

Daily happiness averages using Twitter - koski
http://hedonometer.org/index.html

======
Wilya
From <http://hedonometer.org/about.html> :

> “Why does the day of Osama Bin Laden’s death have such a low happiness
> score?”

> Many people presume this day will be one of clear positivity. While we do
> see positive words such as “celebration” appearing, the overall language of
> the day on Twitter reflected that a very negatively viewed character met a
> very negative end. It was a day of complex emotion which is best explored in
> the word shift for the day, rather than the single number of its average
> happiness.

That's.. a pretty dodgy statement. A more straightforward and honest
explanation would have been "We use a bag of words approach which relies on
the assumption that people use negative words when they feel down and positive
words when they feel good. This sort of models gives good results in most
simple cases, but doesn't handle complex cases, and can't take into account
that people sometimes use the words "death" and "dead" in a positive way."

There's nothing wrong with using these sorts of basic models. That's what
pretty much everyone who provides sentiment analysis does, and it's good
enough for most cases. But there's no need to hide the limits of the system
either.

------
ohwp
Remember these are Twitter users, not the world.

There is a trend in thinking that Twitter, Facebook and other social users are
representing the world population.

Hedonometer gives some explanations here: <http://hedonometer.org/about.html>

_"Tweets represent a non-uniform subsampling of all utterances made by a non-
representative subpopulation of all people. However, there are hundreds of
millions of people presently using the website to express their activities and
interests, and as such it is an important social signal."_

~~~
Dewie
> "Tweets represent a non-uniform subsampling of all utterances made by a non-
> representative subpopulation of all people. However, there are hundreds of
> millions of people presently using the website to express their activities
> and interests, and as such it is an important social signal."

Not many of those people actively tweet themselves, though.

------
Maxious
May 2 2011. Did "death" really mean sad or happy?

"I suppose I should be expressing some ambivalence about the targeted killing
of another human being. And yet, uh, no. [...] Last night was a good night for
me " - Jon Stewart

------
JohnLBevan
I recently had a similar idea (i.e. plotting contentment) related to keeping
employees engaged / detecting how events at work affected the general mood:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5646466> This post's great as it shows a
really good way to model that data (e.g. their use of different colours for
days of the week helps to determine if you had a good day for a special reason
or if that day people are generally in a better mood).

------
micheljansen
A surprisingly good holiday detector (Christmas, valentine's day, mother's day
etc.)

Other major events also clearly stand out (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes
etc.)

------
wjnc
So now Twitter really is out there as the biggest social science database
there is. And much of what we get are descriptives (and analysis on the
stockmarket). What are interesting research questions that need tackling
(let's say: non-financial) and can use a dose of massive sentiment analysis?

I would like to know how you can use global and local sentiments for all kinds
of analysis of social welfare.

------
taoufix
I wonder how do they deal with negative phrases:

* not happy

* far from being happy

* I could use some happy moments

* ... etc

~~~
program
I wonder how they deal with ironic statements. It seems that they merely
extract words out of the context.

~~~
lucb1e
How do _you_ deal with ironic statements, program? ;)

------
unkoman
Reminds me of <http://twistori.com/#i_love> which has a nice screen saver too.

------
j7
I wonder how much happiness stems from aggregate "good" weather across the
locations at whcih people are tweeting. I would wager that it correlates quite
nicely.

Then I would, once again, question why the hell people live in gloomy places
when most of them enjoy sunshine (and lollipops?)

------
james4k
Wow, Tuesdays are killer.

Edit: At first it seems we are trending down in happiness, but surely there is
some bias here. One thought is that the number of new or fresh twitter users
has declined, and so the overall eagerness and excitement around tweeting has
declined as well.

------
shaydoc
Very good, I was considering doing a similar experiment, but possibly grouping
happiness by country. And I was also thinking some way of determining what
triggered the expression of happiness, you know like , 'I am happy now, I just
did a skydive' etc..

------
gmac
See also: hourly happiness averages, using a dedicated research app:
[http://blog.mappiness.org.uk/2011/11/17/project-
update/#more...](http://blog.mappiness.org.uk/2011/11/17/project-
update/#more-364)

------
michaelochurch
I'm not that surprised by the low score of 5/2/11, because double negatives
are hard. It's actually hard to separate sentiment when interactions (such as
double negatives) come up:

"A _bomb_ _killed_ a _terrorist_." Good news. Three negative words.

Many psychologists believe that the quickest parts of the human brain don't
process double negatives at all-- that's why thinking "this is not going to
kill me" doesn't help during a panic attack, but "this will end" does-- which
is probably a small part of why news-watching (even positive news like Osama's
death) makes people unhappy.

"My _best_ _friend_ has been _killed_ by a _heart_ _attack_." Three positive
words. One negative. One (attack) that is slightly-negative but has
energetic/positive connotations.

"My best friend defeated cancer" vs. "Cancer defeated my best friend." Similar
tokens; opposite meanings.

What really surprises me is that it seems contrary to economic trends: in late
2008, when the economy was going to hell, the sentiment average goes up in a
major way. Across 2009-13, while the economy slowly recovers, the sentiment
level declines. Day-of-week average differences are very slight, but the more
people are working, the more unhappy they are. This could mean that
structurally unemployed people are self-deceptive, or tweet happier things
because they have more time per tweet, or it could genuinely mean something.

~~~
daned
His research specifically mentions the classification of n-grams as a future
area of work. (I have been working on implementing his work in python, so I
have been diving into this over the past few weeks.)

------
gdonelli
is it me, or it looks like it is going down?

~~~
lucb1e
I'm very surprised how easy it is to bring something down by just posting a
link on HN. Simple things like blogs, but also most weekend projects don't
hold up. I've never had anything going down due to HN load and also never
spent a dime on protecting it. Good code, a fetish for saving CPU cycles and
anticipation is what it takes.

~~~
sublimit
He was talking about the chart in question, obviously.

~~~
lucb1e
Oh, I'm seeing no chart so I couldn't know that, obviously.

~~~
moystard
The chart is not displayed if using Firefox. Switched to Safari and it works
perfectly.

It's a bit of a shame that most demos now are only focusing on webkit/blink
browsers... Please guys, think of folks like me who use the best browser in
term of Freedom ;)

~~~
lucb1e
> _It's a bit of a shame that most demos now are only focusing on webkit/blink
> browsers... Please guys, think of folks like me who use the best browser in
> term of Freedom ;)_

Chrome here, wasn't displaying.

Edit: At home now, tried with Firefox, that works.

------
logn
So if I say 'merry christmas' does it think I'm feeling merry? That would be
an unfair assumption.

