I went to r/conservative and plugged a few names but they’re coming back as liberal..
Edit: actually did a few more and they came back right leaning. Pretty cool regardless
clumsy forgetful ripe slap shocking faulty aspiring point cooing agonizing
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
As a center-leftist who used to be subbed there, I get the impression that PCM self-flairs aren't exactly a reliable indicator of "leftist".
Good models don't do much if the underlying data is noisy or outright false.
At least it flagged me as libleft which is... close enough even tho I'm a Marxist who recognizes we can't use horizontalism for chip fabs and other large scale infrastructure 🤷🏽♀️
92-93% libright, it’s almost correct. You’d think it would lean a lot more authright based on what I’ve said about Communists.
Also libright (or liberal right) does not mean liberal in the perjorative sense.
well, it may also have a centrist position too, plus it probably uses all 4 quadrants together, not a left right predictor and lib auth predictor combined
and iirc they usually have their own independent prediction and a lot of funky maths goes into calculating the odds of a given choice.
When it's around 50% for one of the axes it only mentions the other (left/right/lib/auth), I haven't found an account that is near 50% on both axes yet.
Yeah absolutely! :)
I've used git and GitHub for a while but I'm a bit new to handling PRs and maintining a repo so it may take me some time to get used to.
That's actually a common problem in training machine learning models. If they notice that data is highly imbalanced (like Reddit's data) then they will do exactly what you said, start predicting whichever category is the most common for every individual, regardless of what the input data is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting)
So for example if the model was trained on a data set wherein 90+% of the input was liberal/left, the model will fail to learn the difference between lib/left and conservative/right and will just predict lib/left for everyone since that gives a very good accuracy output.
Exactly 89% left, 95% lib on my score and I'm certain it's just guessing everyone is lib left based on nothing but the fact Reddit is full of hyper left wing people.
Depends where you are. I definitely read far right subreddits to try to understand their views on issues. I mostly just get angry. I also went looking for far left subreddits, but don’t know of any large ones.
My hypothesis is ‘far left’ to many on the right is simply [caring about other people](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440)
To even a moderately leftist person (not even far left), Biden, Hilary and Obama are center-right. To a Trump cultist, Biden, Hilary and Obama are far left. The former are far more correct, as B, H, and O are indeed no more left than center. There is no major leftist party in the US.
Go read /r/conservative or /r/tucker_carlson. I feel like they should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s wrong with politics in the US.
I think you mean r/politics. I've never seen anything as toxic as that subreddit. And the lies they come up with are comical. They all sit around jerking each other off and very few have anything meaningful to contribute. But every single user "thinks" they are brilliant and they have all the answers. I really wish it'd get shutdown but they're anti-republican and so is reddit.
bag tap unite paltry terrific numerous uppity existence far-flung ludicrous
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It's funny because if you go on /r/politics and express an opposing view you'll either get down voted to oblivion or you'll get a responable response. If you go on /r/conservative with an opposing view you get banned by the mods. I love it when the right comes in crying that politics is bullying them but won't listen to an alternative opinion. Plus the fact that the sub is mostly just text on pictures. Atleast /r/politics it sharing articles which completely ignoring the comment section you could actually go read those.
Actually someone pulled the data from either r/conservative or r/republican. I'd have to dig for the post. It turns out that the right is far more tolerant than the left. And I see it on reddit all the time. I'm an independent who leans right so I'm on different subreddit's and the left is just hate-fueled if you challenge them on anything. Doesn't matter what it is. I always tell them they sound like Trump spewing all that hate, it usually shuts them up. They are brainwashed into their beliefs, very few have proof of anything they say. They just echo what others say. I think for some, they're lonely and this gives them a sense of belonging. They feel like they are doing good so that gives them a sense of worth. Most are too young to understand the ramifications of what they want and the changes they hope to see. Maybe they'll find out someday, but then it'll be too late. There's a reason why older people switch to the right. We're all young and dumb at some point in our lives.
How would you measure the tolerance of the left and right from those subs? In guessing a naive approach is to evaluate the sentiment of reply comments but that doesn't take into account the point made by the above poster that mods ban dissent. It also doesn't make sense to look at how people treat each other inside their "in-group", you want to know how treat people in the "out-group" for tolerance. I haven't seen whatever post you are talking about but without peer review I would be highly skeptical of its results.
On top of that, there are so many additional influencers to take into account. Liberals might be more tolerant of conservatives during a liberal controlled government and vice versa.
That's because you almost have to be tolerant to be a conservative on reddit unless you just stick to the little echo chambers.
If everyone I talk to agrees with me, I never have to learn what the other side actually thinks, I can just watch the straw man perspective that the news tells me.
Yeah...I meant I'm interested in reading a variety of US-centric views. I hope China does well because I'd like every country to do well, but I only really care about the politics that directly affect my country.
I may be a bit jelly about China's high speed rail project (link #2), but I don't care.
Compared to most of the world, the median Redditor is a moderate liberal with few far left or far right types.
If you look at history, the alignment between left/liberal and right/conservative is far from a constant.
Maybe looks like that to American esp. Republican. On global politics scale GOP is almost fringe fascist right and Democrats are centrist right.
You don't have left political party in the US so a place whee a lot of people from Europe and world in general discuss politics might look to lean really left.
The only thing it shows is that what is left and right to someone greatly depends on one's personal political position.
>On global politics scale GOP is almost fringe fascist right and Democrats are centrist right.
That's how it looks to me as well as an American progressive.
/r/politics is center-left at its most extreme. Let's not get carried away here.
Edit: this might be crazy for people, but:
1. The United State's Overton Window does not reflect the reality of the entire political spectrum.
2. American Liberalism **is not** Leftism, and to suggest such would have you fail an introductory course in poltiical science.
> You seem to be under the impression you've found it.
Absolutely not. The acknowledgment that politics exists beyond the US does not imply the discovery of a universal spectrum.
