Inspiration
Two facts about me: I’m a big Reddit user, and I personally take a very neutral stance to politics. My internet savviness and general political neutrality is something I pride myself on. However, this is definitely not the case for most other Redditors! Over the course of the past four years, I’ve wondered how conservative users and liberal users on Reddit differ in their expressed emotion: is it negative, positive, or neutral? That is what this project seeks to discover: the overall sentiment of r/The_Donald and r/politics (a conservative subreddit and liberal subreddit, respectively), both across the last four years, and relative to each other.
What it does
This project finds and visualizes the distribution of sentiment for both subreddits from 2016 to 2019.
How I built it
I built it in Python, one step at a time! See the presentation "Fitzgerald_Treehacks_README.pptx" in the Github Repo for more information!
Challenges I ran into
I had to change my approach of the problem to not include machine learning, which was a bit sad. However, I think it worked out for the better.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I think I had a clever way of calculating the sentiment scores for each comment (see presentation).
What's next for The Politics of Reddit in Sentiment
If I had more time, I would create a classifier that could classify a given comment into either r/The_Donald or r/politics.
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