10 ms·
What Was the Happiest Day on the Internet This Decade?
- meawaythrow 8y agoNovember 8th 2016
- stronglikedan 8y agoSeriously. I was giggling like a little school girl all night long.
- anc84 8y agoAs determined by some weird algorithms based on Twitter data.
- jonplackett 8y agoInteresting that many of the big peaks don't have any specific meaning attached to them but the big troughs do. I interpret this as meaning the internet needs a good reason to be sad, but can be happy for no particularly big reason. This seems like a good thing.
- VLM 8y agoLikely something happened that is politically incorrect to even name, the bias is incredible given the troughs for tsunamis and nuclear plant meltdowns are a mere blip compared to Hillary not getting elected. Also I'm not sure how/if they filter out bot traffic. Twitter, as I understand it, is mostly bots and fake follower accounts with human traffic being a tiny fraction of the data. Kinda like the old days of Usenet where 99% of the traffic was computers sending binaries to each other and only a tiny fraction was human to human text discussion. I would imagine the happiness sentiment of a mere repetitive shell script could distort the data such that the average is highly compressed around the 5 result. Possibly if we assume a nuclear plant meltdown should have scored a 1 on any realistic and reasonable human scale, then dropping only a tenth of that might indicate twitter is, to one sig fig, maybe ninety percent inhuman repetitive bot traffic. To some extent twitter is workforce automation for echo chambers and signalling group affinity and membership; I'm not sure the mood of an environment in that context means anything when related to the real world, which reduces the significance of horrible events resulting in small signals. Surely, tens of thousands of deaths and nuclear contamination have nothing to do with trying to fit in with the cool kids, or at least a tiny subset of the population who think they're cool kids, which is a counterexample to my mathematical model in the paragraph above.
- kylecazar 8y agoAlso noticed this, FWIW I believe some of the recurring peaks are named once and label omitted in subsequent years. I.e, the higher peaks before every year are Christmas/New Years with Valentines Day shortly after.
- gillesjacobs 8y agoThe news article is misrepresenting several things: 1) Obviously, Twitter is not representative of the whole internet and its users. Twitter has a particularly activistic base, so it's no wonder "happiness" went down after Trump got elected. 2) It misrepresents the performance of the sentiment analysis method used: This is based on sentiment detection research done in 2011 explained here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026752 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... They used a fairly simple lexicon-based sentiment analysis approach which even in 2011 was not even close to the state-of-the-art. They first create a sentiment/subjectivity dictionary by letting MTurkers rate words in different categories such as "happiness", "laughter", "greed", "hate", etc. For the final "positivity" score they add the matching words in Twitter posts. This is a simple and efficient approach but produces fairly unreliable results w.r.t. negation, valence shifting, etc. Even in 2011, machine learning approaches were much better usually.
- chippy 8y agoRegarding twitter, the population growed and changed composition over time too. For example pre and Post Oprah around 2009 and explosive growth until 2014 when it slowed somewhat. So even if it's not a good representative of the whole internet, it's not a good representative of itself when looked at over time. One would have to use the same cohort of users from each year with the assumption that their usage stayed the same.
- sametmax 8y agoAnd of course it's limited to english, so far from "the internet". And indeed, Trump has been elected for getting the majority of votes, yet it represents it as a sad day, while I'm pretty sure most voters were happy.
- jaredsohn 8y agoHillary won the popular vote. Also non-voters (including younger people who are ineligible or just didn't vote) and people outside of the US have opinions on such things.
- jayd16 8y agoHilariously, the graph has peaks on new years. Presumably "Happy New Years" tweets are deemed quite happy.
- arethuza 8y agoAzure Text Analytics says "Happy New Year" has a sentiment of 96% - whatever that means.
- codeulike 8y agoWell you do need to be at least slightly happy to send a Happy New Years message, unless you're sending it in a sortof ironic depressive funk.
- Loughla 8y agoI think it's honestly more of just a meaningless statement (at least in the US). Sort of like when someone greets you with 'how are you?' and everyone just says 'great' or something like that. It's just words to most people, I think.
- ben509 8y agoBut it's words they say because that's how they want to present themselves to total strangers; as a courteous person. In the same way, people could dress like total slobs, but instead take time every morning to look decent.
- Joe-Z 8y agoOkay, so we now defined the meaning of "being happy" to mean "not being so totally depressed to not even put on clothes anymore" :) Quite a low bar to reach, we can do it!
- tapland 8y agoNo. 1 'Happy Days', June 25th 2015 Obama legalizes gay marriage in the US, but also, Five different terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Syria occurred on what was dubbed Bloody Friday by international media. Upwards of 750 people were either killed or injured in these uncoordinated attacks.
- ovi256 8y agoThat's kinda negligible compared to the other 150k daily deaths around the world. It sure registers as a big event in the media, just like plane crashes. Probably because of saliency bias.
- chapium 8y agoAccidents and deliberate acts are not comparable in my opinion. Accidents can be caused by negligence or just bad luck. On top of all this, humans killing other humans is just barbaric.
