
What Was the Happiest Day on the Internet This Decade? - danso
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/3/5/18249733/happiest-day-internet-history-ranking
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lqet
> 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.

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everdev
> 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
Then 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.

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altharaz
I 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
Is 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
It was also entirely internet enabled. Worlds meeting, I suppose.

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Endy
I'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
Yup, this data is the equivalent of dumpster diving to see what people are
eating.

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jayd16
Hilariously, the graph has peaks on new years. Presumably "Happy New Years"
tweets are deemed quite happy.

~~~
codeulike
Well 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
I 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
But 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
Okay, 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!

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jonplackett
Interesting 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
Likely 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.

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gillesjacobs
The 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...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026752)

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.

~~~
sametmax
And 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.

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jaredsohn
Hillary 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.

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billfruit
I feel that Clinton winning the popular vote is also a statement that does not
give a clear picture, iirc, her popular vote majority was entirely due to her
humongous majority in the single state of California, if you exclude the
outlier of that single state and consider the figure from the remaining 51
states, then Clinton no longer has a majority on the votes.

~~~
Taylor_OD
It also doesnt include the, relevant, fact that half of the USA did not vote.
People seem to hear this as more Americans voted for Hillary than didnt. This
isnt true. More Americans voted for Hillary than Trump. More Americans voted
for no one than either candidate.

~~~
extra88
That's only true if you include Americans ineligible to vote (i.e. children).
61.4% of adult U.S. citizens cast ballots in 2016. More Americans would
_could_ vote for either candidate did so than not.

I doubt there's ever been a candidate that has won votes that total more than
50% of the voting age population so there's no reason to single out the
results of the 2016 election.

[http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-
voter-...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voter-
turnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-record-number-of-americans-cast-ballots/)

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tapland
No. 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._

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ovi256
That'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
Accidents 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.

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anc84
As determined by some weird algorithms based on Twitter data.

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izzydata
The happiest day on the internet is whichever day had the least amount of
traffic.

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rurban
I would have guessed Obama's first election win night. This was massive.

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jfk13
Seems a bit curious that "death of Osama bin Laden" shows such a strong dip.
Much sadder than "death of Robin Williams", apparently.

~~~
anc84
One 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.

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el_cujo
This 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.

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pelasaco
reading 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.

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meawaythrow
November 8th 2016

~~~
stronglikedan
Seriously. I was giggling like a little school girl all night long.

