
The Quality, Popularity, and Negativity of 5.6M Hacker News Comments - sinak
http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments
======
nopinsight
> The minimum average points score of any given comment was about 2 points,
> meaning that all comments received atleast 1 upvote on average. This trend
> has been increasing until 2011 when it peaked at about 4.5 points. Since
> then, the average has trended downward, with a particularly large drop
> starting at 2014.

> Therefore, starting in 2014, both quantity and quality are on a downward
> trend.

The conclusion is unwarranted, because there are other changes in the system
and access points. Most significantly, points are no longer displayed and the
shift to mobile devices. This could affect voter's behaviors over time.

For example, people may be less inclined to vote when they do not see points
(the numbers could trigger voting in some cases). Voting on mobile phones is
also a pain as arrows are very small there, and a lot of mistakes could be
made (clicking down arrow when intending to vote up).

~~~
minimaxir
If people are less inclined to upvote, then they would be less inclined to
downvote as well, offseting it slightly.

Regardless, if the decline could be attributed to mobile devices, it would
have happened _way_ before 2014.

~~~
jimminy
> If people are less inclined to upvote, then they would be less inclined to
> downvote as well, offseting it slightly.

That's not exactly true. Since more people can upvote than downvote, the
threshold for downvote privileges is > 325 karma. So downvoting is reserved
for those that frequently interact with the service in a positive manner.
Downvoting could have had almost zero impact done to it due to the small set
of people with that privilege.

As quantity increased, and newer less frequent users stopped upvoting, because
there was no way to discern one's value in that interaction. Downvotes could
have held at a similar frequency, because of it's smaller group. The decrease
in upvoting could be accountable for a large portion.

Also, I rarely used a mobile device for interacting with HN, until 2-3 months
ago, because the interactions are quite crappy (one of the reasons they
mentioned for opening the API up.)

Edit: It's actually interesting, that the upvote/downvote ability wasn't
considered impactful, since you mentioned it further down in the article.

~~~
minimaxir
> _Edit: It 's actually interesting, that the upvote/downvote ability wasn't
> considered impactful, since you mentioned it further down in the article._

In retrospect, I should have mentioned the downvote threshold. However, it
wouldn't be helpful since I don't have access to the karma values of the
upvoters/downvotes (e.g. are the majority of upvoters people who are under the
karma threshold? are the majority of downvotes those at the karma threshold or
far above?), so I wouldn't be able to make an accurate inference.

------
mgraczyk
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
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
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?

------
tonglil
Just a quick FYI for the author:

> "The average amount of positive words in a comment made in thread about
> gender and diversity is 2.48 words, a little higher than the average, and is
> also the most frequently occuring value. However, The average amount of
> positive words in a comment made in thread about gender and diversity is
> 2.10 words, a much higher increase."

I think you mean:

> "However, the average amount of negative words"

Good article though, great graphics and cool insights!

------
probably_wrong
Nice timing coincidence: recently I decided that I would not comment on a
story if I didn't have anything positive to say about it. I found it that it's
a lot easier for me to focus on one tiny flaw and point it out that actually
making a contribution to the article. My number of comments has really gone
downwards since then, but hopefully their quality will go up.

------
davesque
I enjoyed this a lot. I do think the author is tending to make his assertions
too strongly e.g. saying things like "this data shows that..." instead of
"this data suggests that..." It's still a fun read and thought-provoking.

------
aston
I made the worst comment of the month list for a comment I actually thought
was good (!), and now I'm really curious about the context...

Is there any way to recover the thread ids or parent comments for items on the
the worst comments list?

~~~
koopajah
Found it quickly on [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) it was
a thread titled "Steve Jobs - To All iPhone Customers" and here is the link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51226#up_51333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51226#up_51333)

But I agree, I read some of the worst comments and would be nice to get a link
to the discussion for each of these to get some contexts!

------
gatehouse
Very thorough. Two things I'd like to see are comment score distributions in
the 3 months or whatever before and after scores were hidden (the purple
histogram), and a heat map of article tone versus comment tone.

------
touristtam
I am slightly disappointed in the lack of mention toward posting over a 24
hour period, and by extend to toward the timezone coverage of the users.
Although I have seen article pointing toward this in the past.

~~~
minimaxir
I had done timezone analysis for Hacker News submissions, in February:
[http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-submissions.png](http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
submissions.png)

More likely than not, comments would show similar behavior. (I didn't include
it in the post because those types of charts are much harder to make)

------
cheshire137
Thanks for this.

Third paragraph from the bottom, you say "However, The average amount of
positive words" when you meant to say "negative." Second from bottom, you
misspell "necessarily."

------
emcarey
Fascinating dive into the data-really appreciate the sentiment analysis of
comments made about women and diversity.

------
serf
> It’s worth noting that on Hacker News, you can be downvoted for being
> factually wrong.

Also for having a differing opinion, the incorrect number of characters in the
post, misaligned chakras, irregular weather patterns, cosmic rays, etc.

