Reddit randomly gives me a notification of a post on r/TheGlowUp.
I’ve never been there but it got my interest, and so I click and it’s a picture of a young
woman asking for advice, in the title it reads “be Brutally honest, how can I improve my
appearance.”
I run to the comments and lo and behold, “you have super nice features, the hair doesn’t
suit you.”
hardly brutally honest but ok.
“You already beautiful, you can use different hairstyles with your hair.”
Enlightening stuff, but hardly helpful.
“I dont see anything that needs changing, you’re already stunning..” and my personal
favourite “Smile, that will help immensely…”
The icing on the cake for me was rule number 3, comments like you’re already beautiful,
nothing to change” will be removed but that’s literally all of the comments on the post.
Now about the young woman herself, she obviously posted on a subreddit specifically dedicated
to self improvement because her lived experiences don’t line up with the comforting lies anonymous
internet strangers keep telling her.
There were a lot of things she could have worked on from dark circles, contour deformities
to a general oiliness of the skin, porosity, nasolabial lines, asymmetric hairline and
scleral show.
It may seem like i'm nitpicking, but that’s what brutally honest is and the results that
I can only assume she is after by posting on this subreddit require these small but
consistent changes, because beauty is work as any beautiful person can tell you.
Poor skin indicators do negatively impact both yourself and others perception, and that
is well documented, not something I say for the sake of being mean.
These comforting comments on subreddit dedicated solely to actual beauty advice is the problem
I see everywhere.
I call this toxic positivity, and it helps absolutely no one.
But don’t take my word for it, I wrote a program to analyse over 100,000 redditor’s
beauty advice using A.I and the trends we found reflect what we’ve all been thinking
but to understand the data that I’m going to show you, you need to first understand
what we’re doing.
Let’s consBut where do you start?ider the average self-improvement journey:
1.
If you want to improve your looks, you need advice and direction.
This can come in the form of fitness channels which most people know, fashion and styling,
skincare or more intensive channels like Lori Hill who talks about cosmetic surgery, there
are many ways to improve your looks, some will give you better results than others.
2.
Should I focus on a skincare routine or jump straight to surgery and get orthodontic braces?
For most people, they ask friends and family or head to subreddits like r/rateme, r/glowup,
r/vindicta, r/truerateme and the list goes on, there is a lot of demand for guidance
and advice.
User’s will post their pictures and get advice from anonymous individuals, and statistically,
most people giving advice are just beauty hobbyists, beauty isn’t their dayjob and
so the advice these people give more or less comes back to the same 4 things everyone and
their mother already knows, hair, clothes, skin and weight loss, sounds good but not
really that helpful.
For instance, there was a post of a young man losing his hair very early and it was
severely affecting his mental health.
The reddit users suggested to wear a cap and shave his hair.
I personally would have suggested he visit his doctor to ask about a prescription of
finasteride, minoxidil, microneedling and ketoconazole but wearing a cap is a good solution
to hair loss too I guess, just never take it off though
3.
Even without any data being involved, we can all agree there’s no ground-breaking advice
being shared on these subreddits.
But not all subreddits are the same, some are actively focused on theory, others on
practical beauty advice but the majority exist to make you feel good about yourself, even
when they claim to not be that.
4.
In comes r/amiugly, a subreddit where you post a picture of yourself and ask users if
you’re ugly, and unsurprisingly, if you do call someone ugly, there's a high chance
you’ll be banned.
This is the beauty-advice subreddit I want to analyse, because it’s relatively big
but exists in this grey area of toxic positivity, giving the impression of helping but not really.
Looking through straight away, most comments are one of three things, “you’re not ugly”
“you’re so pretty/handsome” or “2 lines of generic advice with no actionable
steps.”
Let me make things clear, I have no issue with people voluntarily going out of their
way to give advice and help others, but is everyone really as beautiful as the comments
imply?
Does everyone really need a new hairstyle or skincare routine or a new set of clothes?
Is this really the solution to every poster’s problems?
I wrote this script in python, a programming language, in around 1 hour.
It goes through the r/amiugly subreddit’s top posts, and puts into a list those with
50 to 200 comments for consistency.
