This thread got only 6 upvotes as I am typing this comment and there are two replies from green accounts, both registered within the past few hours and show zero other activity on this website, both talking in the same positive tenor with exclamation marks. Surely I am not the only one finding this suspicious right?
Anyway, how exactly do you plan on deterring astroturfing and other sorts of public opinion manipulation? Heck, how do you convince us that you are not the one working on an influence campaign yourself?
Totally fair to question it. I did ask a couple friends to go through the workflow of reading the post, trying the beta, and optionally commenting.
Astroturfing is actually one of the problems I’m trying to solve. Civie has optional identity verification (via Persona), and anonymous responses can be filtered down to verified-only. The idea is to make participation easier while still giving people a way to look at results that are harder to game, with everything aggregated and publicly inspectable.
On the “influence campaign” part, I’m honestly just trying to get feedback during an early beta, not shape anyone’s opinions. And for trust more broadly, you probably shouldn’t just take my word for it. The only real answer is transparency over time. That’s why I’m attempting to build this in public and gather as much feedback as I can.
this is interesting, what was your biggest motivation for building this? had you been thinking of this longer than the recent current events related to civic unrest in the US?
Appreciate that. I’ve thought about anonymous polling before, but the real push came from doomscrolling earlier this year. IG and TikTok were both feeding me nonstop political US content weeks on end, and I started feeling restless and helpless. Didn’t want to just keep consuming, but wanted to add my voice somehow, so I decided to build something. That urgency is what finally got me moving.
I get the concept, but why is this interesting to HN?
The page has very little about how it works (security / trust / identity), there is nothing about tech stack or open source. These are going to be paramount in any civics platform, b/c transparency and the trust-pocolipse.
That’s fair feedback. I’ve updated the post to include a section with more implementation details.
It’s currently built with Next.js and Firebase. Responses are stored separately from identity data, there are no public profiles, and only aggregate results are exposed in the UI. Verification is used to increase resistance to bots, but answers are not tied to public identity.
I agree that any civic platform lives or dies on transparency right now. I’m actively considering showing the question schemas and aggregation logic so the mechanics are inspectable rather than opaque.
If you have strong opinions on what absolutely must be open versus what can reasonably remain closed, I’d genuinely value that perspective. This is still early and the landing page is pretty barebones, but the core web app and data model are where most of the effort has gone so far.
This is increasingly looking like the tell tale for Ai bots masquerading as humans. I've heard essentially this phrase as the first in several recent interactions which ended up being bots.
Can you prove your humanity? Bots and agents are not allowed on HN
I've tried this out and I really like it! It's cool to see different people's opinions in an anonymous format. You're not biased by other people's choices before you answer, and you can skip as well. Honestly if more people used it I think you'd get a very accurate response of how the average person thinks!
The answer-before-results flow was intentional to avoid anchoring, and the skip option is there to keep participation low pressure.
On accuracy, I’m a bit cautious. Since it’s self selected, it won’t be statistically representative. The hope is that with enough diverse participation, it can still produce meaningful directional signal.
That tradeoff between accessibility and representativeness is basically the core experiment.
This thread got only 6 upvotes as I am typing this comment and there are two replies from green accounts, both registered within the past few hours and show zero other activity on this website, both talking in the same positive tenor with exclamation marks. Surely I am not the only one finding this suspicious right?
Anyway, how exactly do you plan on deterring astroturfing and other sorts of public opinion manipulation? Heck, how do you convince us that you are not the one working on an influence campaign yourself?
Totally fair to question it. I did ask a couple friends to go through the workflow of reading the post, trying the beta, and optionally commenting.
Astroturfing is actually one of the problems I’m trying to solve. Civie has optional identity verification (via Persona), and anonymous responses can be filtered down to verified-only. The idea is to make participation easier while still giving people a way to look at results that are harder to game, with everything aggregated and publicly inspectable.
On the “influence campaign” part, I’m honestly just trying to get feedback during an early beta, not shape anyone’s opinions. And for trust more broadly, you probably shouldn’t just take my word for it. The only real answer is transparency over time. That’s why I’m attempting to build this in public and gather as much feedback as I can.
And for what it’s worth, I appreciate the skepticism and questions.
this is interesting, what was your biggest motivation for building this? had you been thinking of this longer than the recent current events related to civic unrest in the US?
Appreciate that. I’ve thought about anonymous polling before, but the real push came from doomscrolling earlier this year. IG and TikTok were both feeding me nonstop political US content weeks on end, and I started feeling restless and helpless. Didn’t want to just keep consuming, but wanted to add my voice somehow, so I decided to build something. That urgency is what finally got me moving.
I get the concept, but why is this interesting to HN?
The page has very little about how it works (security / trust / identity), there is nothing about tech stack or open source. These are going to be paramount in any civics platform, b/c transparency and the trust-pocolipse.
That’s fair feedback. I’ve updated the post to include a section with more implementation details.
It’s currently built with Next.js and Firebase. Responses are stored separately from identity data, there are no public profiles, and only aggregate results are exposed in the UI. Verification is used to increase resistance to bots, but answers are not tied to public identity.
I agree that any civic platform lives or dies on transparency right now. I’m actively considering showing the question schemas and aggregation logic so the mechanics are inspectable rather than opaque.
If you have strong opinions on what absolutely must be open versus what can reasonably remain closed, I’d genuinely value that perspective. This is still early and the landing page is pretty barebones, but the core web app and data model are where most of the effort has gone so far.
There are people working on similar ideas in the ATmosphere / ATProto, are you tuned into that at all?
I wasn’t before, but I am now. Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll dig into AT Protocol and see what’s happening there.
AT has people generally working on the next generation of shared infra for social and much more. Come join us!
https://discord.atprotocol.dev (should work, best entrypoint to the dev community)
I like sharing this one for new devs: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
Consider me an ATProto Toucher :)
lol, changing that name has been bikeshed a number of times
> That’s fair feedback.
This is increasingly looking like the tell tale for Ai bots masquerading as humans. I've heard essentially this phrase as the first in several recent interactions which ended up being bots.
Can you prove your humanity? Bots and agents are not allowed on HN
Oh that's just part of my vocabulary. lol. Um, my username is gucduck on all socials if that helps? And this is my personal website: gucduck.com
I've been dealing with clawd spam, and likely being more/overly sensitive to it
it's good vocab and writing to have! I wonder how much longer we will have easy indicators
No worries, I appreciate the intention. It definitely feels like we’re getting close to not having any easy indicators whatsoever.
They are now writing their HN launch readmes before any code...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009000
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I've tried this out and I really like it! It's cool to see different people's opinions in an anonymous format. You're not biased by other people's choices before you answer, and you can skip as well. Honestly if more people used it I think you'd get a very accurate response of how the average person thinks!
Really appreciate you trying it out.
The answer-before-results flow was intentional to avoid anchoring, and the skip option is there to keep participation low pressure.
On accuracy, I’m a bit cautious. Since it’s self selected, it won’t be statistically representative. The hope is that with enough diverse participation, it can still produce meaningful directional signal.
That tradeoff between accessibility and representativeness is basically the core experiment.
Looks awesome!
Thank you! If you’re curious, would love to have you on the beta list.