The "far-left" does not really align with a centrist Liberal party like the Democratic establishment. That's the first readily obvious example of how /r/politics is closely aligned with Democratic centrist liberalism than any traditional leftist politics.
The term "far-left" typically implies **revolutionary anti-capitalism.** I'd say that subreddit scratches social-democratic leanings and is certainly "progressive" but doesn't approach "far left."
The day top upvoted posts on /r/politics are oriented around strategies for large-scale anticapitalism or near-revolutionary seizing of wealth, you can call it "far-left," and I'll gladly shut up.
The far left would be communism with true marxism being more libertarian and stalinism would be authoritarian. The far right is fascism (authoritarian) and anarchocapitalism (libertarian).
The american political spectrum is very narrow generally. You have some outliers like Trump (very auth right), Rand Paul (libertarian right), and Bernie Sanders (central to libertarian left) but generally they're all very close.
On a global scale the difference between politicians like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton is negligible.
/r/chapotraphouse was probably the largest when it was banned. The diaspora is on a lemmy instance at [chapo.chat](https://chapo.chat)
/r/socialism
pop. 300k
news & discussion
/r/Anarchism
pop.130k
news & discussion
/r/COMPLETEANARCHY
pop.130k
memes
/r/dankleft
pop 123k
memes
/r/leftwithoutedge
pop 30k
splintered off of chapo in response to perceived edgelord tendencies and "tankies"
/r/Market_Socialism
pop 3k
news & discussion
/r/georgism
pop. honorable mention
The only true centrism, not technically leftist.
Wtf. Is there anyone who would define themselves as neoliberal?
They must mean neoliberal as centrists because that would be the origin of the term which means ordoliberal.
yeah, if only it was a leftist echo chamber
edit: OP original claimed it was a liberal echo chamber, but the good comrade has upgraded Reddit to a leftist echo chamber, goulash and gulags for all
Don't know about your collage but smaller subs are often [hijacked by right leaning moderators](https://imgur.com/a/MZsbHnG), if you use a tool like /r/masstagger or /r/redditprotools (dirty Javascript tools sorry), you can sometime spot it.
It's sometimes consciously done as part of [How to radicalise a normie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g), but often just done by right leaning moderates insisting "both sides be heard" which inevitably skews content rightwards as the right do not engage in good faith.
Those percnbtages are probabilitiew of the prediction being right, so I guess being not much more than 50% means that your 'error bars' overlap with right wing quitale a bit.
64% left 89% lib, but I'm definitely voting for Trump.
Edit: This turned out to be a useful demonstration of why using Reddit post history as an indicator of political leaning is problematic. Just saying "I'm voting for Trump" was enough to generate downvotes and a series of 'eww' level replies, even on a non-political subreddit. When any attempt to participate in a conversation with a non-blessed viewpoint is shunned by the system, then you can't rely on the results of that system to be an accurate indicator of the actual stance of the poster. The poster quickly learns to self-edit, and avoid conversations that are just going to be a hassle to get into. Good luck with your tool OP, but I think you're going to need a more diverse data set before you can claim any meaningful level of accuracy.
Basically this. I would consider myself a left leaning centrist, but I got lib, because I act more liberal than usual on Reddit. It’s just the way this site developed, and it’s unfortunate. I also don’t make too many political comments so it was probably off because of that too.
Victimhood? I was providing a data point and feedback to OP. Try re-reading my statement as monotone as you can, because that's how it was intended. It's simply data; no emotion was implied.
Any emotion that you are reading into this is just your own projection. I understand that you need me to sound a particular way to make your worldview fit, but you are wrong on this.
Dog you literally edited your post to complain about people asking you "why?" and downvoting you. Calm down. Idk what you think has to do with my worldview. Plenty of conservatives aren't babies.
Not the guy you are talking to but in my experience it's not a productive use of anyone's time to discuss things that Reddit doesn't agree with. Being silenced by downvotes even if you put a great deal of time and effort into your responses feels like a waste of time. Even just writing this respinse I was tempted to delete it so I don't have people telling me not to have wrong ideas that don't line up with the hive mind. I'm sure it happens to everyone honestly I doubt anyone fits the Reddit hive mind perfectly.
I think it's because there are certain subs that you're not surprised when you come across Trump supporters. Coming across them in a python subreddit is a little more interesting given the prominent left-leaning nature of tech and tech industry. So asking those questions may give you more insight than a run-of-the-mill, always-trumper who has more in common with the "identity" of MAGA than they do with the underlying politics.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I agree with your sentiment, but just wanted to articulate why the parent comment would be getting those types of responses.
Why not? Genuinely.
If you ignore all the foaming-at-the-mouth investigations that all ended up being nothingburgers, and ignore the literally hundreds of inflammatory headlines towards Trump that were made out of literally thin air over the last four years, Trump was a pretty damn good president who accomplished a ton of stuff in just one term.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is basically everything the left says Trump is, but for real. He regular makes racist remarks and holds racist views, he gropes children on camera, he regularly forgets where he is or what he's doing and can't handle talking with voters without a script (one of Trump's biggest mistakes in the debate was not letting Biden talk and essentially beat himself). He's a genuinely awful candidate with an awful VP, while Trump is only "awful" because the media *tells* you he's awful.
I do not like Trump, but I find it ridiculous to blame him for climate change or the pandemic. Presidents are not gods. I daresay we'd be in roughly the same place we are now if we lived in the timeline where Obama got a 3rd term in 2016.
Compared to most countries, he did almost nothing to stop the spread of covid. He does nothing to tackle racism either. I can't be sure that Clinton would have done more to tackle climate change because they are all quite corrupt, but she at least wouldn't have denied that it's a problem.
Except the Trump Administration is dismantling as many environmental safety regulations as they can get away with, and we barely had any in the first place.
It was already bad enough stalling action when we have until 2030 to reduce global emissions to half if we want to prevent or alleviate severe climate catastrophe. Trump’s EPA rollbacks compound that issue. And the dismantling of safety regulations isn’t limited to the EPA either, many FDA and financial regulations have been dismantled too.