Some posts have 500+ comments but it’s 500 of the same comment fanboying over a conventionally
attractive woman so that doesn’t help us much.
Once we get the comments for each of our selected posts, we end up with around 112,000 comments
which is a lot of data.
Clean it all up we can run some A.I.
algorithms on it.
When dealing with text data and languages we refer to a field called Natural Language
Processing which is one of the big subfields of Artificial Intelligence.
I’ll keep it very simple, by turning individual words into numbers, a vector, it points out
into a 2D, 3D, 4D or 100 dimension space, and the similarity between two of these arrows
can be measured to understand what is being said.
The first thing we can do is run a frequency distribution, which is basically asking, how
many times did certain words show up in my data set of 100,000 comments.
Of interest the word ugly showed up 3rd most, but positive words like pretty, good, beautiful,
cute combined showed up more than any other.
Already, we’re getting an idea that the comments of this subreddit are more positive
than negative, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Statistically, even if only the most attractive people post, the distribution of words should
be more diverse, not 5 different words in the top 20 for saying someone is good looking.
Also, hair, smile and eyes were often brought up, I would guess to compliment these features.
To investigate why the word ugly shows up so often, it is r/amiugly but still, we use
a technique called Concordance, where you consider the context of the word in how it
shows up.
From randomly selecting 10 lines alone, the word ugly only shows up when people are saying
you’re not ugly, that’s 10 for 10.
Repeat with a 100 and from memory there were only 2 or less out of 100 randomly shuffled
comments that actually used the word ugly in the negative sense.
Out of 112,000 comments, the phrase you’re not ugly or some variant of it shows up 27%
of the time, the subreddit claims to not be a hugbox but 27% for this exact phrase and
more for variations of it sure feels like a feel-good sub rather than one that’s meant
to help.
An N-Gram is a n-numbered collection of words used in a phrase.
For example “you’re good looking” is a tri-gram.
Unsurprisingly, positive phrases like “youre good looking”, “look really good” “you’re
really pretty” are the 18/20 most common phrases on the sub, like robots.
You’re definitely ugly shows up as 20th most common, which I found very funny, because
that’s such a blunt way of wording it.
By now, we can appreciate that there’s a very strong chance that theres’ some kind
of toxic positivity hivemind at play here, of the close to 2000 posts scrapped, is everyone
so good looking here that 18/20 of the top phrases are in awe of their beauty.
Hmm
The last exercise I want to show you is called sentiment analysis.
AI can be closely taught that some words equate to positive emotions and others equate to
negative.
‘Love’ is a strongly positive emotion, ‘dislike’ is a weakly negative one and
so on.
What we find is that the sentiment of comments in this subreddit is overwhelmingly positive,
to the point of being obviously unusual.
It’s like when every comment on Tiktok is telling an unconventional looking person that
they’re gorgeous, we all know something fishy is up because of the unusually high
number.
Sorting out all of this data, first is that there are posts that are almost entirely made
up of people artificially praising the poster’s looks, and at worst there are posts where
around 2/10 comments are criticising the poster’s looks, which is kind of the point of the sub
I guess.
It’s not like the AI is guessing either, be cause a comment like “not ugly” is
intelligently predicted as positive sentiment because we’re also considering the context
of the words.
Here’s something interesting though, when the user is less conventionally attractive
the positive sentiment is incredibly high, things like “no girl you’re gorgeous.”
When the user is conventionally attractive, people are considerably more negative towards
them, almost nitpicky.
To me this is the crux of why toxic positivity is bad, it’s self soothing, but not actually
productive.
The attractive person doesn’t need all the ‘constructive criticism’ that people give
them, the unattractive person doesn’t need to hear that they’re gorgeous 18/20 times
only to live a completely different life when they log off.
If you want practical advice, I recommend joining a discord server like the QOVES community
where the length and quality of the advice is undeniably better.
I say this because on a platform like discord there is reciprocity, you interact with these
people repeatedly so strangers become your online acquaintances and they have more incentive
to give you the best advice possible as opposed to a random stranger on reddit who says comforting
lies to your face to make themselves feel like they’re doing charity work.