Hump Day: Yay or Nay?

A lighthearted NLP project exploring Reddit’s sentiment about taking Wednesdays off. Because who says weekends should only hug Fridays?

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Project Overview

Redditors love strong opinions, and one thread on r/unpopularopinion sparked a curious debate:
Should we adopt a 4-day work week where Wednesday is the day off?

Using over 1100 comments scraped via Reddit’s API, this project:

• Cleans and tokenizes Reddit comment text
• Handles tricky language like negation (e.g., "not bad")
• Applies VADER sentiment scoring
• Visualizes trends with word clouds and score distributions

The goal? To see how online voices really feel about a midweek pause and whether Wednesday deserves its moment.

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Project Structure

wednesday-off-sentiment/
│
├── wednesday_offs_sentiment.ipynb # Main NLP and sentiment notebook
├── reddit_work_week.ipynb # Reddit API scraping notebook (via PRAW)
├── /data/
│ └── work_week.csv # Raw comment data (scraped)
└── README.md # You’re here

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Dataset Details

The dataset was collected via Reddit’s API using PRAW. It includes 1127 comments from a single post and contains:

• comment_id, parent_id: Reddit threading info
• author: Reddit username (anonymized)
• score: upvotes received
• body: full comment text
• created_utc, depth, permalink: metadata

Note: All data was collected from a public subreddit using Reddit’s API. No private or sensitive user data was accessed.

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Features

• Full NLP pipeline: cleaning, tokenizing, stopword removal
• Negation-aware sentiment processing
• Sentiment scoring with VADER
• Word clouds and violin plots by sentiment/score
• Transparent Reddit scraping notebook included

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Highlights & Findings

• Most top-voted comments were positive or neutral, suggesting support for the idea.
• Frequent themes: mental health, burnout, productivity, and better pacing of the week.
• “Midweek reset” emerged as a surprisingly valid concept!

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Tech Stack

• Python (NLTK, Pandas, Matplotlib, WordCloud)
• VADER Sentiment Analyzer
• Jupyter Notebook
• Reddit API (PRAW)

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Future Improvements

• Compare this with other "work week" debates (e.g., Friday off vs Monday off)
• Train a classifier using manually labeled sentiment
• Analyze comment engagement by thread depth

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License & Use

MIT License — open for educational use and adaptation.
Please respect Reddit's API terms if extending this work.