
Hedonometer - mhb
https://hedonometer.org/index.html
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furyofantares
I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather
complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming
social media and news media?

I find myself often wondering: is the whole world anxious and confused and sad
right now? Or maybe just my country? Or maybe just highly-online folks? Or
maybe just my bubble?

Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever
before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about
it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression. But I don’t know how to
calibrate at all, I have infinite information available to me and no way to
sift through it, and the global marketplace of information seems to mean that
anything that attracts attention is either highly biased or a statistical
outlier or is otherwise just taking advantage of some human bias that makes it
sensational enough to attract eyeballs and spread.

~~~
dilippkumar
I once reasoned that I trust my network of friends, family and colleagues to
pass along any information to me that might be relevant to me - as long as I
maintain a strong relationship with them - through regular meets, phone calls
and texting each other fun memes.

I figured that I don’t need to consume any information from untrusted and
unvetted sources (cable news, new york times, reddit, wsj, late night tv
shows) - so I disconnected myself from all of the modern news sources and
chose to live in ignorance.

Anecdotally, I feel great. I’m at peace, I still find out everything that’s
useful - and I don’t waste cpu cycles in my head on things completely outside
my sphere of control.

And yes, the whole world is doing really well right now - the way I see it -
despite what the TV news anchors yell into the camera every hour.

~~~
simplify
Isn't this the sort of attitude that enables bad actors to abuse their
positions of power?

~~~
objectivetruth
It's the sort of attitude that enables a LOT of bad things in the world:

The poster doesn't like "unvetted" news sources like the Wall Street Journal
or the New York Times (which get lumped in with Reddit and Stephen Colbert in
their opinion). Instead, apparently they consider the information they get
from their friends and family as adequately "vetted." Now, that's a very
unusual definition of "vetted," plus where are the friends/family getting
THEIR info? The poster is information-gathering via the old game of
"telephone" with all the attendant problems and distortion that invites.

Now, the poster also claims they are getting all the info they need. How do
they know that? How do they know their trusted friends and family are 100%
informed on all of the relevant issues?

The world is a fast-changing place so to safely not worry about any of those
changes, you have to be:

1) near the top of the socio-economic pyramid, AND 2) devoid of empathy

Example: as a white natural-born US citizen, I probably won't have to worry
about any upcoming changes to the existing legal permanent resident program
personally affecting me. But a recently-approved permanent resident really
SHOULD pay attention to the news so that they can learn that many Americans
and their representatives want to revoke their residency and kick them out.

Same thing for marriage laws: I'm a straight unmarried man, so I won't
personally be affected if the GOP re-bans gay marriage, invalidates all of the
existing ones, and jails county clerks and pastors for officiating them in the
future.

But as a human being who cares about the people who ARE affected, it would be
incredibly selfish of me to ignore not just their plight, but to go out of my
way to avoid learning about what is going on.

I feel that being an informed citizen is a critical responsibility, an
integral part of citizenship.

~~~
buildzr
> where are the friends/family getting THEIR info?

Are you trying to tell me Alex Jones and The Official Flat Earth Facebook
group aren't "vetted" enough for you?

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sn41
This seems to be measuring the volume of messages with particular keywords on
each day. I think that people wishing "happy
birthday/thanksgiving/christmas/Valentine's Day" may not actually mean they
are happy. (contrast this with a message saying "we're blessed with a new kid"
which may denote actual mood.) Most of these generic messages are automatic
greetings for particular days. I am not convinced that this actually measures
people's moods on particular days.

~~~
petercooper
The same the other way. The day bin Laden died is notably "unhappy" because a
lot of people said "dead" or "death" but I do not recall it being seen as a
negative event at all.

~~~
sixstringtheory
I saw the point where Paul Manafort received a guilty verdict, and it is also
one of the lower points. My first thought was that it's still a negative
situation, so even if people are happy about the outcome, overall it's still a
drag. It still brings back all the things that had to happen to get to that
point.

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coding123
It clearly shows a giant sine wave and we're very happy on xmas. So... now we
should juxtapose the stock market and see how things correlate. Only then will
we be able to answer the age old question if money = happiness.

Edit: Also we're much much much happier with our mother than our father. This
has soo much info packed into it.

~~~
blackflame7000
It's a big mistake to assume the people of twitter are a good sample of the
people of the US.

~~~
taurath
I think the bigger mistake is to think even if it was a good sample it could
gauge people’s mood - incentives for posting to social media are either happy
or outrage. You will never get a silent majority “just okay” or “neutral-low”
by averaging between ecstatic and outraged.

~~~
blackflame7000
"The squeaky wheel gets the grease"

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tibbon
I've often wondered, "Is it just me, or everyone and everything seems to be
kinda awful right now?". This points to at least some validity to this idea,
or at least as much as the real world reflects onto Twitter.

Is the measurement here flawed? Likely. But it's really interesting to see
that some Christmases are indeed happier than others

~~~
sixothree
My team has made a few comments about this lately. We deal with a lot of other
teams and keep coming across levels of rudeness that we would probably not
tolerate in our own teams.

It feels like something is in the air lately.

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the_arun
Social networking sites usually project perceived happiness vs Real happiness.
It is hard to measure real happiness - people often wear diplomatic masks on
internet to protect their real mood :) Having said that, I get the idea & this
could be a great platform if we extend this to other emotions, political
swings etc.,

~~~
tekromancr
I would believe that for any site except twitter.

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jolmg
If that site's developer is reading this, the top of the page can't be seen
when the width is such that the upper links in the navigation bar wrap. For
example, at the typical width of my browser, I can't see the years above the
graph. I can't scroll high enough to see them.

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jointpdf
One interesting observation: there’s a noticeable gap between average
sentiment on Fri/Sat vs. Mon/Tue/Wed (especially when viewing the “Full”
trend). Fridays rule—it’s science.

I wonder what accounts for the trough between ~2012-2014?

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pvaldes
I imagine that an army of twitter bots sending automatically thanksgiving
messages could mess with the results. A sad event in christmas would be
balanced by the global cheering and be perceived as "less sad" by the program
than in a common day.

The opposite is also possible. That bots can be programmed to create outrage
deliberately is not a secret. Outrage means bussiness for newspapers so is a
desired goal.

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Grue3
Why is the word "gun" listed as a "bad thing"? That seems biased just to make
mass shootings seem worse than other disasters/loss of life.

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wscott
Doesn't seem accurate from my experience. We should have seen a huge downward
spike last night when Amazon Prime went down. ;-)

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muhammadusman
this is cool, overall kind of amazing to see how a whole ecosystem feels even
if it's pretty generalized!

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donutdan4114
Can we get this data overlayed with the stock market? Correlations?

~~~
airstrike
The stock market isn't driven by sentiment alone, and the population of
investors isn't the same as the population in this study

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taneq
What, no huge downward spike when tumblr banned adult content? :P

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w_t_payne
How does this correspond to economic data?

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k__
So basically humanity loves new year?

~~~
monkeynotes
Twitter is at best a representative of people in the West. And only a small
subset of those people.

~~~
opencl
Japan has a pretty large Twitter userbase, but this seems to only look at
English words anyway.

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szaroubi
Very interesting. The downwards spike of the Trump election is very similar to
the upwards spike of xmas day. Nothing more, just an observation.

~~~
okmokmz
Aside from them both being spikes how exactly are they similar, and why would
that be interesting? The same could be said about pretty much any spike

~~~
szaroubi
At a very high level the spikes seem to be of equal and opposite value. You
are correct, there is a lot of variance in the diagram, which makes your
comment very valid. My post was very lighthearted and by no means data driven.

