Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

live.votizen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 31 posts

Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#1

Post by jdunck »

Votizen is working to remove the influence of money in politics by making political decision-making more peer-to-peer.

We're using Twitter and our API to pull tweets from only registered voters, and showing how the discussion breaks down among the parties. This has never been done before as far as I know, not even by the major media outlets.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. If people are interested, we'll work to improve it for the further debates and campaigns.

Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates
live.votizen.com

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#4

Post by jdunck »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #3

How are you matching Twitter accounts to voter registration?

We have voter rolls (preprocessed) into elastic search. We do search using data available from twitter (name & location, mostly). We can't match all twitter users who are voters, but we have a very low false-positive rate.

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#7

Post by jdunck »

michael_fine wrote: post #5
jdunck wrote: post #2

What do you like? What don't you like?

I love the whole concept and execution, except I think the tweets should scroll by slightly slower, as sometimes you don't have time to read a tweet before it disappears.

Yeah, it's a tough call. If we slow it down, we'd have to show fewer as the underlying stream is zipping by. We considered pause or pause-on-hover, but sort of assume people will glance at it, not stare at it, if that makes sense. Gestalt, not reading?

Re: Show HN: Tracking voter discussion of the Presidential debates

#10

Post by jaysonelliot »

It's a fun visualization to have up as a dashboard, I think I'll keep it running during the debates.

I love the design; it's very easy to read, and the simplicity and color make it easy to digest information at a glance.

My constructive criticism:

For the word frequency charts at the top of the screen, I'd weed out common words, and/or try to combine words into meaningful phrases. http://www.wordle.net/ does a good job with this (weeding out common words, not discerning phrases).

The number one thing I think people would be interested in would be some kind of sentiment analysis. Perhaps a knowledgable HN'er could suggest a service you could use for this?

From a UX perspective, I'd like the ability to pause and rewind the twitter streams, or filter them for specific words, phrases, geographic locations, or demographics.

One final nitpick, I would suggest using image meta-tags for sharing on Facebook. I posted the live.votizen.com page to my timeline, and there was no image to accompany the link. Here are the meta-tags you can use for richer sharing: http://davidwalsh.name/facebook-meta-tags

But yes, overall, I love this.

Post reply on HN