Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisisdallas | Hacker News Reader

I agree it would be interesting!

This certainly isn't scientific at all but a quick search for tpp (all time popularity) shows the first page of results as posts that primarily took place more than a year ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

Trump mentioned he was opposed to the tpp almost exactly one year ago today.

If we search the popular 'tpp' posts from December 1st 2015 to today, we get results that show posts that are critical of the tpp but over half of the first page of results have less than 100 upvotes. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tpp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...

Like I said, not scientific but kind of interesting I guess?

View on HN

I'd be interested to know if it was the same people speaking on both occasions though, because it is entirely possible that different sentiments being expressed was a result of different people expressing sentiment, rather than the same people changing their sentiment.

In other words, the same people who disliked TPP before could dislike it today, but not be commenting in the threads talking about Trump's opposition to it and new people who didn't comment on it before could be expressing their opinion formed by recent events (or even harbored from before).

I definitely think an in depth study on internet group think would be interesting, I just think that examining closer to see who composes the group and how it's thinking is an important aspect of that study.

Cool. Nice quick hack! How would you go about tying in identity politics?

My theory is that, and this totally based on opinion, most people don't want to show support for a specific idea or policy of the "enemy" politician out of fear from being persecuted by those who are on their same team. "I might agree with Trump on the tpp but I will certainly never say I agree with Trump about anything."

Working with what you've described, how would you go about supporting that with HN data? Selfish reason for asking: I've been thinking about doing something like this, but haven't yet spent much time thinking about it. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com