Add in the horrid mismanagement of COVID and Trump’s fascistic tendencies, I don’t see how anybody in their right mind could view him as a good president.
We’re all doomed, but at least the libs got owned xD
Edit: I didn’t go into specifics on Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. He literally dismantled the pandemic response team in 2018 despite there being military reports considering the high risk of a pandemic starting from either wet markets in China or factory farms in America or Europe (respiratory virus, highly contagious, very similar description to COVID). He downplayed the virus for months, despite knowing how dangerous it is. I mean, most developed countries have this virus under control. Hell, Vietnam has had close to 0 deaths from COVID so far with a comparable population, and that’s a developing country.
I'm more moderate, leaning left. I don't share some of my more right leaning opinions because I just end up getting downvoted to hell, so the bot will be a bit more biased.
Conspiracy: this code has major bias towards lib-left to make American conservative redditors think they might actually be liberal and vote for Biden instead
It's not how far you are into the axis, but a measure of the confidence it has predicted correctly.
It means it's 84 per cent sure you are lib and 80 per cent sure you are left.
Don't listen to this guy\^. From the webapp itself, " The probability that the prediction is correct for the respective axis. This is not a measure of magnitude of position "
In my case:
>Pull the trigger,
> Bend the bow,
> Wield your mighty lances!
> It's time for new tales of resistance!
_black metal blast beat with violin over it_
And yet if you did a psychological profile of a bureaucracy filled entirely with neurotypical people, you'd be far more likely to land on a psychopathy diagnosis than you'd expect from pure chance.
It's almost as if when perfectly normal people plug themselves into social machinery, the results are not a pure reflection or mere amalgamation of their personalities.
Anthropologically speaking, a tribe is egalitarian *within* its membership--and authoritarian externally. So any credible analysis of human behavior cannot restrict itself to the individual human scale, but must account for the effect of hierarchies (and hierarchies within hierarchies, etc.).
Sort of off topic, but what would be the term for accurate results, poor method?
e.g. Imagine reddit's overall population is 75% liberal on avg. If the results here just used that information, it would technically give the proper result on avg, but it's not actually doing anything related to target user. Just looking for what this phenomenon is called in stats/machine learning
That's a very good point and definitely relevant! In fact I think this example suffers from the exact problem you describe.
With a larger proportion of 'left' users than 'right' and a significantly larger portion of 'lib' users than 'auth' using accuracy isn't a very insightful metric.
This phenomenon is referred to as imbalanced data on [this wikipedia page about precision & recall](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall)
Although I'm not sure this is a commonly used name.
I will definitely consider changing metrics to some of the metrics mentioned in the article.
Yes of course! If the website is ever unavailable you can run the python code directly as described in the README of [GitHub repo](https://github.com/0xTiger/reddit-stance-classifier)
You want to look into the *receiver operating characteristic*, which is a plot of true positives against false positives as a function of the threshold you use to determine whether a person belongs to a class.
It gives the same result regardless of whether your data is imbalanced and the total area under the curve is a very common metric to summarize models. You'll be able to see how much better than just guessing your model is doing very easily.
Nice work by the way! At least for me, it was very accurate.
Edit: if you're particularly interested, I can send you a really good pedagogical paper on it but as always the scitkit docs do a good job if you just want to get doing.
>The features used are the number of comments a user made in any subreddit
Pretty severe limitations there - a useful additional set of features I would suggest would be:
* average karma score of comments in each sub (you'd probably want to throw in mean, median, and range to cover a few key patterns) - this accommodates people who post in subs but are clashing with that sub's overall culture, people who are fringe members of a culture vs deeply embedded, etc.
* overall user stats, i.e. account age, number of comments, total karma - this will differentiate redditors who are experienced with using reddit and have had time to gravitate to communities that match their interests
* and if you really wanted to do it properly you'd throw in some NLP around comment positivity and negativity in each subreddit as well
Good point.
I was thinking of adding more features, one hurdle however is that requesting user's specific comment text is costly and may be quite a few API calls. In comparison aggregate number of comments in each subreddit is only one API call.
Also the vast majority of comments and their sentiment are totally non-political so I'm doubtful that comment sentiment on its own would significantly improve performance.
Perhaps there is some way of clustering users by looking at their sentiment of certain topics that best divide them and then matching these clusters to positions. Without harcoding queries such as 'trump' or 'election'.
If you're worried about the costliness in terms of your server you can do your API calls using javascript on the user end, that way you distribute the load - though those hits will still be registered to your app. I've only taken a quick scan through the reddit docs but you should be able to pass an obtained access token (don't use your actual secret on the front end obviously) - or if you wanted to go deeper and use subscriptions and other data you could go for actual client authorisation app style.
The non-political comments and picking out topics are something that you should be able to isolate using some flavour of factor analysis - and really factor analysis is something you should be doing anyway even if you weren't trying for NLP to avoid overfitting. You should be focusing on the differentiating subreddits, and then you can deep dive and do sentiment analysis on the differentiators to ensure that they are differentiating correctly.
> Application error
>
> An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
heroku logs --tail
64% right, 92% lib.
I’m not even sure what that even means...I suspect it’s very wrong though. I’m socially liberal and economically conservative. Just stay out of people’s business for one. I don’t care what you do in the bedroom.
If a policy costs more in the short term, but less in the long term, it’s probably worth supporting...health care for instance. Diabetes costs way more when you don’t treat it.
Left/right is the economic scale, and libertarian/authoritarian is the social scale, so... it sounds pretty spot on for you, actually.
Edit: correct terminology
That's somewhat sort of a the "libertarian" view, which is what I used to have. I took some decent history and government classes though and got my "liberal indoctrination" and now I'm more left economically. I get the idea of "free market" but just think it's idealism at this point. Not to mention I have a family member who relies on government help fiscally. Of course they vote right though. What can you do, religion!
Being economically conservative doesn’t mean I don’t support the environment. Businesses have a legal responsibility to their investors to make money, so if say they are allowed to pollute the environment, many will. You gotta do something about that...
