties have the same number: there are still at least 30 comments, but there might be two comments tied for 29th and so no 30th place!
- Mojo is listed as +whatever approximately as before, but now also can have a -number for comments that were also HRed. You might laugh, but it turns out to be fairly common.
- Context achievement badges![“What the heck is mik smoking?!”, you ask>] These are often less about the comment itself than the diary and discussion around the comment. The idea is to give you some idea of the context that the comment was made in. Yes, really. I find them pretty useful, but your milage may vary… so please comment! The magic decoder ring is:
- ♥ (a filled heart) = it looks like it is in some sort of community support diary where lots of mojo is given out. Most of these fall into one of two categories: serious diaries with heavy emotional content where commenters give each other mojo to show support for each other and community diaries where commenters toss handfuls of mojo at each other because it is fun and helps maintain TU status (e.g. TC, C&J, pooties, etc). It turns out to be difficult for the script to tell the difference between these two groups statistically.
- ☆ (white star) = looks like a serious diary where a few commenters get lots of mojo for
inciteful inSIGHTful commentary and the rest… don't.
- Π (
pie pi) = looks like a pie fight. lots of mojo, lots of HRs. You won’t see this very often because the script doesn't run with TU privileges so cannot see hidden comments at all.
- ★ (black stars) = how much more mojo than average in the diary’s comment history it had. For statistics wonks, a comment gets a black star for every three std deviations from mean.
- † (dagger) = a comment that seems to be poking at a trollish (or other bad behavior) in a diary or comment. Again, something that you might not ever see because trolling will usually be hidden, but in principle some great comments are made in response to bad behavior. [Edit: this would be inciteful!]
- cat = the comment is just a pootie picture. no, sorry… I’m kidding about this one.. or AM I?
So, without further ado… To the comments!
Brillig's ObDisclaimer (which mik is stealing for tonight): The decision to publish each nomination lies with the evening's Diarist and/or Comment Formatter. My evenings at the helm, I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eyes of the nominator and of you, the reader - I leave the decision to you. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all build community, supporting and uplifting instead of tearing our fellow Kossacks down.
From a2nite:
This is an excellent comment by TarheelDem in the excellent diary The Civil War never ended. The neo-Confederate tea party fights on by Denise Oliver Velez. It should be a diary, thanks.
From brillig:
From Spider Stumbled on how Al Gore not inventing the Internet is why he posts political stuff on Facebook.
From the magic mojobot * :
zenbassoon posted: Projection. They know science is reality and truth
Libby Shaw posted: One more thing
GoGoGoEverton posted: Because Republicans aren't authoritarians.
* This is a rather more experimental feature, so beware, however: The same script that generates Top Mojo also can apply some statistics and filtering that I pulled out of my bu ahem... created after a long and detailed study of the posting dynamics at DailyKos. The "mojobot" looks for comments that didn't make the TM list, but look like they are likely to have been contenders based on the surrounding context. The algorithm is far from complete and still requires some manual management, but usually produces some interesting results. Feedback please!
Top Mojo for yesterday, September 27th, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you
mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary
FAQing Top Mojo. Actually, see today's diary instead, especially for the key to the symbols at the end of each line. When/If this becomes the norm, we'll include a key here.
1) Right wingers are violent by MargaretPOA +156 Π ★★
2) Just finished reading that at TPM myself by HiKa +115 ☆ ★
3) And that, folks, is how it's done! by jayden +106 ☆ ★
4) Not usually by Dallasdoc +95 Π ★
5) I almost cheered out loud while reading it by PurpleElectric +87 ☆
6) Stewart's rant was so excellent... by BenderRodriguez +78 ☆ ★
7) Because if Fox fired every asshole who worked... by BelgianBastard +76 ☆
8) Its Great to hear that there is by Things Come Undone +75 Π ★
9) Awesomeness! nt by leftfielder +74 ☆ ★
10) What Carmen Segarra experienced goes on every by Mark Lippman +72 ☆ ★
11) i hope the person replacing Eric Holder by Seattle Socialist +70 ☆ ★
12) Well done by Tara the Antisocial Social Worker +69 ☆
13) Now THAT'S rich.... by leftykook +68 Π ★
14) You'd be surprised how many Israeli Jews.... by bobswern +66 Π
15) Gandhi also had a sympathetic new media by MargaretPOA +63 Π
15) Of all the problems outlined in that article by Catte Nappe +63 Π ★
17) I followed Carmen Segarra's story from a year ago by Mark Lippman +62 ☆ ★
18) fire their asses by Karl Rover +60 Π ★
19) Excellent likeness of Eric Boaring. n/t by Tara the Antisocial Social Worker +59 ☆ ★
19) If agents of the government by NoMoreLies +59 Π
21) Snickering about boobs by crystal eyes +57 ☆
22) Totally unacceptable! by Ekaterin +53 Π ★
22) Hey if you can see by T Maysle +53 ☆ ★
24) Of course... by Retroactive Genius +51 Π
24) When dissenters are beaten with clubs by MadRuth +51 Π
24) Yeah, that's pretty astonishing... by Frank Vyan Walton +51 ☆ ★
24) Yes by MadRuth +51 ☆
28) Lloyd Blankfein deserves an orange jumpsuit by skepticalcitizen +50 ☆
29) Some help with the Caturday chore list ... by jwinIL14 +49 ☆
29) It's the leading cheerleader for The Fed! by bobswern +49 ☆
29) Excellent diary by procrastn8 +49 ☆ ★
Well, obviously this doesn't illustrate all the possibilities, but notice that there is a three-way tie for 29th position and the pie badge does, in fact, get bestowed. It seems, in fact, that pie overwhelmed hearts today and the number of black stars looks unusually low. I might post another day or two in the comments to show you what other patterns look like.
Top Pictures for yesterday, September 27th. Click any picture of a cat to be taken to the full comment and/or larger picture of the cat. Thank you jotter for the image magic!