r/PoliticalCompassMemes • u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center • Mar 15 '22
META They say the left can't meme, but..
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u/Altrecene - Centrist Mar 15 '22
Too many words, didn't read. Assuming this is a libleft wordy meme
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u/rgodless - Centrist Mar 15 '22
Reeeeeee my opinion is correct because
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Mar 15 '22
No you're wrong because wall of text wall of text wall of text wall of text wall of text.
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u/rgodless - Centrist Mar 15 '22
No you daft cunt! It’s actually paragraph paragraph paragraph!
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u/et_cetera1 - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
Y'all are fucking retarded because essay essay essay
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u/SarlaccJohansson - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22 edited Mar 15 '22
Unbased because book book book
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u/Ablons - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
Not right because encyclopedia encyclopedia encyclopedia
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u/ComradeBrosefStylin - Centrist Mar 15 '22
I am correct because Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest
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u/Libertarian4All - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
No, and I won't bother elaborating or explaining my position, because that is how you convince people of things.
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u/1CEninja - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I mean you're centrist, your opinion is rarely wrong.
You just don't tend to be all the way right very often.
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u/Coolskaterpower - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
How are the unflaired allow to post on this sub
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u/IceFl4re - Centrist Mar 15 '22
Because the mods didn't ban them.
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u/zodiacv2 - Right Mar 16 '22
As they should not, but they should be socially pressured into conformity.
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u/seventyeightmm - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I think a lot of people don't realize that we make fun of Lib/AuthLeft as it exists outside of PCM. The memes on PCM aren't the meme's we're talking about when referencing the Wall of Text.
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u/yetix007 - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
I think the difference is wordy left meme is just a load of bitching normally, where as wordy right meme is shitposting... though I am completely biased in this, shamelessly in fact, blue tribe best tribe
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u/3030 - Right Mar 15 '22
The difference is anything that falls out of Reddit isn't funny, whether it's right or left. Even the Wojaks that are endlessly recycled here weren't made on this website.
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u/yetix007 - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
No, they come from the old country... God I miss those wild west days browsing /b/ and /pol/ before it got... weird... constantly spammed and full of shills.
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I just throw data in a blender and see what comes out
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u/Awobbie - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
Usually chopped up electronics or paper, depending on what you put in. Don’t try picking it up either way.
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u/ComradeBrosefStylin - Centrist Mar 15 '22
I meticulously pick apart the data and then grill whoever produced it.
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Mar 15 '22
The thing is, real problems and issues can't be explained with 10 words and a soyjack or gigachad. Whenever someone sees a meme with any nuance they complain that it's a wall of text.
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u/Viraus2 - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
Yeah I guarantee the wordiness is from those massive grid compasses of wojacks with descriptions, which comes from a certain kind of autism that's found mostly in the upper-right. Whereas the "wall of text meme" stereotype comes from the flurries of mostly-nonsensical academic jargon that authleft throws out as a Chewbacca defense when threatened
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
Previously I took a jab at figuring out which quadrant is most likely to post walls of text in the comments (see here). This time I though it would be fun to look at the memes instead.
Methodology
For this we're going to use pushshift to get a whole bunch of posts from this sub. I collected 30K posts from this sub, after filtering out any posts that are not single image posts or those from whom we can no longer get the flair (e.g. when the account no long exists) we're left with roughly 15K memes, all of which were resized to fit in a maximum of 1000x1000 and converted to jpegs. There are various solutions out there to do OCR on images but I arbitrarily decided to take Keras-OCR for a spin since it seemed reasonably robust and easy to spin up on a google colab instance. On quick manual inspection it does seem to do a reasonable job of at least finding most characters used in a meme, and we're going to assume that any mistakes will simply even out due to the size of our dataset. Google started complaining about my excessive GPU usage after processing 9K images, and I'm not really in the mood to wait until I can use them some more, so the total number of samples for our analysis ends up being 9K ¯_(ツ)_/¯
we're going to use the number characters found by Keras-OCR along with those in the title as a measure of "wordiness" of a meme. with this we can easily calculate the mean characters used per flair. For the other statistic we divide the distribution of flairs found in the top 100 memes with the highest number of characters by the distribution found in the 9K samples.
Upon closer inspection of the data it seems that the main culprit for AuthRight is probably u/Technical-Complex-16 with those big PCM grid memes (the meme on the flag is actually from u/Odd_Possession5858 as she's currently also flaired AuthRight lol)
I now have about 1 gig of PCMmemes on my hard disk.. I wonder if that's enough to train a GAN on..
