This is a physics simulation where every player attracts whoever he upvoted and repels players that he downvoted.
To be exact, the following forces are being applied:
-
Brownian motion with decaying magnitude
-
A small force towards the center of the simulation area that increases exponentially with distance
-
Constant attractive force towards players that were upvoted (proportional to amount of votes)
-
Constant repellent force towards players that were downvoted (proportional to amount of votes)
-
Repellent force towards other players, decays with distance^4
-
Friction to stabilize the system
How you can read this image:
-
Color represents friendliness: A player who has never downvoted anything will be fully green, while a player who only does downvotes will be red.
-
Being near a player represents a "good relationship" regarding forum karma. Whether players are direct neighbours or a little distance from each other is not of any significance due to the noise of the Brownian motion deciding on such small differences.
The zk forum cluster:
The only similarly dense cluster is much smaller:
Some rather negative players aren't downvoting everybody, so a loosely connected cluster could form a good distance away from the central cluster:
Here's the list of players in that image:
[pikts]wolas 
[Fx]Drone 
jseah @_Shaman
GoogleFrogIf you wanna have a look around, here's a
zoomable version of the image. Click the button on the bottom right for a minimap.
Alternatively, you can find the full image
here. It may crash your browser.
