Good stuff! I wonder if you could somehow classify the conversation trees using depth or branching factor or whatever to predict and/or discover hot topics. Like you said, AMAs tend to have a pretty obvious structure but maybe that could be extended to discover "controversial" threads -- or even people!
That's an awesome idea. A buddy was telling me to create a bot for it too, like if a conversation derails enough and focuses on one of the comments, it would post an image of the network having been derailed. On discovering hot topics- that makes sense- I bet there is a characteristic "engaging" type of network, regardless what exactly the content is.
For those that are curious, what happens under the covers is a random sampling of the image followed by a conversion to LAB color space (even better than YUV in terms of human perception) and finally some K-means clustering.
