Ask HN: What are your thoughts on an opinion tracker?

3 points by naiveai 8y ago ↗ HN

This is not a startup idea, I'm just looking for a pet project to work on and I came up with an idea that sounds promising to me. I wanted some feedback on it.

The idea is basically a journal of your opinions. I'm imaginaning connecting this with various different social media and other journaling apps so there won't be too much to deal with. For the moment I'll take Twitter as an example, since people tend to post their opinions there anyway. By tweeting something like "I think Brexit is stupid", you can record an opinion on a topic, and then watch it grow and change over time. You can add sources, reasons why you think the topic is important, track your confidence in that opinion, etc.

I'll flesh this out and come up with designs a bit later, but right now I'm just looking for basic validation of this idea: Does this sound cool? Would you use it? Why or why not?

Thanks in advance!

1 comment

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fiiv 8y ago ↗

So you would do sentiment analysis on a person's tweets (and whatever else) and give them their opinion on certain topics?

Sounds cool, but more like one of those "who are your 5 best friends" kind of apps than perhaps a person tries once, something I would personally not use on a regular basis (or somewhat regularly).

The tech's out there for this - sentiment analysis is a pretty standard Naive Bayes tutorial subject and I am certain there are some learned models already out there. And to identify subjects you could maybe use something like MIT Entity Identification.