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Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by nbashaw on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:38PM (#2603273)
How does the author measure anxiety, hostility, depression, confidence, compassion, and happiness? That seems to be left out.
Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by tansey on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:42PM (#2603302)
Hi! My startup [1] is based on an algorithm that can measure the emotional impact of text. Our blog is where we post interesting results from applying our algorithm.

[1] http://effectcheck.com

Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by raganwald on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @02:32PM (#2603830)
Speaking of your startup, it appears to have "Oracle Pricing" as its revenue model. You have to talk to a salesperson to get a price, which is often code for "We need to know how much you can afford and how much you are willing to pay before we quote a price."

I like everything else I see.

Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by gammarator on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @01:12PM (#2603435)
Trying the sample EffectCheck script on http://effectcheck.com/about : the sidebar says it's counting occurrences of phrases which score on each dimension. How is the association of word/topic determined? The measurement is valuable if and only if "Anxiety" defined as the count of ("different", "trigger", "taken out", "over", "carefully"...) corresponds to anxiety on some other psychologically relevant scale.
Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by hugh3 on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:51PM (#2603336)
Uhhhhh-huh. But how does the algorithm work, and (more importantly) how do we know whether it works or not?
Re:Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Co... by pavel_lishin on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @12:52PM (#2603340)
I assume the actual algorithm itself is not open sourced.

I'm wondering if there's anything that trips it up, like adding points to a comment's "hostility" score for profanities, which some people use when they're fucking excited about an idea.