In case anyone wants to make their own trends (less sophisticated, but maybe more transparent), I have an app at http://hn-trends.heroku.com that plots word percentages on HN over time.
For example, some emotive words that appear to have increased since the beginning:
I haven't looked at any of this closely, so make of it what you will.
(I was meaning to wait until I had time to dig deeper and add extra features like time series smoothers and trend/slope metrics before "releasing" this, but figured this might be useful now given the post. I still plan on adding those later.)
For example, some emotive words that appear to have increased since the beginning:
* sad: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=sad
* fuck: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=fuck
* shit: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=shit
Some words that appear to have decreased:
* great: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=great
* cool: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=cool
* lol: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=lol
* reddit: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=reddit
* digg: http://hn-trends.heroku.com/trends?q=digg
I haven't looked at any of this closely, so make of it what you will.
(I was meaning to wait until I had time to dig deeper and add extra features like time series smoothers and trend/slope metrics before "releasing" this, but figured this might be useful now given the post. I still plan on adding those later.)