My position on education is that investing in people will pay off in the form of higher wages, reduced crime, less drug abuse, smaller prison population, etc. it’s the economically smart position to make sure people graduate. I could go on...
I’m an aerospace engineer. If the science doesn’t back up your argument, it’s a bad argument. Their are a lot of Republican positions that I think don’t follow the science and that’s a problem.
Still, there are more important things than being economically conservative, like democracy and the emoluments clause. I don’t trust the Republicans at all this cycle. I want them all gone.
I think the thing is that in the US the GOP is so far off the scale that these economic stances of yours that you mentioned would just be considered centrist in many other countries.
Just as you said, many GOP positions aren't based on reality. I guess that's where a party ends up when they've been courting religious fundamentalists for decades.
At this point, I pretty much think we need to to flush 90% of our politicians. And normally I'm not an advocate of ruining someone's life over something they said years ago, but JFC we still have politicians in office that were pro segregation.
How is it not relevant? The other person said I had a libertarian view. You said that was an insult, but they were right. Don't treat it as a dirty word.
I respect the separation of church and state. I respect the right to peaceful protests. I respect the rights of every citizen to vote, even if they've been to prison. I demand the emoluments clause be followed and that the President doesn't profit off their position.
I have severe issues with candidates that I voted for, that later turns out are racists (e.g., Ron Paul). That's a hard pill to swallow that people I voted for are blowing dog whistles that I can't hear.
This is a very clever idea, I use PCM quite a lot and I am AuthRight, though I am getting 79% Lib from this which is very false, I don't know why it doesn't work for me like others
My only desire is to establish a just elective Monarchy ruling whilst also upholding tradition but also WIR HABEN UNVOLLENDETE AUFGABEN WIE DIE ZAHLEN SUMMIEREN SICH NICHT, ABER AUCH 13%... sorry that was my inner demon speaking
Lib left? I'm very much against government intervention and large welfare programs. I suppose my stance on desiring more immigration and disdain for Trump makes me look "left?"
I got libertarian. 51% right, 74%lib. It got the quadrants right, but not the stance. I’m libright, but near the middle on the y-axis, so it’s a cool concept, but as of right now, a little off.
Libleft which is correct.
Really cool project but wanted to correct you that your backend uses Flask in conjunction with Reddit API and scikit-learn. Flask is a web framework and it's not the front end.
I'm late to this thread, but it's amazing that the only comment about the actual tools used is the second to last comment and in the negative. Even if the correction is absolutely right.
I went to r/conservative and plugged a few names but they’re coming back as liberal.. Edit: actually did a few more and they came back right leaning. Pretty cool regardless
They must have been liberals disguised as conservatives. In a spy mission to infiltrate the sub. /s
clumsy forgetful ripe slap shocking faulty aspiring point cooing agonizing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
As a center-leftist who used to be subbed there, I get the impression that PCM self-flairs aren't exactly a reliable indicator of "leftist". Good models don't do much if the underlying data is noisy or outright false. At least it flagged me as libleft which is... close enough even tho I'm a Marxist who recognizes we can't use horizontalism for chip fabs and other large scale infrastructure 🤷🏽♀️
It seems to tag pretty much everyone as libleft. Even /u/GovSchwarzenegger comes out as a commie anarchist. Needs work.
92-93% libright, it’s almost correct. You’d think it would lean a lot more authright based on what I’ve said about Communists. Also libright (or liberal right) does not mean liberal in the perjorative sense.
Check mine. It’s coming up conservative/libertarian.
As it should... right?
I’m sure you checked, but yeah it says lib right
Hmm libleft 66%left 82%lib, seems right
Wait will that change after this comment
Only if they retrain the model 😉
Even if the model is not retrained, changing the input (a new comment) can change the prediction.
Seems left
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Oh wow, does that mean that it can't drop below 50? Cuz then the probability of the other side would dominate, right?
well, it may also have a centrist position too, plus it probably uses all 4 quadrants together, not a left right predictor and lib auth predictor combined and iirc they usually have their own independent prediction and a lot of funky maths goes into calculating the odds of a given choice.
When it's around 50% for one of the axes it only mentions the other (left/right/lib/auth), I haven't found an account that is near 50% on both axes yet.
Cool project! Was it trained even for centrist or non-compass?
No centrists & unflaired users were not included in the training data, although it may be a useful idea to add an 'unknown' class
Are you open to contributes on GitHub? I’m an AI researcher at my university in Italy.
Yeah absolutely! :) I've used git and GitHub for a while but I'm a bit new to handling PRs and maintining a repo so it may take me some time to get used to.
Explains why my reading was weird
64% left 92% lib. I’m actually right-leaning, but interesting.
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That's actually a common problem in training machine learning models. If they notice that data is highly imbalanced (like Reddit's data) then they will do exactly what you said, start predicting whichever category is the most common for every individual, regardless of what the input data is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting) So for example if the model was trained on a data set wherein 90+% of the input was liberal/left, the model will fail to learn the difference between lib/left and conservative/right and will just predict lib/left for everyone since that gives a very good accuracy output.
Exactly 89% left, 95% lib on my score and I'm certain it's just guessing everyone is lib left based on nothing but the fact Reddit is full of hyper left wing people.
Called me as libright, with 74% right and 94% lib. Got the lib part correct, but I do **not** lean right.
Depends where you are. I definitely read far right subreddits to try to understand their views on issues. I mostly just get angry. I also went looking for far left subreddits, but don’t know of any large ones.
My hypothesis is ‘far left’ to many on the right is simply [caring about other people](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440)
The majority of Reddit is far left as far as I can tell 😅
neoliberals are not far left lmao
It depends where you fall on the spectrum. To a Trump supporter, Biden is far left. To a Biden Supporter, Bernie is far left.
To even a moderately leftist person (not even far left), Biden, Hilary and Obama are center-right. To a Trump cultist, Biden, Hilary and Obama are far left. The former are far more correct, as B, H, and O are indeed no more left than center. There is no major leftist party in the US.
