How it works

The Idea

Every day, millions of conversations happen on the internet. We built this site to track how people feel about key topics over time. Why do we only search Reddit? Its API is the cheapest.

The Methodology

We start with a curated list of 100 terms that we want to track. Every day at midnight MST, we search Reddit for new posts mentioning these terms. Each post is semantically analyzed and assigned a sentiment score from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive) based on how people are talking about it.

For each term, we average the scores across all the posts from that day. We scale that to create our scores, which go from -1 for highly negative sentiment to 1 for positive sentiment.

Notes

• Sentiment scores are averaged across posts mentioning a term, not weighted by upvotes or engagement.
• We use a plaintext search, so we don't look at related terms, only the term itself.
• Posts are analyzed using semantic language models, but sentiment analysis is inherently subjective and imperfect.