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crazygringoyesterday at 9:51 PM1 replyview on HN

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. :)


Replies

ps2026yesterday at 10:00 PM

Thanks for the thoughtful ideas! You make some great points and laid out a few good plans honestly. I do have an "account" feature right now, where you just enter your email to login. It is passwordless. Logged in accounts can only vote 1 time. I still have the fundamental difficulty of not knowing what they actually voted to maybe have two counts, the anonymous vote and the logged in vote.

Maybe if this somehow takes off, I can re-evaluate if there is a better way to maybe have the anonymous voting as well as a more "scientific" version where users opt-in to provide their information or a way to verify it before anonymously storing their vote.