[HN Gopher] Hedonometer: Average Happiness of Twitter over Time
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Hedonometer: Average Happiness of Twitter over Time
Author : catchmeifyoucan
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-04-29 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hedonometer.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hedonometer.org)
| fundamental wrote:
| Looks like the site might have received the hug of death. Last
| time it loaded for me the site produced a 504 error.
| dmuth wrote:
| I couldn't load the site either, but it reminds me of something I
| built a couple of years ago that let me analyze the happiness of
| specific Twitter users: https://github.com/dmuth/twitter-aws-
| comprehend
|
| Some interesting takeaways from my experiment:
|
| - President Obama's tweets became a LOT happier once he left
| office.
|
| - Donald Trump's tweets were less negative than one might think!
| I did some digging and found most of the "happy" tweets were made
| by his social media team--the tweets made by him personally were
| quite angry.
| hpoe wrote:
| Archived link
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210429165316/https://hedonomet...
| enragedcacti wrote:
| There is a Reply All episode talking to the creator of the
| Hedonometer. It includes the researcher turning his analysis
| tools against the host's texting history.
|
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/kwh96n
| cyberlab wrote:
| Site seems down for me. I remember a tool for Twitter where you
| could automatically engage with people posting positive or
| uplifting tweets (better known as sentiment analysis). I forget
| the name of the tool, but it would search for any tweet with a
| simple smiley like `:-)` plus a keyword that you pick, and it
| would favorite it, tricking people into thinking your interaction
| was an 'organic' one.
|
| Over time Twitter naturally would have accounts with nothing but
| performative anxiety present, as Twitter (at least for me) is
| more an antisocial network, not a social network highlighting our
| more positive nature (Think Instagram, and TikTok for contrast).
| oxymoran wrote:
| What in the world is positive about Instagram or Tiktok?
| Twitter is clearly worse, but Instagram inspires nothing but
| vapid voyeurism and tiktok very well could be an act of
| espionage.
| drusepth wrote:
| Compared to Twitter, anything else is a shining light of
| social media.
|
| Instagram may be nothing but vapid voyeurism, but the posts
| there are generally (fake) messages of "I am enjoying my
| life, look at it!" My stream's a bunch of travel photos
| and/or interesting things. Even if it's shallow or attention-
| seeking, it's a far cry from the flood of hatred and filth
| that spews from Twitter's fringe.
|
| TikTok's a bit more varied (and feels more akin to reddit,
| which has a lot of ups and downs), but still doesn't feel as
| bad as Twitter.
| bckr wrote:
| > Over time Twitter naturally would have accounts with nothing
| but performative anxiety present
|
| I had this thought two days ago--that Twitter is largely a
| repository of mental health issues on display. The next day I
| visited a developer's Twitter profile, and it was just bad
| jokes with a general theme of mental health. I created a new
| profile recently in order to interact with developers but I
| will never again enter into this performative aspect of the
| website.
| andrepd wrote:
| > a social network highlighting our more positive nature (Think
| Instagram, and TikTok for contrast)
|
| How so?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Looks to me like 2020/2021 has some wilder spikes that other
| years. I wonder if that's because people are much more focused on
| Twitter during the pandemic. The site certainly makes the world
| feel like an awful place with that stupid trending panel forcing
| it upon your eyes.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| It seems counterintuitive that as the volume of tweets
| increases, the variance _increases_. What could be the
| explanation for this?
| v8engine wrote:
| Feels very US related. Twitter in India is all about COVID-19
| second wave right now and that hasn't affected the graph even
| though the sheer mass of English speaking Indians should have had
| some effect. The only mention I can see is April 28, 2021
| twentieth word 'oxygen'.
| andrepd wrote:
| Ftfy: my the results of my flawed measure of "happiness" over
| time
| karaterobot wrote:
| My takeaway is that (ignoring holidays) negative events make
| Twitter more unhappy than positive events make it happy. Yet
| another reason I'm not on Twitter!
| JamilD wrote:
| There's a weird methodology quirk here. Looking at the data,
| words like "violence" seem to directly decrease the overall
| happiness score. Which is weird, because use of that word
| doesn't necessarily indicate that someone is feeling less
| happy.
|
| Mentioning negative events therefore seems to _directly_
| decrease the happiness score, so a conclusion like yours is
| almost tautological -- when a negative event happens, people
| talk about it, so the algorithm infers that people are unhappy.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I think that talking about upsetting things does steer
| conversations in upsetting ways. A lot of things happen all
| the time. The choice of what one talks about is informative.
| You can frame an event in both negative and positive ways. If
| you mention violence, but don't mention togetherness,
| solidarity, courage (or some other positive words), that's
| probably a negative framing.
|
| What's more, it's misguiding to say that people talk about
| things that happen. People talk about some of the things that
| happen. Media plays a big role in the selection. People also
| tend to adopt framings. Which is to say that people's
| happiness does depend on what's being talked about, if we
| agree that happiness is the positivity of thoughts held.
| meowkit wrote:
| That's a human thing, not a twitter thing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
| karaterobot wrote:
| Agreed. I find that Twitter (et al.) just amplify existing
| human biases and psychological effects like that. To totally
| misquote Steve Jobs, social media is like a bicycle for
| feeling bad.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > To totally misquote Steve Jobs, social media is like a
| bicycle for feeling bad.
|
| I like that. What's the actual quote?
|
| Edit: it's probably this:
|
| > ...the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've
| ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our
| minds.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's the one!
| masona wrote:
| Reminds me of Jonathan Harris's 2007 project 'We Feel Fine.'
|
| http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html
|
| When I did some work on sentiment analysis using tools like
| Crimson Hexagon, it always felt like the data was skewed since
| what people post is different from what they say, which itself is
| different from what they do. Might need to be some kind of
| corrective filter that includes 'uncounted emotion' as a
| baseline.
| andrepd wrote:
| I mean the elephant in the room is that that "sentiment
| analysis" is flawed and crude and does not correlate in any
| meaningful way with actually "happiness".
| rkagerer wrote:
| Interesting to see how much more volatility it shows the last few
| years.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| upwards of 8 years old site but here's previous discussion from a
| couple years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20705755
| guenthert wrote:
| Hugged to death already :(
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(page generated 2021-04-29 23:01 UTC)