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I would be interested to see a how the "negativity index" behaves with other emotionally charged topics. What other sorts of topics lead people to use a more e

I would be interested to see a how the "negativity index" behaves with other emotionally charged topics. What other sorts of topics lead people to use a more emotionally charged vocabulary? What if instead of titles containing (women|female|diversity), you did the same analysis with other topics associated with toxic discussion? Maybe: (israel|palestine|gaza) or (gentrification|rent control|eviction) or even (windows|microsoft) The data seem to indicate that people use more emotionally charged words, both positive and negative, when they talk about something emotional/personal like diversity. I wonder if other topics lead to the same asymmetrical increase in negativity?

wutbrodo 12y ago
Seriously, I found a few of the conclusions drawn from the data here to be pretty odd. I was hoping for some interesting insight but the article is really disappointing. > "The language in the former is more neutral and about the content of the article (apparently Hacker News users really like to talk about Open Source software), while the submissions about gender and diversity trend to talk about tangent topics." Does the author _really_ find it surprising that combining all topics will lead to, on average, more "neutral" language than a topic that (ostensibly) doesn't require any expertise/knowledge of esoterica? It should be obvious that the number of people who have an opinion about diversity in tech will be higher than the number of people who feel the same way about "Show HN: Virtjs, an ES6 emulation library " or "The amazing progress of LEDs" (both from the front-page right now). Note: I'm not suggesting that the latter two aren't as _interesting_, but that contributing a comment of substance is obviously going to be more difficult and thus have less people go ahead and do so.
- RyanZAG 12y ago
  Is it just me who finds the latter two far more interesting? It seems the biggest problem with HN becoming more popular is that it's picked up all of these politically charged topics which were very seldom before (from memory). If anybody could run the numbers on the percentage of topics featuring 'diversity' from 2014 compared to earlier that would be very interesting to me. There's no shortage of places to discuss diversity and the usual political issues, but far fewer places to discuss difficult business and tech issues and having HN taken over by these 'interesting' topics is very unfortunate. Is this the case though?
minimaxir 12y ago
Per your suggestion, I created a word cloud of (windows|microsoft), and compared it with a word cloud of (google|android) as a counterpoint: http://i.imgur.com/CD3rFRR.png http://i.imgur.com/CD3rFRR.png ...I did not expect these results.

wutbrodo 12y ago

Seriously, I found a few of the conclusions drawn from the data here to be pretty odd. I was hoping for some interesting insight but the article is really disappointing. > "The language in the former is more neutral and about the content of the article (apparently Hacker News users really like to talk about Open Source software), while the submissions about gender and diversity trend to talk about tangent topics." Does the author _really_ find it surprising that combining all topics will lead to, on average, more "neutral" language than a topic that (ostensibly) doesn't require any expertise/knowledge of esoterica? It should be obvious that the number of people who have an opinion about diversity in tech will be higher than the number of people who feel the same way about "Show HN: Virtjs, an ES6 emulation library " or "The amazing progress of LEDs" (both from the front-page right now). Note: I'm not suggesting that the latter two aren't as _interesting_, but that contributing a comment of substance is obviously going to be more difficult and thus have less people go ahead and do so.

RyanZAG 12y ago
Is it just me who finds the latter two far more interesting? It seems the biggest problem with HN becoming more popular is that it's picked up all of these politically charged topics which were very seldom before (from memory). If anybody could run the numbers on the percentage of topics featuring 'diversity' from 2014 compared to earlier that would be very interesting to me. There's no shortage of places to discuss diversity and the usual political issues, but far fewer places to discuss difficult business and tech issues and having HN taken over by these 'interesting' topics is very unfortunate. Is this the case though?

minimaxir 12y ago

Per your suggestion, I created a word cloud of (windows|microsoft), and compared it with a word cloud of (google|android) as a counterpoint: http://i.imgur.com/CD3rFRR.png http://i.imgur.com/CD3rFRR.png ...I did not expect these results.