Experiment with enabling comment exploration in graph via fisheye/cartesian distortion

[patcon]

Ideas from Colin, Pol.is

1. MORE SPACE

There are many places in pol.is, in the visualization, that we wanted to show things and didn’t have enough room. This is a fertile area for exploration. For instance, the ‘opinion space’ of the graph, in other words, the x & y coordinate plane, is ‘defined’ by comments. Comments have a ‘position’ in the x & y space, and then people are positioned closest to the comments they agreed with and further from the ones they disagreed with. Because of space, we don’t show the comment text, but this is the whole reason pol.is is confusing! If we could show the text of all the comments, it would be very clear that people who are ‘over in this area’ tended to agree with ‘this set of comments.’ Showing this visually will make the entire experience much less abstract. We don’t even show all of the people who have logged in with social media! We have in some conversations 200 people who have logged in, we show maybe 20. Showing everyone, and everyone who is in the conversation but anonymous (maybe as a little orb), would be neat.

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17-TZX-A6ysES5VLb18kv2jmWqajkYURRZacmyQ5fPgk/edit?tab=t.0

Allowing an optional mode of zooming the graph under the mouse might allow statements to be placed withing the graph, for further exploration. (I am NOT suggesting this be a default feature, but an advanced toggle for people already familiar with Polis)