Here’s a perfect example of how the negative opinions of a smaller subset of people on the Internet have a tendency to overwhelm the majority of the positive sentiment, and completely transform the tone of the conversation. Though critics and Internet commenters (generally, two of the most critical and negative populations of people on the Internet) lambasted the How I Met Your Mother finale, which even the cast has been critical of, most of those on Twitter actually loved it, according to the scientific data collected by the social analytics platform Canvs.
Basically, using “scary-specific data profiling” and “sentimental analysis,” Canvs not only could figure out how people on Twitter felt about the How I Met Your Mother finale, they could also ascertain where the people who liked and disliked it the most live, and what kind of food they like to eat. For instance, more of the people who thought the HIMYM finale “sucked” — surprise, surprise — came from New York, Boston, and Philly. (Wait? Philly and Boston thinking something sucks? Noooooo? Get out of here!) Also, and this is strangely specific, but those who found the finale to be “sad” were more likely than the average Twitter user to be teenage girls who like Taco Bell (now Taco Bell knows who to market its breakfast menu to: Weepy Taylor Swift fans).
Here’s the breakdown that Canvs had on viewer response to the finale:
— 19 percent of people said the finale “sucked, not a fan”
— 18 percent enjoyed it
— 16 percent called it “great, glorious”
— 15 percent called it sad
— 13 percent reacted with “love, perfect”
— 12 percent “loved(d)” it
— 7 percent called it “great, sad”
So, basically, less than 20 percent hated it. Ultimately, as Canvs CEO Jared Feldman notes, “You may log into Twitter and see a random tweet [from someone who hated the ending]. But it turns out 10 times more people were saying how perfect the ending was.”
It’s just that the people who hated it have more followers.
Source: The Atlantic
