Great work! Would love to learn how the sentiment is scored!
The Saltiest Users on HN
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Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#32May I suggest removing Cantarell from the list of fonts used? The font weight used on this site makes it extremely hard to read.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#33I hope it's not based on the contents of the quoted posts alone. > This was explored (all the way to its grim dystopian conclusion) in tv series Dollhouse. Might want to check it out. That doesn't seem very salty to me, and I could see myself writing that same comment.
It seems to be based on the individual words, not the meaning. "Grim" and "dystopian" are probably considered "salty" words. My lowest scoring comment was about dissonance in music, and presumably "dissonance" is a "salty" word too.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#34A lot of my salty comments are me complaining about myself or my own stuff.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would worry about my methodology if I saw dang, who basically only ever weighs in to politely tell people to be less salty, in the #2 spot on my "Total Salt Score" list.
What's your definition of 'salty'? I think you can definitely be politely salty, and dang's comments are all saying (at least) 'don't do that' which seems to fit.
My understanding of the word lines up pretty well with the Merriam-Webster definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salty): feeling or showing resentment towards a person or situation; bitter.
By that standard, just telling someone not to do something wouldn't be salty. Salty is telling someone not to do something because only an idiot would do that.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#36How is saltiness trained? Are there readily available sentiment analysis tools or did the author train it himself? Anyway, cool and entertaining idea :) PS: not just seeing the saltiest but also the sweetest comments of a person would be nice.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#37The scoring heuristic could use some work; I've already encountered multiple "salty" comments along the lines of "That sounds awful", with a sympathetic tone, probably tagged because of the word "awful".
Agreed. It looks like they went through a dictionary and scored the words on a negativity/positivity axis, and then just took the mean of all the scoring words in a post.
I have written posts very much saltier than the ones scored as saltiest by this ranking algorithm, possibly because I didn't use inherently negative vocabulary to express a highly negative sentiment.
It's a fun party trick, but its usefulness is limited without semantic analysis or live-human scoring.
20.23% of my posts are rated as "salty". I wonder what percentage of scoring words are rated as negative.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#38The opposite of this would also be interesting.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#39Why the hell am I not on that list?
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#40I love this! I'm sort of proud to note that my salt score is -0.08, with my saltiest comment being: The iPad and iPhone are especially dangerous when it comes to accidental downvoting. Separating or enlarging the arrows would help those of us with fat fingers. However, (and this will apparently add to my salt score ;)), I'm curious how a comments like these get rated as expressing a negative sentiment?: Out of curios…
I'm nothing but salty and my score is -0.13. Garbage in garbage out.
Sentiment analysis is overall a dangerous way for social media players to punt around 'things we don't like', whatever that may be. You will end up shadowbanned on whatever social media platform you use, because you're not posting cat photos and other prosaic content that people trying to sell insurance policies, sugar water, and watches are okay with.
Thankfully, this is such an ill-posed problem, it will just be an embarrassing boondoggle.