The title of this piece doesn't adequately reflect the fascinating methodology it contains. The 538 team uses latent sentiment analysis to create a kind of algebra for subreddits, i.e. r/running + r/weightlifting = r/fitness. Politics aside, it's (IMHO) well worth the 15 minutes it takes to read. I'd love to see HN readers more experienced with the methodology take it to task and see what shakes out.
Agreed, I submitted the same link with the title "Semantic Analysis of Donald Trump Sub-Reddits," but even that leaves out the fascinating idea of "subbreddit algebra" that the article goes into. Articles like these are why I love 538. It's like popular science for statistical analysis.
Not only is this a really cool and novel (as far as I know) use of machine learning techniques, there's a lengthy footnote that goes into some detail about the method. And the presentation is great, very slick modern HTML.
So it seems like an excellent fit for HN, apart from the title which will unfortunately put a lot of people off.
This is a really clever application of this sort of model. I did a lot of work with LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modeling, but never consider doing binary operations on the topic vectors themselves. Cool idea.
I haven't read the linked articled (yet), but I wanted to urge everyone to check out r/the_donald. It is the strangest online community that I've seen.
Truth doesn't really matter unless it supports us, everyone who says good things about us is right and everyone who doesn't is a corrupt MSM cuck libtard. To get banned you don't even have to be critical of Trump. If you're even ambiguous you'll get banned. In a sense this is self-selection in that the only people that haven't been banned are lunatic-level supporters.
Basically, it's Donald Trump times 380,000. You have to experience it.
It sounds just like the /r/Hillary_Clinton subreddit I briefly checked out during the election. I said something a little bit critical of Hillary and was immediately banned.
This is just how Americans are these days. You have to pick a camp, and you need to agree 100% with everything in that camp or else you'll be shunned. And there's only two main camps too; if you try to pick an alternative camps, or even a camp that's really a sub-camp of one of the two main camps, you'll be shunned and derided.
>It is the strangest online community that I've seen.
shrug It's just NeoGAF with some surface level differences.
GAF is wider focused, has a different position, and uses different memes to be dismissive of disagreement. But overall this describes it's type of political discussion and moderation of wrongthink to a T.
yeah, that is true of r/the_donald. I got banned for saying I support him but I have questions about some aspects of his campaign. At the same time, arbitrary banning for anything less than 100 % agreement and support seems to be a reddit in general thing rather than something individual to r/the_donald or Trump supporters. Reddit mods and reddit communities are ban happy, whether they are on the left or the right.
