What does America want? #AskObama Twitter insights knows | Hacker News Reader

What does America want? #AskObama Twitter insights knows

obama.twitsprout.com

27 pointsmichaelrlitt27 comments

Sprinkling a little Twitter pixie dust on an infographic doesn't make a pure politics story germane to HN. Flagged. Please do likewise.

We disagree; there's very few other situations where you can get a quantitative look at which issues have mindshare. Most of the time the reporters get complete veto power.

We saw a rare opportunity to apply technology to something it doesn't normally get to be applied to. Seems pretty germane to HN to me.

You know how you can tell it's a crappy HN submission? More than half the comments are about drug legalization. This is a Reddit politics story, not an HN story.

This isn't a value judgement on your infographic. It's just the wrong venue for it.

Tend to disagree - comments are on that topic because of the content of the post.

I'd think the relevance of the venue is determined by the level of comments and votes from the audience, the beauty of social sites. While I agree it doesn't follow the typical content of HN, if the audience up-votes then so be it.

This is one of the worst info graphics I've seen. The graph shows nothing. It took me a couple minutes to realize the numbers outside the box are related to the stuff inside the box. And worst of all what does time zone have to do with anything? The only thing that was even semi-useful was the tag cloud.

Unfortunately, geo-tagging in the Twitter API is still hardly ever used -- in almost 100,000 #AskObama tweets, less than 500 of them were tagged. At the same time we felt that location was an interesting metric, since the country is often politically divided along state lines. The time zone is the best compromise we had. It's not perfect, but the fact that the numbers match the "stereotypes" shows there's at least some merit to this approximation.

Glad you liked the word cloud at least -- I've gotta say, you've been our toughest viewer so far ;) Thanks for the feedback though.

What does "the numbers match the stereotypes" mean? That the numbers match the relative populations of the timezones?

If so, how would I know this from the infographic? Any why would I care? Shouldn't that be the default assumption?

Very cool analysis! Let's see if it comes true... Would love to hear the answer to the question from @kim: "Tech and knowledge industries are thriving, yet job discussion always centers on manufacturing. Why not be realistic on jobs?"

That's one of the ones that got picked, towards the beginning. We'll have a post-mortem up of everything soon.

Post-mortem sounds grim. Let's call it "post-town-hall-analysis" :)

So legalization of marijuana is our nation's biggest concern right now? I'm not sure what to think about that.

For me it's not about smoking pot, it's about not putting people in jail for it. A decent chunk of our budget mess at the state and local levels is in law enforcement. We spend huge amounts of money enforcing bad laws. I'd like to make that stop, but it has to stop at the federal level first.

Think of all the lives its ruined by making felons (destroying future careers) out of nonviolent people. Think about the complete destruction of our civil liberties/due process/militarization of police/etc. The War on Drugs is one of the most destructive and wasteful endeavors ever attempted by the US government. It funds gang activity, makes police encounters more dangerous, all in all it affects US citizens more than the most other federal activities.

The marijuana topic is legit. We have ample data that shows overwhelming interest in the subject. It's not just about the drugs, it's also about the laws enforcing them. People don't necessarily want to get high, they just don't want to pay to have one of the highest per-capita imprisonment rates in the world.

It's a legitimate issue. The War on Drugs is an abject failure that has cost billions of dollars and left millions of lives either lost or destroyed through violence or imprisonment. It's a moral disaster, as well as a financial one. The only reason it continues is because voting to end it would be politically difficult.

When good politics back up terrible policy, it's reasonable to ask the head of state why he supports them.

I'm hoping (maybe against hope…) that Twitter isn't representative of the whole country.

I really hope you're right! Will be interesting in hearing the analysis on whether Obama focused on what people wanted to hear vs. his agenda.

Was also pretty cool to checkout Obama's Twitsprout stats, seems his team is trying to drop the # of people they follow.

Seems we're loving the "war on..." tagline these days. While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like the marijuana debate may need to be more of an analysis than a war.

The Town Hall just ended, and the entire topic of drug law reform was conspicuous only by its complete absence :( This will be part of the upcoming post-mortem for sure.

It seems he only mentioned 'drugs' once, in the context of 'war on drugs' - nothing about pot legalization

1) It's a funny question to retweet, 2) it's something the president does not typically get asked about, and 3) As far as problems facing our country, it has a relatively easy answer, IMHO.

I'm sure more people are worried about the economy, but "how are you going to fix unemployment?" is neither a fun/funny question to ask nor is it likely to produce an interesting or novel response.

I think it has the highest ratio of "people support it" to "politicians and DC media absolutely will not even mention it let alone give it credence", so people tend to bump it up on places like twitter because it's the only time they can express the viewpoint.

Why does asking a question about it make it the biggest concern? It's a simple issue with a clear way to decide and most people simply want him to go along with his repeated promises of not using the fed to raid dispenceries, which is exactly what the AG is doing right now.

I think the "biggest concern" refers to the Re-Tweet analysis...it had over 4900 RTs, far beyond anything else.

The drug question always seems to come up as the #1 question asked when a vote is put to internet users. And every time Obama dodges/laughs at the question.

And every time Obama dodges/laughs at the question.

Well, we can stop hoping for audacity now.

that was a really clever way to get me to sign up for twitsprout.

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