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.<p>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).
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'.
Archived link <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210429165316/https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2019-10-29&to=2021-04-28" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210429165316/https://hedonomet...</a>
Reminds me of Jonathan Harris's 2007 project 'We Feel Fine.'<p><a href="http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html" rel="nofollow">http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html</a><p>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.
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!
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.<p><a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/kwh96n" rel="nofollow">https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/kwh96n</a>
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: <a href="https://github.com/dmuth/twitter-aws-comprehend" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dmuth/twitter-aws-comprehend</a><p>Some interesting takeaways from my experiment:<p>- President Obama's tweets became a LOT happier once he left office.<p>- 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.
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.
upwards of 8 years old site but here's previous discussion from a couple years ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20705755" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20705755</a>