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POTUS = President of the United States. HNQ = Hot Network Questions.

I'm curious how much "clickbait" HNQ-"guarantee" does a US president's name confer to Skeptics SE questions. Basically, what proportion of questions that have a US president's name in the title reach HNQ?

(Let's limit this to non-deleted questions. Often enough trolls also go for political/clickbait topics, but that's another matter.)

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  • 2
    Are you hoping to solve some issue with this information? I don't understand the point of the question.
    – user11643
    Aug 29, 2021 at 16:47

1 Answer 1

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Original research time! According to SEDE:

  • 342 Hot Network Questions
  • 25 HNQ with titles containing Obama, Trump or Biden
  • 1705 total questions
  • 64 questions with titles containing Obama, Trump or Biden

Note:

  • Data updates every Sunday
  • HNQ status only started being tracked in March 2018, so I only looked at questions that were posted since about that time
  • Didn't filter out questions about people who weren't presidents at the time the question was asked
  • Some of the titles that matched referred to people who were never president (and probably never will be!) such as Michelle Obama, and at least one matched question is asking about trumpets and not a person at all
  • You will need to modify the query yourself if you want to know about all US presidents

My code for reference:

select distinct posts.id as [Post Link], score from posts
where posts.id > 43573 -- ID 43574 is the first HNQ
 and parentid is null -- only questions
 and posts.id in (select distinct posthistory.postid from posthistory where posthistorytypeid = 52) -- remove if looking for non HNQ questions
 and (lower(title) like '%obama%' or lower(title) like '%trump%' or lower(title) like '%biden%') -- remove if looking for all titles
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  • So … it’s more likely? Nov 10, 2021 at 11:58

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