YouTube shows hotspots in videos when you scrub the video timeline:
As you can see, there are peaks and valleys of view count that I always wanted us to get to @sam @eviltrout.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine porting our existing “summarize this topic” feature over to a video … “I ain’t got time to watch a 30 minute video, just show me the best parts” 
This applies to topics with a large number of hits and comments. A text that has just been published cannot be automatically split into logical parts.
The easiest thing to do with posts. Perhaps it would be worth considering the reactions of users. Then the least useful posts could be shaded or hidden completely, thus compressing the thread. The same rules might be applied to the paragraphs of the first message.
The most popular places from the first post are paragraphs whose quotations were used in the thread.
Then it would be worth considering the tags and picture captions used by the author of the topic, so as not to accidentally hide important things.
We need more active user interactions. Involve them by telling that the content of the topic is shaped by them. “Hey, your opinion is taken into account, look how great it is!”
Well yes, this is why the “Summarize This Topic” button only appears when a topic has 50 or more replies… that’s the way it has always worked.
Having discussed paginations and infinite scrolling with users on another forum, and since I suspect that what users really miss with infinite scrolling isn’t a pagination strictly speaking, but some sort of breakpoints, I wonder if Discourse’s dev team made progress on these breakpoints thoughts.
It’s striking how useful this “timeline popularity” feature is in practice. Heck, it’s great for podcasts, for long articles, for long chats… really anywhere. Show me what specific parts people are actually reading, listening, and looking at.
The Summarize This Topic is at the top of the topic. So, as you enter the topic at the top and scroll down, you have the option to see “just the good stuff”. The idea that you will mostly enter at the top of the topic is a bit of an assumption, a reasonably safe one I suppose, but…
I can’t help wondering if it’d make sense to advertise the “Summarize” feature (and offer to turn it on) when you (somehow) get deep linked into a longer topic, arriving at the bottom, or anywhere in the middle of a long conversation? 
I think there is a small issue with encouraging users to go or focus on breakpoints (if a breakpoint is a particularly liked post or a post that had a lot of replies, for example).
It can make people miss other interesting content. They’ll go for the “best” selected discussion content, and then there is a snowball effect. They’ll see and like the selected posts that are displayed to them, and other posts will be ignored because not displayed.
On your screenshot, most of the “most viewed parts” are linked to chapters, but on videos that have few or no chapters, the “most viewed part” exist as well outside chapters marks:
And I also use them thinking it will naturally lead me to what I want to see. Sure. It may in most cases. But how to know without watching the whole actual video (even with fast forwards)?
I can’t think about that without thinking about the Reddit upvote system, where the most upvoted posts are the most likely to be the most upvoted because they are by default on the top of the replies. Snowball effect. And I’ve seen a LOT of top comments on Reddit that contain erroneous information.
As a user, if you want to correct them, you write a message… That no one will ever read it because your message with 0 upvotes will lay at the bottom of XX or XXX comments. That happened to me too many times and I don’t bother to do it anymore.
I really like this topic. This is a very, very interesting subject.
