[popinman322]

It's always very interesting to see people pull out threads with low like counts (like 12k) and claim that central idea of the post is widely held.

We're talking about platforms with tens of millions of users; wide appeal is at least a quarter million likes, with mass appeal being at least a million. A local-scale influencer can gather 10-30k likes very easily on such a massive platform.

[corimaith]

Do you disagree then that's not a sentiment widely reflected within Chinese social media? I simply gave an example for brevity, other answers are similar, I would encourage people to actually go in and read themselves here.

[gunian]

Why argue we are on HN scrape US and China social networks. Have at least a 100 million posts from each. Do sentiment and topic extraction.

If it is based on one post I'm sure i can find a Reddit post talking about how non white people should be slaves it's the internet lol

[glenstein]

>It's always very interesting to see people pull out threads with low like counts (like 12k) and claim that central idea of the post is widely held.

In what context is 12k likes a low amount? To me this is reminiscent of arguments I heard from neocons that global anti-Iraq war protests, the largest coordinated global protests in history at the time, counted as "small" if you considered them in absolute terms as percentages of the global population.

I think it's the opposite, that such activities are tips of the proverbial iceberg of more broadly shared sentiment.

It would be one thing if there were all kinds of sentiments in all directions with roughly evenly distributed #'s of likes. I'm open to the idea that some aspect of context could be argued to diminish the significance, but it wouldn't be that 12k likes, in context, is a negligible amount. It would be something else like its relative popularity compared to alternative views, or some compelling argument that this is a one-off happenstance and not a broadly shared sentiment.