Sentiment analysis would be possible to run on either or both of articles and individual comments - I've done it before on a forum that had far less activity th

Sentiment analysis would be possible to run on either or both of articles and individual comments - I've done it before on a forum that had far less activity than HN does and gotten at least some usable data. You could then track individual features (e.g. "Julian Assange", "Uber" or "free speech") over time, I'd assume that both how frequently it appears in comments and how the sentiment towards it changes over time are both interesting if you were thinking of some sort of metrics. Forums are also quite good sources for intent and emotional analysis along with just sentiment, you could probably get to see what topics are (5, Flamebait) in the old Slashdot sense :) https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/08/emotion-sentiment-analysis-practitioners-guide-nlp-5.html https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/08/emotion-sentiment-analysis...