Tech media often gears its reporting toward the feedback heard from government officials, heads of big corporations and institutional spokespersons. But what about the common man?
Recent reports show a company called Comparitech analyzed thousands of Reddit posts, as well as tech media articles, to find that 85.5% of the Reddit conversations were positive in sentiment.
By contrast, news articles from the Huffington Post, Business Insider and International Business Times were decidedly negative by statistical analysis.
The research, according to coverage from Jack Martin at Cointelegraph, also proceeded according to the Bitcoin timeline that has moved markets over the past several years.
“Talk about cryptocurrency in general started to increase in March 2017, when Bitcoin became more valuable than gold,” writes Martin. “This grew in volume to peak with Bitcoin price in December 2017, only to fall away again as prices across the board started to tumble. However, frequency jumped back to those peak levels in November 2018, when cryptocurrency prices were bottoming out. Since then cryptocurrency discussions on subreddits have surged, as prices have gone back up and Libra was announced.”
Whether the company scored for sarcasm is a good question if technicians were trying to parse the often cryptic and informal remarks that you see on a Reddit thread.
However, if only a portion of the research findings are true, it does indicate that a great number of individual redditors really do like the idea of cryptocurrency in general and Facebook Libra in particular, where study researchers reported that 97% of Libra-based conversations had a positive angle.
In fact, regular people may be more positive about Libra than the U.S. government is – under pressure of real concerns about destabilizing the American economy, legislators are holding hearings to try to figure out how to handle Facebook’s plans for its own stablecoin. Facebook has been asked to halt progress on Libra temporarily until federal officials can catch up.
Keep an ear to the ground for more on stablecoin progress and which big businesses are getting in on the ground floor.
