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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

The_donald members often post in TwoXChromosomes and TropicalWeather?

https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=the_donald

In fact, a lot of users seem to post both on extreme right-wing and left-wing subreddits, I did the test for a few of these subs, and it's just baffling. Either it's because of the phenomenon called "brigading", where a thread from one side is linked on another sub which leads users of the latter to post in the former, or a lot of users are just trolls playing both sides and inciting drama and outrage between people just for kicks.

> inciting drama and outrage between people just for kicks.

"popping their filter bubbles", or "are generally interested in boundary-pushing ideas", or "are susceptible to the rage-inducing trolls who run fringe communities".

"Affinity for extreme ideas of any kind" maybe a stronger / more common personality trait than "interested in one extreme point in the vector space of ideas".

JordanPeterson subreddit links to the_donald, but not the other way around?

The metric (Jaccard distance) is symmetric. The assymmetry comes from ranking: JordanPeterson is more special-interest/intense-interest with a narrower more homogenous audience than the_donald, so it probably has more very-similar subreddits to it than the_donald does. the_donald would have more related reddits but with less perfect overlap in membership.

A broader base of people (about 1/4 to 1/2 of the voting age US public) is aware and supportive of Donald Trump and for a wide variety of reasons, and much more than half at at least aware of Donald Trump. Jordan Peterson has a much smaller following, who are interested in him for similar reasons to each other.

Makes sense, JP's reddit fanbase is quite small. One slice of his videos has been seen across all the edits and platforms 500million times. He has insane reach.

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