alt Hacker NewsI am not really sure honestly. I thought of the idea a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. I follow politics and current events, but never really participated in online discussions of it. I have a background in data analytics and have loved stats since I was a kid. I always followed sports stats and election poll stats. I have been working on an enterprise application for ~ 3 years now, that I hope to beta test this year and it has been pretty heavy. I decided to take a short break and just get this idea I had out there and see how it goes.
The reason it is anonymous is I do not want to tie users to votes. A couple reasons being liability. If I know who you are, how you are voting, and your demographics, that is pretty powerful, but also a ton of liability. If something happened and that data got leaked out, that could be awful. I also don't think users are as likely to create an account, give away their information, just to hit two big buttons. The goal was no barrier to entry, sign up if you want more and not to farm political data from users.
Of course I would like it to become popular, be a place for thousands to discuss hot topics, and get enough votes that it washes out any abuse and grabs enough diversity to see real sentiment. I don't know if it will ever get to that point though. I don't plan to make it scientific as that would require removing the anonymous nature of it. I have thought about it as a free tool for universities or high schools to use for current events polls and discussions.
The short version, I have no idea haha. It really is a fun side project for now, it was fun to code and get something out there, but I am interested to see where it goes.
Interesting, thanks.
I think that if you keep it anonymous like that, then it's limited to basically being a toy, since there's zero accuracy, nothing to prevent "ballot-stuffing", etc. Which is fine, if you just want to have built it for fun.
But if you wanted to, I do think this is an idea that could take off in a popular way, the idea of America's "question of the day" that people answer every morning after they do their Wordle (or their enclose.horse, ha). But it would require creating an account linked to probably a phone number, that you log in with via a code, and answer basic demographic questions after your first vote that you'd use for balancing. I don't think you need to worry too much about liability if you follow best practices around database security? (And if it really took off, you could put it behind a cheap LLC to protect you personally.) Obviously you don't want people to think you're selling their data to political operatives, so you might want to partner with a political scientist at some well-known university to give some kind of "academic seal of approval" that this is used for research and public information, not for selling data. I think there could really be something here, and let people suggest and vote on what tomorrow's question should be.
Just something to think about, if you did want to try to turn it into something popular that could become part of the news environment, the way FiveThirtyEight has. But if you value the anonymous aspect the most and just want to keep it as something smaller for fun, then that's cool on its own. :)