Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgberlin | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure what I'm looking at here. Could you put some sort of explanation for the y-axis? I haven't the foggiest what a sentiment score is, and nothing seems to really change when I put in Obama, Trump, Angular, or React.

View on HN

We can definitely add some copy around that. The scores that we're using are normalized on [0, 1] and broken into three categories - positive, negative, and neutral. It's possible for something to be all positive or all negative, but most things are a mix. The relative differences between positive and negative sentiment are the most interesting. For example, if you search Obama, you'll note that in September '13 the average positive and negative sentiment trends cross. On average, sentiment expressed in comments on stories mentioning Obama were more negative than positive. They later return to being more positive than negative, but this is the sort of thing that's interesting to investigate. In this particular case there were a string of very negative stories involving the NSA [1], the assassination of U.S. citizens [2] and Obamacare [3].

In the case of React you'll note an overall trend of increasingly positive sentiment and less negative sentiment. Sometimes it's fun to figure out what the spikes were by searching on HN. The big positive spike on 20015-07-15 was [4], a Show HN with very positive reception.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347790

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435963

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462339

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891989

edit: formatting

Ah, so you have to pay more attention to how the positive and negative scores are interacting, and sort of disregard the neutral score, even though it looks much larger. That's nonintuitive (for me). Unless the neutral score serves some other purpose, you might consider removing it from the visualization.

Thanks for the suggestion, we very well might do so. The line does add something for the cases where a topic is becoming less neutral (stronger language is being used, either positive or negative) but it's unfortunate that the scales are quite different on the whole. We're going to work on making the system more intuitive and find better ways to highlight the most interesting trends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com