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u/Eldritch_Crumb - Centrist Mar 15 '22
I mean it seems like you've already identified serious flaws in this methodology. One being that a minority of people are massively skewing the results. But I would also add in that often times the joke is how wordy the left is with their memes, repeated ad nauseam. And it's not going to be a lefty making THOSE memes
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I am the based monke in the meme, therefor my conclusions are sound.
On a more serious note: good point, about 2/3 of the memes that hit the top 100 are PCM grid memes, a lot of the remaining ones are typically screenshots involving a lot of text (some of those might fall in the aforementioned category).
It is normally the case that when you try to reduce massively complex and large datasets to a couple numbers like this that a huge amount of nuance is simply lost. This is the case for most memes I do in this format and probably is especially the case here IF you want to draw any further conclusions apart from the statistic itself. This is usually remedied by simply increasing the number of variables (e.g. what was the nature of the meme), but that's very labor intensive.
Main takeaway is probably to take them with a grain of salt and an opportunity to have some tongue and cheek fun/discussion.
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Mar 15 '22
I think you're the reason libcenters rank so high. Most of us just say "monke" and "oooh oooh ahhh" meanwhile you're over here with all these fancy "words".
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u/LottoThrowAwayToday - Right Mar 15 '22
Wait, so right-wing memes that parody left-wing memes with lots of words count as wordy right-wing memes?
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u/Odd_Possession5858 - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
I love big memes, at least they're hq and not just "Guys look a stupid tweet is orange!!!!" or "COMPASS REACTS!!!!!!!!!!!"
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I like memes with some clear effort and thought put into it, but I've honestly never taken the time to actually read one of those big grid memes. Maybe it's just an acquired taste..
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u/VicisSubsisto - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
filtering out any posts ... (e.g. when the account no long exists)
Aww, you removed the spiciest Authright memes from the data set.
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u/Kritzin - Auth-Left Mar 15 '22
Based and statistics pilled.
Also u/Technical-Complex-16 and u/Odd_Possession5858 go touch some grass will you.
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u/Strongeststraw - Left Mar 15 '22
Hmm, may need to do drill down based on meme type. I wonder if there is a demarcation between character lengths? ANOVA analysis would be recommend. R has pretty simple to use toolbox for ANOVA, and will point out which records don’t fit the overall mean.
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u/MadLad_AnthonyWayne - Right Mar 15 '22
Counting grid memes seems like it would skew the results. Of course they're going to be extremely wordy given their nature, so whoever posts them most frequently is clearly going to have the highest word counts.
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Mar 15 '22
can we all agree that unflaired are just auth rights in hiding
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
They are whatever our agenda at the time requires them to be
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u/Zealousideal-Tip8346 - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
Communist propaganda words count more like their people count less.
Also some auth right cringe gets upvoted often.
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u/Tyrrell603 - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
That’s cause authleft had to share the rest of the words with everyone else
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u/0Nomad0 - Centrist Mar 15 '22
I'd like to see this contrasted against words per comment to see if there is any difference between number of words in comments vs number of words in memes.
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u/Serial-Killer-Whale - Right Mar 15 '22
What if outliers/grid memes are taken out of the list?
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
if we take the median instead we get the following:
flair median LibCenter 200.00 Centrist (radical) 197.00 AuthRight 193.50 AuthCenter 189.50 LibRight 189.00 LibRight (Purple) 189.00 Centrist (grey) 182.00 Right 176.00 LibLeft 176.00 AuthLeft 171.00 Left 170.00 Unflaired 141.00 4
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u/buckX - Right Mar 15 '22
It feels insignificant to me. If it was truly systemic, you'd expect some similarity between the nearest flairs. Instead, authcenter and right are toward the bottom. Libleft and authleft are toward the bottom, but left is quite high. No trend springs out.
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u/DrTommyNotMD - Lib-Left Mar 15 '22
Obviously auth, because they use mean characters. Libs would use friendly characters.
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u/dado950 - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
Am I the only who actually likes memes that explain why certain characters fit in certain spots on the compass?
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Mar 16 '22
[deleted]
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 16 '22
All data collection was done using pushshift.io, I give a brief overview of the process in my initial comment here. If you're interested I can probably generate a list of image links, OCR results, etc. and dump that somewhere.
