4 ms·

Dissecting Trump’s Most Rabid Online Following

61 points by peshkira 10y ago

jtr1 10y ago
The title of this piece doesn't adequately reflect the fascinating methodology it contains. The 538 team uses latent sentiment analysis to create a kind of algebra for subreddits, i.e. r/running + r/weightlifting = r/fitness. Politics aside, it's (IMHO) well worth the 15 minutes it takes to read. I'd love to see HN readers more experienced with the methodology take it to task and see what shakes out.
- peshkira 10y ago
  You are probably right. I just used the authors title. I also found it fascinating and the scroll effects were a nice bonus :)
- ideonexus 10y ago
  Agreed, I submitted the same link with the title "Semantic Analysis of Donald Trump Sub-Reddits," but even that leaves out the fascinating idea of "subbreddit algebra" that the article goes into. Articles like these are why I love 538. It's like popular science for statistical analysis.
  - iainmerrick 10y ago
    Me too, too! Not only is this a really cool and novel (as far as I know) use of machine learning techniques, there's a lengthy footnote that goes into some detail about the method. And the presentation is great, very slick modern HTML. So it seems like an excellent fit for HN, apart from the title which will unfortunately put a lot of people off.
- pc2g4d 10y ago
  This is a really clever application of this sort of model. I did a lot of work with LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modeling, but never consider doing binary operations on the topic vectors themselves. Cool idea.
peregrine 10y ago
This story is extremely fascinating and relevant to the HackerNews Community but it's already been Shadow Banned. Neat.
- mkstowegnv 10y ago
  sorry but how can someone/some group shadow ban a story and who do you suppose would be behind shadow banning this one?
  - peregrine 10y ago
    The mod's can choose to "bump" a story off the front page as a form of moderation. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/ http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov... They do it constantly to stories deemed "not worthy".
wopwopwop 10y ago
I haven't read the linked articled (yet), but I wanted to urge everyone to check out r/the_donald. It is the strangest online community that I've seen. Truth doesn't really matter unless it supports us, everyone who says good things about us is right and everyone who doesn't is a corrupt MSM cuck libtard. To get banned you don't even have to be critical of Trump. If you're even ambiguous you'll get banned. In a sense this is self-selection in that the only people that haven't been banned are lunatic-level supporters. Basically, it's Donald Trump times 380,000. You have to experience it.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  It sounds just like the /r/Hillary_Clinton subreddit I briefly checked out during the election. I said something a little bit critical of Hillary and was immediately banned. This is just how Americans are these days. You have to pick a camp, and you need to agree 100% with everything in that camp or else you'll be shunned. And there's only two main camps too; if you try to pick an alternative camps, or even a camp that's really a sub-camp of one of the two main camps, you'll be shunned and derided.
  - aanm1988 10y ago
    No, The_Donald is somethign special.
  - Panoramix 10y ago
    r/Hillary is a run of the mill biased sub-reddit. T_D is biased and lunatic in a way that will have sociologists publishing papers for years to come.
- vivekd 10y ago
  yeah, that is true of r/the_donald. I got banned for saying I support him but I have questions about some aspects of his campaign. At the same time, arbitrary banning for anything less than 100 % agreement and support seems to be a reddit in general thing rather than something individual to r/the_donald or Trump supporters. Reddit mods and reddit communities are ban happy, whether they are on the left or the right.
wyldfire 10y ago
The code is on GH [1] and the data is on BigQuery [2]. [1] https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddit-algebra https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddi... [2] https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...
- mshenfield 10y ago
  Big Query table used is actually all_starting_201501 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.all_starting_201501 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...

61 points by peshkira 10y ago

jtr1 10y ago

The title of this piece doesn't adequately reflect the fascinating methodology it contains. The 538 team uses latent sentiment analysis to create a kind of algebra for subreddits, i.e. r/running + r/weightlifting = r/fitness. Politics aside, it's (IMHO) well worth the 15 minutes it takes to read. I'd love to see HN readers more experienced with the methodology take it to task and see what shakes out.

peshkira 10y ago
You are probably right. I just used the authors title. I also found it fascinating and the scroll effects were a nice bonus :)
ideonexus 10y ago
Agreed, I submitted the same link with the title "Semantic Analysis of Donald Trump Sub-Reddits," but even that leaves out the fascinating idea of "subbreddit algebra" that the article goes into. Articles like these are why I love 538. It's like popular science for statistical analysis.
- iainmerrick 10y ago
  Me too, too! Not only is this a really cool and novel (as far as I know) use of machine learning techniques, there's a lengthy footnote that goes into some detail about the method. And the presentation is great, very slick modern HTML. So it seems like an excellent fit for HN, apart from the title which will unfortunately put a lot of people off.
pc2g4d 10y ago
This is a really clever application of this sort of model. I did a lot of work with LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modeling, but never consider doing binary operations on the topic vectors themselves. Cool idea.

peregrine 10y ago

This story is extremely fascinating and relevant to the HackerNews Community but it's already been Shadow Banned. Neat.

mkstowegnv 10y ago
sorry but how can someone/some group shadow ban a story and who do you suppose would be behind shadow banning this one?
- peregrine 10y ago
  The mod's can choose to "bump" a story off the front page as a form of moderation. http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/ http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-remov... They do it constantly to stories deemed "not worthy".

wopwopwop 10y ago

I haven't read the linked articled (yet), but I wanted to urge everyone to check out r/the_donald. It is the strangest online community that I've seen. Truth doesn't really matter unless it supports us, everyone who says good things about us is right and everyone who doesn't is a corrupt MSM cuck libtard. To get banned you don't even have to be critical of Trump. If you're even ambiguous you'll get banned. In a sense this is self-selection in that the only people that haven't been banned are lunatic-level supporters. Basically, it's Donald Trump times 380,000. You have to experience it.

Arizhel 10y ago
It sounds just like the /r/Hillary_Clinton subreddit I briefly checked out during the election. I said something a little bit critical of Hillary and was immediately banned. This is just how Americans are these days. You have to pick a camp, and you need to agree 100% with everything in that camp or else you'll be shunned. And there's only two main camps too; if you try to pick an alternative camps, or even a camp that's really a sub-camp of one of the two main camps, you'll be shunned and derided.
- aanm1988 10y ago
  No, The_Donald is somethign special.
- Panoramix 10y ago
  r/Hillary is a run of the mill biased sub-reddit. T_D is biased and lunatic in a way that will have sociologists publishing papers for years to come.
vivekd 10y ago
yeah, that is true of r/the_donald. I got banned for saying I support him but I have questions about some aspects of his campaign. At the same time, arbitrary banning for anything less than 100 % agreement and support seems to be a reddit in general thing rather than something individual to r/the_donald or Trump supporters. Reddit mods and reddit communities are ban happy, whether they are on the left or the right.

wyldfire 10y ago

The code is on GH [1] and the data is on BigQuery [2]. [1] https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddit-algebra https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddi... [2] https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...

mshenfield 10y ago
Big Query table used is actually all_starting_201501 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.all_starting_201501 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...