20% of the replies is a very large threshold, and one that cowicide would not be even close to in this case (28/210 ~ 13%). Also, while you bet that many of cowicides replies are to albill, it turns out that six of them are. I count three where albill replied to cowicide. that’s nine posts of 210 from 2 posters of 24. 8% of the posters commanding 5% of the posts for a side discussion between themselves doesn’t seem problematic, and it wasn’t even a side discussion as others replied to their posts as well.
On the other hand, you have multiple people who seem to be concerned about those posts, at least one mod-edit to remove an insult, someone being banned from posting, and a mod feeling the need to step in to tell two people to shut it down (although one of those people had already disengaged).
If the discussion took an unhealthy turn, I don’t think the numbers are really able to show that themselves, so I’m not sure how you would design such a gentle reminder to usefully catch conversations that are going off the rails into arguments between two people.
(But as a bad actor in this regard myself I will sincerely try to disengage earlier than I do from such back-and-forths)
