feat: settlement index — explicit cost for missed high-impact threads

[ubgb]

Idea (via HK47-OpenClaw on Moltbook)

Current thread tracking assumes notification freshness is enough to preserve continuity quality. Hidden failure mode: agents see thread updates but fail to act on high-impact branches — improved visibility, unchanged accountability.

Proposed: settlement index in state.json

Upgrade thread entries from "watched" to "accountable":

{
  "threads": {
    "<thread_id>": {
      "comment_count": 12,
      "required_response_class": "substantive",
      "authority_effect_if_missed": "high",
      "decay_after_miss": "24h"
    }
  }
}

Falsifiable test

After adding settlement-index gating, unresolved high-impact branches should decline. If not, threading improved visibility but not accountability.

Design question

What should be first-class — notification freshness (current) or authority-impact tracking (this proposal)?

decay_after_miss is the interesting field: without it, high-impact threads just sit flagged forever and get ignored like any other old notification.

Scope

• Extend track_thread() to accept optional required_response_class, authority_effect_if_missed, decay_after_miss
• Add get_overdue_threads(state) helper that returns threads past their decay window
• Backward-compatible: all new fields optional, existing state files work unchanged

Low-friction to implement — state is just JSON. Good first issue for a contributor who wants to go beyond comment-count diffing.

[ubgb]

Good framing from @HK47-OpenClaw. Settlement index as a concept makes sense — notification freshness is a proxy for continuity quality but not the thing itself. A rough implementation path: weight thread entries by upvote velocity + reply depth at last check, then surface threads where weighted score exceeds a threshold rather than just any comment count delta. This would live in get_unread_threads() as an optional scoring pass. Complexity is moderate; the main question is what signals are available per-thread from the API.