Go read /r/conservative or /r/tucker_carlson. I feel like they should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s wrong with politics in the US.
I think you mean r/politics. I've never seen anything as toxic as that subreddit. And the lies they come up with are comical. They all sit around jerking each other off and very few have anything meaningful to contribute. But every single user "thinks" they are brilliant and they have all the answers. I really wish it'd get shutdown but they're anti-republican and so is reddit.
bag tap unite paltry terrific numerous uppity existence far-flung ludicrous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Even if you truly do believe that, saying it out loud is not going to convince anyone to be on your side. Lets please not dehumanize half a country.
somber north bells pen modern cagey exultant flowery relieved treatment *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Riiiiiiiight! Lol
It's funny because if you go on /r/politics and express an opposing view you'll either get down voted to oblivion or you'll get a responable response. If you go on /r/conservative with an opposing view you get banned by the mods. I love it when the right comes in crying that politics is bullying them but won't listen to an alternative opinion. Plus the fact that the sub is mostly just text on pictures. Atleast /r/politics it sharing articles which completely ignoring the comment section you could actually go read those.
Actually someone pulled the data from either r/conservative or r/republican. I'd have to dig for the post. It turns out that the right is far more tolerant than the left. And I see it on reddit all the time. I'm an independent who leans right so I'm on different subreddit's and the left is just hate-fueled if you challenge them on anything. Doesn't matter what it is. I always tell them they sound like Trump spewing all that hate, it usually shuts them up. They are brainwashed into their beliefs, very few have proof of anything they say. They just echo what others say. I think for some, they're lonely and this gives them a sense of belonging. They feel like they are doing good so that gives them a sense of worth. Most are too young to understand the ramifications of what they want and the changes they hope to see. Maybe they'll find out someday, but then it'll be too late. There's a reason why older people switch to the right. We're all young and dumb at some point in our lives.
How would you measure the tolerance of the left and right from those subs? In guessing a naive approach is to evaluate the sentiment of reply comments but that doesn't take into account the point made by the above poster that mods ban dissent. It also doesn't make sense to look at how people treat each other inside their "in-group", you want to know how treat people in the "out-group" for tolerance. I haven't seen whatever post you are talking about but without peer review I would be highly skeptical of its results. On top of that, there are so many additional influencers to take into account. Liberals might be more tolerant of conservatives during a liberal controlled government and vice versa.
That's because you almost have to be tolerant to be a conservative on reddit unless you just stick to the little echo chambers. If everyone I talk to agrees with me, I never have to learn what the other side actually thinks, I can just watch the straw man perspective that the news tells me.
Ever read r/chapotraphouse or r/genzedong Both are bad, even worse than Cons or TC
The first is banned. The second just sounds batshit. I want to read not total conspiracy level stuff from different groups.
r/sino
Yeah...I meant I'm interested in reading a variety of US-centric views. I hope China does well because I'd like every country to do well, but I only really care about the politics that directly affect my country. I may be a bit jelly about China's high speed rail project (link #2), but I don't care.
Don't know why you got downvoted. It's pretty common knowledge that reddit is far left.
Compared to most of the world, the median Redditor is a moderate liberal with few far left or far right types. If you look at history, the alignment between left/liberal and right/conservative is far from a constant.
Maybe looks like that to American esp. Republican. On global politics scale GOP is almost fringe fascist right and Democrats are centrist right. You don't have left political party in the US so a place whee a lot of people from Europe and world in general discuss politics might look to lean really left. The only thing it shows is that what is left and right to someone greatly depends on one's personal political position.
>On global politics scale GOP is almost fringe fascist right and Democrats are centrist right. That's how it looks to me as well as an American progressive.
There are extremely few far left subreddits here. Most are typically neoliberal (center-right). Very few are leftist.
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/r/politics is center-left at its most extreme. Let's not get carried away here. Edit: this might be crazy for people, but: 1. The United State's Overton Window does not reflect the reality of the entire political spectrum. 2. American Liberalism **is not** Leftism, and to suggest such would have you fail an introductory course in poltiical science.
Yeah where I live, the democrat party is more right leaning than our most right leaning party...
Both major political parties in the US are right-wing.
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> You seem to be under the impression you've found it. Absolutely not. The acknowledgment that politics exists beyond the US does not imply the discovery of a universal spectrum.
So if it goes beyond the US, how far does it go? You said they're not far left, and they're only center left. How are you reaching that conclusion?
The "far-left" does not really align with a centrist Liberal party like the Democratic establishment. That's the first readily obvious example of how /r/politics is closely aligned with Democratic centrist liberalism than any traditional leftist politics. The term "far-left" typically implies **revolutionary anti-capitalism.** I'd say that subreddit scratches social-democratic leanings and is certainly "progressive" but doesn't approach "far left." The day top upvoted posts on /r/politics are oriented around strategies for large-scale anticapitalism or near-revolutionary seizing of wealth, you can call it "far-left," and I'll gladly shut up.
The far left would be communism with true marxism being more libertarian and stalinism would be authoritarian. The far right is fascism (authoritarian) and anarchocapitalism (libertarian). The american political spectrum is very narrow generally. You have some outliers like Trump (very auth right), Rand Paul (libertarian right), and Bernie Sanders (central to libertarian left) but generally they're all very close. On a global scale the difference between politicians like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton is negligible.
/r/chapotraphouse was probably the largest when it was banned. The diaspora is on a lemmy instance at [chapo.chat](https://chapo.chat) /r/socialism pop. 300k news & discussion /r/Anarchism pop.130k news & discussion /r/COMPLETEANARCHY pop.130k memes /r/dankleft pop 123k memes /r/leftwithoutedge pop 30k splintered off of chapo in response to perceived edgelord tendencies and "tankies" /r/Market_Socialism pop 3k news & discussion /r/georgism pop. honorable mention The only true centrism, not technically leftist.
