Techno pessimism is trendy, snark is trendy, climate doomerism is trendy. There’s also a time honored tradition of using newspaper comment boards specifically for complaining, which predates digital papers (see: letters to the editor). I’d be hard pressed to find anything that moves far off that base rate.
That said, I expected 60⁄40 positive to negative. This is a super helpful way to see sentiment at a glance and I’d be so excited to see a compilation extended across other articles (ex: the negative Salon piece) and maintained over time.
That’s a great point. This probably says as much about the psychology of news commenters as it does opinions about longtermism. Comparing comments of different articles would be great for understanding the bias of each. But ultimately, the important messaging questions are probably best answered with proper surveys.
Techno pessimism is trendy, snark is trendy, climate doomerism is trendy. There’s also a time honored tradition of using newspaper comment boards specifically for complaining, which predates digital papers (see: letters to the editor). I’d be hard pressed to find anything that moves far off that base rate.
That said, I expected 60⁄40 positive to negative. This is a super helpful way to see sentiment at a glance and I’d be so excited to see a compilation extended across other articles (ex: the negative Salon piece) and maintained over time.
That’s a great point. This probably says as much about the psychology of news commenters as it does opinions about longtermism. Comparing comments of different articles would be great for understanding the bias of each. But ultimately, the important messaging questions are probably best answered with proper surveys.