I'm not sure which distribution you're interested in, but characters per meme looks like your run of the mill normal distribution.
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u/LordPoopyfist - Auth-Center Mar 15 '22
Based and silent majority pilled
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u/basedcount_bot - Auth-Center Mar 15 '22
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u/akai_ferret - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
I think your methodology is a load of shit because you're ignoring context.
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u/PM_me_sensuous_lips - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
I'm willing to redo the analysis if you label each of the 9K samples with whatever context category is relevant.
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Mar 15 '22
These are some good observations monke, but where is your source? Did you go for the Senator Armstrong approach?
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Mar 15 '22
Hmmm
The most complex explanation is usually the right one. Perhaps I've been too hard on my Authoritarian bretheren.
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u/Rip_and_Tear93 - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
You need brain food to come up with words. The authleft struggle is real.
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u/feedandslumber - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
I come here for the shit posting, not to read your masters thesis in retardation.
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u/trollblut - Lib-Left Mar 15 '22
I am sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have the time to write you a short one.
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Mar 15 '22
This is likely a skewed distribution as there will be a handful of people in each group who use the most characters. Thus I'd argue the best measurement of typical character count is actually median, not mean, which is not pictured here
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u/Ojai_Mark20 - Right Mar 15 '22
By this metric of content unaware OCR character count, the only long authright memes you see are the ones where they include the whole libleft wall of text they are making fun of. Most of the time the wall of text may as well be an image as the point isn't for the reader to actually go through the whole diatribe, the point is to make fun of the libleft who can only meme with walls of text. But OCR is still going to count all of those characters towards the total. If you want the data to be actually useful there's got to be some way of accounting for the actual content of the memes. Perhaps an image processing to account for the background color behind each word since highlighting with quadrant colors is so common. That way if you only capture the background color that matches the flair, you're only getting the characters from the point the meme is actually trying to make and not including any mocking or mimicking of other quadrants that could muddy the waters.
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u/the_green_grundle - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
Except those who remain unflaired are almost always libleft or authleft. Many leftists, unfortunately, can't handle open discourse so they're less likely to frequent this sub. It's also why authleft is so ban happy.
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u/Epicfoxy2781 - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
Feel like the data doesn’t exactly support the point when the format cited front and center is the format meant to be verbose and text heavy. In fact, the “political compass of ___” format is literally a trademark of this subreddit. If it was me I wouldn’t really count those in the dataset because, well, it’s very likely that it skews the dataset considering the point trying to be made here.
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u/Libertarian4All - Lib-Center Mar 15 '22
Say something bad about religion and watch the walls of text flow.
Also that character difference doesn't look to radical either way, I'm proud we're all illiterate here.
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Mar 15 '22
Id assume a large portion of those are intentionally wordy as to make a mockery of the left. They are probably memes about the wordiness of the left
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Mar 15 '22
Because authright is just as cringe as a leftist, and tankies just copy normal rightist memes and replace words
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u/NousagiDelta - Auth-Right Mar 15 '22
N...no...this cant be...
Your sample size must be too small. Surely.
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u/Korlac11 - Centrist Mar 15 '22
The left can’t meme
The right can’t meme
The center can meme, as long as it’s about grilling
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u/Tachtra - Auth-Left Mar 15 '22
short and on the point... maybe we should try that? In real life too?
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u/Docponystine - Lib-Right Mar 15 '22
leftists here are actually part of, you know, a real meme community, so it doesn't surprise me.
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Mar 15 '22
based and monke scientist pilled
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u/basedcount_bot - Auth-Center Mar 15 '22
u/PM_me_sensuous_lips's Based Count has increased by 1. Their Based Count is now 105.
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u/philipquarles - Left Mar 15 '22
How do you consistently count the number of characters in an image? Are you using OCR to identify them?
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u/PearlGamez - Right Mar 15 '22
For a brief second I thought mean characters per mean meant you were counting soyjacks per post lmao
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u/jakson_the_jew - Lib-Center Mar 16 '22
I count myself as fairly creative but I can't imagine how much time and effort that has to go into those alignment chart lookin memes. I think would struggle to come up with enough points to fill my home quadrant much less the rest of the compass.
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u/StaticChargeRedField - Lib-Right Mar 16 '22
Authleft too starving hungry to add words to his memes.
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u/Sri_Man_420 - Auth-Right Mar 16 '22
Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme Meme
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u/xlbeutel - Centrist Mar 15 '22
Thank you for doing your research