Introduction
Bristruths is an anonymous confession page for University of Bristol students and it is one of the most popular university confession pages in the UK. To date, there are more than 30 thousand posts touching on the most varied of topics, ranging from hummus to arguments about Jeremy Corbyn.
This huge number of posts, combined with the fact that they represent many different student opinions, encouraged me to explore Bristruths posts to answer the question - what do Bristol students actually like, and what are their views?
In a bid to find answers, I took all the publicly available posts (before the 2020 summer break) on the Bristruths Facebook page and conducted various analyses on them (see the About section for more details on how I did this). The main questions I am answering are:
Top Posts
Ordering all posts by the total number of reacts - see the table below for the top 10 posts - reveals some of the key trends in what topics are popular on Bristruths.
The enormous number of positive reacts seen on the two top posts shows how Bristruths is ultimately about community issues. In combination with the 4th most popular post (which celebrates the falling of the infamous Colston statue), it comes as no surprise that the student population is very engaged with issues such as rape culture, the state/private school divide, and racism, especially in the posts from the spring and summer of 2020.
Perhaps even less surprisingly, a grand 50% of the top 10 posts are "react-voting" posts on hot-button issues such as the length of lockdown and the best style of pancakes (it seems UoB much prefers the crêpe style). There is even a top 10 post about the stereotypical "personality" of a Bristol student, which echoes the huge wave of "_ is not a substitute for a personality" posts that swept Bristruths in 2018 and 2019.
In the next section, we'll look at just how popular all these kinds of posts are and what they tell us about Bristol students.
Post Categories
As seen in the top 10 Bristruths, some formats and topics - or more broadly, "categories" - are incredibly popular on Bristruths, and play a huge role in the general vibe of Bristruths. In this section we'll try to answer questions such as 'what is the most popular category?' and 'what do these categories tell us about Bristol students?'
For an explanation of how the categories were chosen and posts in each category identified, see the About page of this website.
Category Popularities - Explained
This bar graph immediately shows just how common posts are about three topics in particular - exams, politics, and university accommodation. Students are interested in discussing one of the biggest facets of their uni experience - studying and exams - but also politics, and especially the divide between private schools and state schools. This is perhaps the most hotly discussed and contentious topic on Bristruths - 3% of all posts are concerned with this issue alone, while just under 5% of all posts were categorised as being political. Although it is difficult to tell whether this issue is discussed more at UoB than other higher education (HE) establishments, it may be being indicative of wider trends - statistics compiled by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for 2018/19 show that Bristol was in the bottom 20 HE providers by the percentage of students from state schools/colleges (67.6% of students at UoB who started between 2015 and 2018 were from state schools).
So far, only the proportion of posts for each category has been discussed, but the main way that people interact with Bristruth posts is by commenting or reacting to them. To find out which categories have more interactions on average, I calculated the median number of total reacts and comments for each category - see the bar graph of the data below:
If you had any doubts about what kinds of posts garner the most reacts, I am sure they have been dispelled forever - the category with the highest median total reacts is by far and away react voting. However, the most-commented category is not react voting but the "ranking/tiers" category. A quick browse of any "tier list" post shows that the huge volume of comments is due to people tagging each other in the post, something which happens much less on other kinds of posts.
In the next section, we'll explore react voting posts in more detail and see what they tell us about the preferences of Bristol students.
React Voting
The kind people of Bristruths have been submitting "react voting" posts since the dawn of the page. Here I present a table with each voting question/matter and the corresponding voting options ranked by how many people chose them (indicated by the number in square brackets).
React Voting Summary
What have we learnt from these posts? Bristruths loves crêpe style pancakes, the South, The Inbetweeners, Cheesy chips, normal hummus, watching a lecture on 1.4x speed, starting pres at 9pm, North London (South London narrowly losing out here), coffee, going to the College Green Tesco Express for a meal deal, and the vast majority of Bristruths thinks Mary Berry to be a superior baker to Nigella Lawson (a strange comparison in my opinion).
Finally, was Bristruths correct in estimating how long the lockdown in England would last? Taking the official start of the Lockdown Regulations on the 26th of March 2020 as the start of "full lockdown", we have two possible end dates for "full lockdown":
- 1st June 2020 (first easings of restrictions now allowed to meet one person outside your household)
- 4th July 2020 (further relaxing of restrictions, reopening of hospitality industry - "Super Saturday")
Taking (1) to be the lockdown, then its duration was 2 month and 6 days, whereas (2) gives a duration of 3 months, 8 days. I would say that (2) seems closer to being the end of "full lockdown", meaning that if we take "3 months" to be the correct duration, one third (345 out of 1053) of people correctly guessed the length of lockdown.
Trends Over Time
In all the analyses so far, we've only looked at trends across all available posts - but many trends are time-specific. Indeed, looking at how often certain keywords are used over time reveals how the Bristruths community has responded to major events. Here, I look at the trends over time in posts related with the two biggest events so far in 2020 - the outbreak of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world more than perhaps any other event over the past decade. Indeed, it is difficult to find many posts after April 2020 that don't touch upon this world-defining pandemic. But when did Bristruths first pay attention to coronavirus?
Plotting the freqency of related keywords over time shows that even though the first recorded cases of Covid-19 were announced in late January, the virus was first mentioned on Bristruths only in early March. This suggests that by large students (and perhaps the population as whole) was not concerned with coronavirus until it became apparent that it was a full-blown pandemic. Since then, however, barely a week goes by without a mention of a topic related to coronavirus.
Alongside the spread of coronavirus across the world, there took place worldwide protests against racism and police brutality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis on 25th May 2020. Following protests in the US, just three days after George Floyd's death, the first solidarity protests took place in London outside the US Embassy, after which protests continued to grow in number and size. This trend of public support for the anti-police brutality and pro-BLM protests was reflected in Bristruths, with many posts in the early weeks of June thanking protestors or asking how they could help the cause. What's more, the admins of the Bristruths page shared their support for the BLM cause in a public post on the 28th June 2020 where they highlighted the contributions that BAME LGBTQ+ people have made to liberation.
The event which triggered the most discussion, however, was the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston on the 7th June 2020. Almost a third of all posts that week mentioned the falling of the statue, as seen by the huge spike in posts containing the word "statue". Indeed, so common were posts about the falling of the statue of Colston that on 14th May 2020 one person wrote:
#Bristruth29585
After reading the last hundred Bristruths I have a suspicion that the statue of Colston may have been taken down 🤔
The popularity of these posts can be explained by the fact that the falling of the Colston statue was a once-in-a-lifetime event for Bristol. It underscored the ongoing anti-racism protests and provided a focal point for the entire world regarding the West's response to its legacy of slavery.