Using Edgesense for online community management: is the conversation still alive?

Interpreting the interaction graph over time with Edgesense

The interpretation of edges in the graph depend on the time frame over which they occur, i.e. on the age of the online community

• If the community is only a few months old, it is acceptable to consider all links as "live". Everybody is likely to remember every single interactions they had with others. Also, all users are likely to still consider themselves part of the community.
• ** If the community is several years old, it is possible that the social effect of some of the interactions has faded**. Alice left a single comment to Bob five years ago: this might mean she has changed her mind and ceased finding Bob interesting. She also might have dropped out of the community altogether (and so might Bob). The decay time of social effects of interactions vary from one community to the other.

Edgesense offers a way to visualize recent interactions differently from older ones.

1. Click on the cog icon in the graph toolbar.
2. From the pop-up menu, type a number in the Max age (days) field. For example, to see only the interactions of the latest month, type "30".
3. Click on the Show button in the pop-up menu. This will "ghost out" the nodes (users) and edges (interactions) that have not been active in the period selected, highlighting the more recent ones.
4. To go back to the default visualization, click on reset view.

While visualizing the recently active subnetwork, you can still interact with Edgesense: toggle moderators, go back and forth in time with the time slider, etc.