20 Sep Symbol blockchain news update – 20/09/21

Well it’s Monday again and I for one am glad that it is drawing to a close. After 14 hours working in front of a computer with no breaks after working all Sunday too I have rewarded myself by sitting in front of a computer for a bit longer to write this post 🙃 Weirdly I find it kind of relaxing just to switch my brain off and type so here comes another Symbol Blog news update!

Strong leadership 💪👏

This seems like common sense to me. I don’t really think that anyone else can argue that they are better qualified for the job. Good luck guys, I think you have the vast majority of the community behind you and some great ideas. Let’s make Symbol the :- 😆

If you’re wondering what the weird :- emoji was about, this made me laugh.

The dog’s bollocks (aka the mutt’s nuts) meaning “the acme of excellence”. I haven’t heard this British slang in a long time! 😁 It’s kind of amazing that this dates back to 1949! It seems also to appear in the US Declaration of Independence but apparently that was not the intended usage at the time 😂

Mining for sentiment

This was an interesting post from @Hatchet. As you know we often talk about “community sentiment” but the response rate to surveys is generally low, focussed on one specific issue and can also be easily gamed. What if we could datamine huge chat logs from Telegram, Discord and the forum and pick out how sentiment has changed over time? It seems that this might become another Hatchet pet project (I don’t know where you get your energy from!) and obviously this could be applied to any domain where these data exist.

I checked out VADER briefly earlier and it’s pretty cool (and easy to use which is always a plus for me and my limited technical skills). With a little text wrangling to parse all of the chat logs and assign a date to each post you could relatively easily track positive and negative sentiment and plot this as a timeseries. Then you could map on other data, number of daily posts and unique posters, XEM/XYM/BTC price, who is running NEM at that point in time 😆, big announcements etc and look for patterns.

I bet my entire XYM stash that there is a very strong correlation between general sentiment in nemberia and XEM price. We would have to update the VADER standard lexicon (words mapped to sentiment score) to include some crypto related language. I guess scoring these could be tricky but it would be relatively simple to use synonyms which are already scored e.g. rekt = bankrupt (strong negative score).

Hatchet likes to think a lot bigger than I do and is considering making this a fully fledged tool which would allow you to track individual user sentiment over time (GDPR police?😬🚨) as well as key topics such as for example “Moon” or “Binance” 😜 Hatchet before you pile even more on your plate can I have my article please? 😊

That’s all for today

I think this is a combination of me being tired and a lack of Twitter news but I will end my ramblings here today and promise you that I will return soon with an actual news update! I think it may be time for some Writer’s Tears before bed 😉

NineLives

I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!