- extra88 8y agoYou're conflating two different things, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage (a happy event for many, sad for others), Obama sang "Amazing Grace" at a sad event, a funeral.
- pelasaco 8y agoreading the tweets while Trump started to win the elections.. before was like "no way it will happens" and after just "omg he is winning", was kind of a tragic comic day.
- jfk13 8y agoSeems a bit curious that "death of Osama bin Laden" shows such a strong dip. Much sadder than "death of Robin Williams", apparently.
- anc84 8y agoOne of them chose to die by their own will. The other was unlawfully assassinated in a perverted lust for revenge. I would be glad if the death of the latter was made society unhappier when comparing the two. Not so say that this is a morbid, perverse thing to do anyways.
- Endy 8y agoI'm coming in just to say this: Twitter is not the internet. There must be more complete places to pull this data, even if that takes more effort.
- degenerate 8y agoYup, this data is the equivalent of dumpster diving to see what people are eating.
- tzfld 8y agoI have something better to say: the op is bs and don't make any sense.
- everdev 8y agoFrom the intro: > let’s take a pseudoscientific journey
- lqet 8y ago> There’s a lingering hope among people who are Extremely Online that the internet will somehow right itself and again become the place of bizarre daily delights that made it so engaging in the first place. Those days may be gone forever. Meh. Just because a big part of the internet really is like the "torture chamber" of Clockwork Orange doesn't mean the internet of the early 2000s is gone. I used to hang out in some forums as a young teenager, and these forums are still there, and active. All of the IRC channels I was active in 2002 are still there. I can still use ICQ to send messages to people I now know for over 20 years. You can still spin up a personal homepage with nearly the exact amount of work as in 2001 (at least in Germany, you had to be very careful regarding legal issues even back then). It may be buried under a ton of shit (read: ton of tweets), but the internet of 2000 is still very much there.
- everdev 8y ago> a big part of the internet really is like the "torture chamber" of Clockwork Orange Is it? My daily rounds almost never encounter anything like that.
- lqet 8y agoThen you have either developed an immunity, or you are proofing my point: since it is possibly to move around in a sane, creative and/or interesting subset of the internet, the internet from 20 years ago is still out there :) On a side note: this "good" internet may be hard to find, but don't forget that for the majority of the population even in highly developed countries, it was still uncommon to have access to the internet at home 20 years ago, so it was "hard" to find the good internet also back then. This is somewhat thought provoking, as it seems to indicate that the "good" parts of the internet were, and are, elitist circles.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thatoneuser 8y agoEveryone likes to say you can go back and do things like they did in 2000 but it's never going to take away the fact that there is more stuff out there. Back in the day this "old internet" was all there was. There was no outside influence and the rules were all just being made. Now even if you go to old forums you can't help but see the influence they've taken on from the "new internet". It's like growing up. Even if you're immortal you're only growing up once.
- altharaz 8y agoI would have said “the day Pokémon Go had been released”. I remember people from different generations walking in the streets, talking and laughing together without knowing each other. Something very rare for Paris :).
- WhompingWindows 8y agoIs that really a day "on the Internet" though? That was beautiful precisely because everyone got outside, saw monuments and interesting sites, learned about their surroundings.
- BurningFrog 8y agoIt was also entirely internet enabled. Worlds meeting, I suppose.
- potta_coffee 8y agoIt was less fun in my town: pedestrians wandering obliviously into traffic, etc. Still entertaining though.
- izzydata 8y agoThe happiest day on the internet is whichever day had the least amount of traffic.
- rurban 8y agoI would have guessed Obama's first election win night. This was massive.
- el_cujo 8y agoThis article is kind of trash. It basically starts off by saying you can write off anything that happened after 2016 because Trump winning made twitter go into a downspiral of sadness, when in reality that downtrend seemed to have started in mid 2015 (right around when election coverage started really ramping up, interestingly enough). Then after going through the effort of showing graphs and numbers to make the rankings seem legit, the author describes how the scoring is done, and it seems incredibly skewed by the addition of arbitrary events that each add a point to the score. So basically, if the author wants a day to get a higher score, they can just look into it more to find more events so that its score goes up. If an event happened that day that contributed to happiness, the hedonometer score already reflects that, it makes no sense to double dip by giving the score extra points since that days happiness may have had multiple small contributions rather than just one big one. I don't even really agree with how the hedonometer score was integrated. I think to really see how "happy" an individual day is, it would be better to subtract that day's happiness from the baseline/average happiness of that month rather than the raw score. This gives small happy days in a happy period an advantage over big happy days in a less happy period. I guess if you're just trying to say that day is happy without trying to tie any event to it, the raw data is fine, but I think that's much less interesting. There is probably some fancier math that could be done to weight the scores on a curve that would be more fair than just subtracting from their baseline if you really wanted to get into it. In the end they come to the conclusion that same-sex marriage being legalized is the happiest day on the internet, but if you look at the first graph, it really barely looks like an out of the ordinary day, you wouldn't notice it if it wasn't being pointed out. This really makes it feel like the author came into this article wanting that to be number one and made everything else fit around that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]