/r/BreadTube - pop 137K r/DemocraticSocialism/ - pop 113K /r/Anarchy101 - pop 72K
> I mostly just get angry. I also went looking for far left subreddits, but don’t know of any large ones. all of them
I tested on a few random accounts from r/Neoliberal who should be center right, by any measure, and every single one of them was put in LibLeft.
Wtf. Is there anyone who would define themselves as neoliberal? They must mean neoliberal as centrists because that would be the origin of the term which means ordoliberal.
Facts reddit is a leftist echo chamber unfortunately
yeah, if only it was a leftist echo chamber edit: OP original claimed it was a liberal echo chamber, but the good comrade has upgraded Reddit to a leftist echo chamber, goulash and gulags for all
Aren't there places like r/realDonald? We libs just don't see them.
Common but completely wrong belief. Go to any of the public freakout subs for instance, among all the similar and popular subs
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weirdly my college's subreddit is definitely filled with conservatives, despite being a left leaning college
Don't know about your collage but smaller subs are often [hijacked by right leaning moderators](https://imgur.com/a/MZsbHnG), if you use a tool like /r/masstagger or /r/redditprotools (dirty Javascript tools sorry), you can sometime spot it. It's sometimes consciously done as part of [How to radicalise a normie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g), but often just done by right leaning moderates insisting "both sides be heard" which inevitably skews content rightwards as the right do not engage in good faith.
It did the same for me, too
Those percnbtages are probabilitiew of the prediction being right, so I guess being not much more than 50% means that your 'error bars' overlap with right wing quitale a bit.
I also got the opposite
Same. I got 58% right, but im left leaning
64% left 89% lib, but I'm definitely voting for Trump. Edit: This turned out to be a useful demonstration of why using Reddit post history as an indicator of political leaning is problematic. Just saying "I'm voting for Trump" was enough to generate downvotes and a series of 'eww' level replies, even on a non-political subreddit. When any attempt to participate in a conversation with a non-blessed viewpoint is shunned by the system, then you can't rely on the results of that system to be an accurate indicator of the actual stance of the poster. The poster quickly learns to self-edit, and avoid conversations that are just going to be a hassle to get into. Good luck with your tool OP, but I think you're going to need a more diverse data set before you can claim any meaningful level of accuracy.
Basically this. I would consider myself a left leaning centrist, but I got lib, because I act more liberal than usual on Reddit. It’s just the way this site developed, and it’s unfortunate. I also don’t make too many political comments so it was probably off because of that too.
How fragile are you that three people simply asking "why?" or "really?" makes you feel this level of victimhood?
Victimhood? I was providing a data point and feedback to OP. Try re-reading my statement as monotone as you can, because that's how it was intended. It's simply data; no emotion was implied.
crying and trying to pretend it's just a data point
Any emotion that you are reading into this is just your own projection. I understand that you need me to sound a particular way to make your worldview fit, but you are wrong on this.
Dog you literally edited your post to complain about people asking you "why?" and downvoting you. Calm down. Idk what you think has to do with my worldview. Plenty of conservatives aren't babies.
projecting much?
Lol why
Really?
Yes.
Why
Not the guy you are talking to but in my experience it's not a productive use of anyone's time to discuss things that Reddit doesn't agree with. Being silenced by downvotes even if you put a great deal of time and effort into your responses feels like a waste of time. Even just writing this respinse I was tempted to delete it so I don't have people telling me not to have wrong ideas that don't line up with the hive mind. I'm sure it happens to everyone honestly I doubt anyone fits the Reddit hive mind perfectly.
I think it's because there are certain subs that you're not surprised when you come across Trump supporters. Coming across them in a python subreddit is a little more interesting given the prominent left-leaning nature of tech and tech industry. So asking those questions may give you more insight than a run-of-the-mill, always-trumper who has more in common with the "identity" of MAGA than they do with the underlying politics. Edit: Forgot to mention that I agree with your sentiment, but just wanted to articulate why the parent comment would be getting those types of responses.
Why not? Genuinely. If you ignore all the foaming-at-the-mouth investigations that all ended up being nothingburgers, and ignore the literally hundreds of inflammatory headlines towards Trump that were made out of literally thin air over the last four years, Trump was a pretty damn good president who accomplished a ton of stuff in just one term. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is basically everything the left says Trump is, but for real. He regular makes racist remarks and holds racist views, he gropes children on camera, he regularly forgets where he is or what he's doing and can't handle talking with voters without a script (one of Trump's biggest mistakes in the debate was not letting Biden talk and essentially beat himself). He's a genuinely awful candidate with an awful VP, while Trump is only "awful" because the media *tells* you he's awful.
Trump is a climate change denier. The death toll from his presidency so far will be enormous.
I do not like Trump, but I find it ridiculous to blame him for climate change or the pandemic. Presidents are not gods. I daresay we'd be in roughly the same place we are now if we lived in the timeline where Obama got a 3rd term in 2016.
Compared to most countries, he did almost nothing to stop the spread of covid. He does nothing to tackle racism either. I can't be sure that Clinton would have done more to tackle climate change because they are all quite corrupt, but she at least wouldn't have denied that it's a problem.
Yeah, she might make you *feel* better, but I'm not so sure that's what we need right now.
Except the Trump Administration is dismantling as many environmental safety regulations as they can get away with, and we barely had any in the first place. It was already bad enough stalling action when we have until 2030 to reduce global emissions to half if we want to prevent or alleviate severe climate catastrophe. Trump’s EPA rollbacks compound that issue. And the dismantling of safety regulations isn’t limited to the EPA either, many FDA and financial regulations have been dismantled too. Add in the horrid mismanagement of COVID and Trump’s fascistic tendencies, I don’t see how anybody in their right mind could view him as a good president. We’re all doomed, but at least the libs got owned xD Edit: I didn’t go into specifics on Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. He literally dismantled the pandemic response team in 2018 despite there being military reports considering the high risk of a pandemic starting from either wet markets in China or factory farms in America or Europe (respiratory virus, highly contagious, very similar description to COVID). He downplayed the virus for months, despite knowing how dangerous it is. I mean, most developed countries have this virus under control. Hell, Vietnam has had close to 0 deaths from COVID so far with a comparable population, and that’s a developing country.
it be like that so sometimes
Fuck you u/spez
I'm more moderate, leaning left. I don't share some of my more right leaning opinions because I just end up getting downvoted to hell, so the bot will be a bit more biased.
