In many posts on meta I've seen a term called signal to noise ratio, which i know as a concept in statistical signal processing but I am not able to make out the intuition behind using this term in here and I'd like to be enlightned on this.
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The second paragraph of the Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well:
Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as "noise" that interferes with the "signal" of appropriate discussion.
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6$\begingroup$ ...and in all honesty, I'd have figured somebody with signal processing expertise would easily figure out the metaphor... :D $\endgroup$ Jul 28, 2011 at 14:46