Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

I have long wondered about doing an analysis of HN comments to find correlations of opinions, instances where people have changed their mind over time, topics where the balance of opinion is out of proportion to the balance of comments due to a vocal minority.

I have made some casual observations that it would be nice to know whether the broader data supports what I have seen. For instance, one weird thing that I have noticed, is that antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile. It may just be by imagination.

Possibly more importantly, but also something should be approached with caution and sensitivity would be analysis of comments to identify people in mental distress. I know of a few HN users that have taken their own lives and have wondered if there was enough information in their comments to allow someone to provide pre-emptive support.

I would be really curious to explore such correlations.

Tbh, while I was working on this, I did struggle with forming hypotheses to test, or even a suitable manifold for the different items/users (e.g., I didn't know some of the users share the PGP keys). Unsupervised methods were not very satisfying in uncovering such hypotheses as well.

There is also the point you raised about how to share (or what to do with) some of these correlations. For example, concerning mental illness, as much as I would love to uncover that due to my sheer curiosity, I am really concerned about what I would see.

> antagonistic comments appear to me to be posted more often by users with PGP keys in their profile

While it's definitely preferable to encrypt private communications among all people including the "nothing to hide" types who generally behave well within societal norms, the types who don't behave as well feel a greater need to encrypt.

I should clarify that I don't think that most these type of comments are from people deliberately violating societal norms (like a troll would).

My hypothesis is broadly similar to yours, that comments like this come from individuals with a more adversarial view of the world.

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