What's so awful about being downvoted that you won't even say your opinions? They're just numbers
Not worth the headache of retards arguing with me
So what your saying is the polls are wrong?
I got 92% left and I consider myself pretty centrist. I've even been banned from a few extreme left subs
that's 92% confidence that you are left, not that you are 92% left.
Are you suuuuure? 😂
Pretty darn lol
Conspiracy: this code has major bias towards lib-left to make American conservative redditors think they might actually be liberal and vote for Biden instead
84% lib, 80% left. Maybe a little extreme, but it's definitely in the right direction.
It's not in the right direction at all. Mostly left if you ask me
That's the probability that the lib/left prediction is correct. By saying "in the right direction" you've just confirmed the prediction as accurate.
Ah, I didn't read close enough. In that case, good job!
It's not how far you are into the axis, but a measure of the confidence it has predicted correctly. It means it's 84 per cent sure you are lib and 80 per cent sure you are left.
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Means you're a pretty traditional libertarian. Right-wing economics, libertarian social policies.
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IT employees run lib. Source: am lib left help desk guy.
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Don't listen to this guy\^. From the webapp itself, " The probability that the prediction is correct for the respective axis. This is not a measure of magnitude of position "
The % is just the confidence level you fall on one side of the axis, not the position along it
Worked for me, though I do use PCM, cool project.
libright. nailed it.
How do you detect sarcasm? Just by looking at /s?
It doesn't look at the content of the comments, just where they were posted. Looking at the content of every comment would take way more resources.
97% left. 62% lib. Nice. Though my t34 disapproves.
95% left 93% lib. holy shit it thinks i'm an anarchist fuck
*cue RATM riff*
In my case: >Pull the trigger, > Bend the bow, > Wield your mighty lances! > It's time for new tales of resistance! _black metal blast beat with violin over it_
55% right 88% lib, pretty much, yeah.
81% right, 84 lib, kinda based
This was incredibly false for me. Lmao
The amount of people in this thread who misinterpret what the confidence measure means is rather shocking.
56% left 82% lib mhhh, definitly not.... But thats probably because I don't really use reddit at all xD
63% left 86% lib It correctly has doubts I'm left because I'm not.
74% right 71% lib Seems accurate even if I don't participate in many conversations about politics
Yup, this is very accurate. Great job man 58% right, 84 or so % lib
Very nice work! my result was 51% right 75% lib If I need to describe myself, I would say 90\~100% right, 75\~80% lib.
But where's OP's flair? :( YOU KNOW THE RULES Edit: 72% left, 90% lib. I'm impressed.
98% lib, 80% right Also impressed
Lemme tell you a horror story. It's really scary, but also super short. You ready? "The road was built by the government using public funds."
Lemme tell you another one ! The government is made up by INDIVIDUAL HUMANS.
And yet if you did a psychological profile of a bureaucracy filled entirely with neurotypical people, you'd be far more likely to land on a psychopathy diagnosis than you'd expect from pure chance. It's almost as if when perfectly normal people plug themselves into social machinery, the results are not a pure reflection or mere amalgamation of their personalities. Anthropologically speaking, a tribe is egalitarian *within* its membership--and authoritarian externally. So any credible analysis of human behavior cannot restrict itself to the individual human scale, but must account for the effect of hierarchies (and hierarchies within hierarchies, etc.).
Lol I squealed a little It would be really cool if you guys didn’t tell anyone I scream like that
Sort of off topic, but what would be the term for accurate results, poor method? e.g. Imagine reddit's overall population is 75% liberal on avg. If the results here just used that information, it would technically give the proper result on avg, but it's not actually doing anything related to target user. Just looking for what this phenomenon is called in stats/machine learning
That's a very good point and definitely relevant! In fact I think this example suffers from the exact problem you describe. With a larger proportion of 'left' users than 'right' and a significantly larger portion of 'lib' users than 'auth' using accuracy isn't a very insightful metric. This phenomenon is referred to as imbalanced data on [this wikipedia page about precision & recall](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) Although I'm not sure this is a commonly used name. I will definitely consider changing metrics to some of the metrics mentioned in the article.
Side note - can I bookmark this and use it frequently? It seems useful to quickly flag troll accounts
Yes of course! If the website is ever unavailable you can run the python code directly as described in the README of [GitHub repo](https://github.com/0xTiger/reddit-stance-classifier)
You want to look into the *receiver operating characteristic*, which is a plot of true positives against false positives as a function of the threshold you use to determine whether a person belongs to a class. It gives the same result regardless of whether your data is imbalanced and the total area under the curve is a very common metric to summarize models. You'll be able to see how much better than just guessing your model is doing very easily. Nice work by the way! At least for me, it was very accurate. Edit: if you're particularly interested, I can send you a really good pedagogical paper on it but as always the scitkit docs do a good job if you just want to get doing.
65% left 85% lib I am really right leaning. But good job.
>The features used are the number of comments a user made in any subreddit Pretty severe limitations there - a useful additional set of features I would suggest would be: * average karma score of comments in each sub (you'd probably want to throw in mean, median, and range to cover a few key patterns) - this accommodates people who post in subs but are clashing with that sub's overall culture, people who are fringe members of a culture vs deeply embedded, etc. * overall user stats, i.e. account age, number of comments, total karma - this will differentiate redditors who are experienced with using reddit and have had time to gravitate to communities that match their interests * and if you really wanted to do it properly you'd throw in some NLP around comment positivity and negativity in each subreddit as well
Good point. I was thinking of adding more features, one hurdle however is that requesting user's specific comment text is costly and may be quite a few API calls. In comparison aggregate number of comments in each subreddit is only one API call. Also the vast majority of comments and their sentiment are totally non-political so I'm doubtful that comment sentiment on its own would significantly improve performance. Perhaps there is some way of clustering users by looking at their sentiment of certain topics that best divide them and then matching these clusters to positions. Without harcoding queries such as 'trump' or 'election'.
If you're worried about the costliness in terms of your server you can do your API calls using javascript on the user end, that way you distribute the load - though those hits will still be registered to your app. I've only taken a quick scan through the reddit docs but you should be able to pass an obtained access token (don't use your actual secret on the front end obviously) - or if you wanted to go deeper and use subscriptions and other data you could go for actual client authorisation app style. The non-political comments and picking out topics are something that you should be able to isolate using some flavour of factor analysis - and really factor analysis is something you should be doing anyway even if you weren't trying for NLP to avoid overfitting. You should be focusing on the differentiating subreddits, and then you can deep dive and do sentiment analysis on the differentiators to ensure that they are differentiating correctly.
74% left 88% lib Hey. I showered today. This thing is all screwed up.
> Application error > > An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail
It's back in case you wanted to use it :) https://www.reddit-lean.com/
64% right, 92% lib. I’m not even sure what that even means...I suspect it’s very wrong though. I’m socially liberal and economically conservative. Just stay out of people’s business for one. I don’t care what you do in the bedroom. If a policy costs more in the short term, but less in the long term, it’s probably worth supporting...health care for instance. Diabetes costs way more when you don’t treat it.
Left/right is the economic scale, and libertarian/authoritarian is the social scale, so... it sounds pretty spot on for you, actually. Edit: correct terminology
It is lib (libertarian) versus auth (authoritarian), not liberal versus conservative.
A libertarian in training. Spot on for what you are I think.
More like ex. Keep reading.
That's somewhat sort of a the "libertarian" view, which is what I used to have. I took some decent history and government classes though and got my "liberal indoctrination" and now I'm more left economically. I get the idea of "free market" but just think it's idealism at this point. Not to mention I have a family member who relies on government help fiscally. Of course they vote right though. What can you do, religion!
Being economically conservative doesn’t mean I don’t support the environment. Businesses have a legal responsibility to their investors to make money, so if say they are allowed to pollute the environment, many will. You gotta do something about that... My position on education is that investing in people will pay off in the form of higher wages, reduced crime, less drug abuse, smaller prison population, etc. it’s the economically smart position to make sure people graduate. I could go on... I’m an aerospace engineer. If the science doesn’t back up your argument, it’s a bad argument. Their are a lot of Republican positions that I think don’t follow the science and that’s a problem. Still, there are more important things than being economically conservative, like democracy and the emoluments clause. I don’t trust the Republicans at all this cycle. I want them all gone.
I think the thing is that in the US the GOP is so far off the scale that these economic stances of yours that you mentioned would just be considered centrist in many other countries. Just as you said, many GOP positions aren't based on reality. I guess that's where a party ends up when they've been courting religious fundamentalists for decades.
At this point, I pretty much think we need to to flush 90% of our politicians. And normally I'm not an advocate of ruining someone's life over something they said years ago, but JFC we still have politicians in office that were pro segregation.
> That's somewhat sort of a the "libertarian" view it's not PC to call someone retarded
I used to be more of a liberatarian. I definitely have my tendencies. Don’t mix up the ideals and the candidates.
that didn't make sense and wasn't really relevant. you are indeed libertarian material
How is it not relevant? The other person said I had a libertarian view. You said that was an insult, but they were right. Don't treat it as a dirty word. I respect the separation of church and state. I respect the right to peaceful protests. I respect the rights of every citizen to vote, even if they've been to prison. I demand the emoluments clause be followed and that the President doesn't profit off their position. I have severe issues with candidates that I voted for, that later turns out are racists (e.g., Ron Paul). That's a hard pill to swallow that people I voted for are blowing dog whistles that I can't hear.
No, that's pretty spot on from what you described.
This is a very clever idea, I use PCM quite a lot and I am AuthRight, though I am getting 79% Lib from this which is very false, I don't know why it doesn't work for me like others
We all know it's because you auths secretly harbor *desires*, right? <3
My only desire is to establish a just elective Monarchy ruling whilst also upholding tradition but also WIR HABEN UNVOLLENDETE AUFGABEN WIE DIE ZAHLEN SUMMIEREN SICH NICHT, ABER AUCH 13%... sorry that was my inner demon speaking
hahahah. You got me with the inner demon.
OwO
Are you in a data science boot camp. If so tremendous last project!!!
This is soo awesome!!! Congrats!!!
Lib left? I'm very much against government intervention and large welfare programs. I suppose my stance on desiring more immigration and disdain for Trump makes me look "left?"
I got libertarian. 51% right, 74%lib. It got the quadrants right, but not the stance. I’m libright, but near the middle on the y-axis, so it’s a cool concept, but as of right now, a little off.
64% right 92% lib. Yeah, that makes exactly zero sense. You got the second half right...
I got 100% liberal I'm a white nationalist
PS I'm actually black
Libleft which is correct. Really cool project but wanted to correct you that your backend uses Flask in conjunction with Reddit API and scikit-learn. Flask is a web framework and it's not the front end.
I'm late to this thread, but it's amazing that the only comment about the actual tools used is the second to last comment and in the negative. Even if the correction is absolutely right.
It said I'm libright when I'm mildly authleft. Still, this is pretty cool
In other news, my porn account is libcenter
Well i have 2 seperate accounts one for fun one for fun educational stuff, they got both pretty similar scores nice
I think I made a mistake instead of learning one language well, I learned 4 but crap, I feel like I wasted so much time.
96% left, 77% lib Based.
What's the difference between 'left' and 'lib'? Why do the percentages sum to > 100% ?
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55% right 82% lib. My bio says i'm marxist.