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Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

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Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#11

Post by ps2026 »

oersted wrote: post #9

Cool project! The results of all the archived votes made sense to me, but I was most surprised by this one: > The U.S. was right to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) > 62% Agree - 38% Disagree I didn't know that the WHO had such a negative reputation. We are quite fond of such international institutions in the EU at least (ranging from a force for good to fairly harmless). What's the context? The rest…

Thanks for checking it out!

Most of my voters have come from Reddit and Bluesky so far, which is primarily where the left leaning is coming from. My X account was unfortunately suspended lol. I put an appeal in, but was originally flagged I think do to a new account, political content, and lots of links to the polls. I use an OG dynamic card generator so if I post a link to that poll or result, it creates a card for it on the fly. I think X didn't like that since I wasn't established.

That one was interesting, I am not really sure why that one skewed so far the other directly. I did not have the discussion section open yet (and just slowly getting a few active users), but that was the original reason I added the discussion. I don't know who users are, what their demographics are, etc.. (and I don't want to store that info), so hopefully in the future polls like that people will explain the "why".

I need to build some more analytics into the site (both frontend and backend) so I can analyze the data and visualize it, and so users on the frontend can get better ideas on what is happening.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#12

Post by ps2026 »

kjshsh123 wrote: post #6

I think it would be cool to track how votes differ depending on where a user was linked from. Being able to see e.g. "x% from hackernews support death penalty, y% from x". You wouldn't just be polling but also showing differences between users of different sites.

That would actually be really interesting since most of my users so far are from Reddit and Bluesky. Seeing how that breaks down would be telling of how sites primary users feel.

The only issue is, while Plausible analytics that I am using is really nice since it is privacy focused and doesn't track people, I have noticed it doesn't do a great job of understanding what links brought someone there. I am sure Google Analytics or others would do a better job, but it sort of circumvents the anonymous idea. Especially since this is a side project mostly for fun/interesting, I don't really want to be responsible for linking people to political choices.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#13

Post by 1e1a »

ps2026 wrote: post #7
1e1a wrote: post #3

It would be cool to be able to see how sentiment changes for a specific issue over time. Maybe you could recycle questions every so often?

That is a great idea! So I actually have two "meta" tags that will be used as I get going more. One is "revisited". This one will tag statements that have been asked before and I'll then add in more analytics to see how sentiment shifts. The other one is "recurring". I'll likely ask some of the more boring straightforward "The country is headed in the right direction" statements. Then set up some charts to see how it…

Awesome! I'm excited to see how this goes.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#14

Post by boldslogan »

feature request? dumb question, but can you add underneath or after you click your vote and before you show it. can you ask "What do you think most people answered" for that question.

It is cool to see the distribution of yes/no. But maybe when you do that you can do a kind of....how far off was i type result that lets people learn about their...biases? or just a fun surprise.

Anyways fun idea!

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#15

Post by 1e1a »

ps2026 wrote: post #10
joekrill wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was changed quickly, but I can't find anywhere that is says "No tracking". It specifically says "We don't track you around the internet." and "doesn't track you across sites" in the terms and about pages. Also, you kind of have to "track" users to some extent for a site like this - otherwise it would be simply for someone to stuff votes.

The Plausible does count raw statistics without "tracking" specific users. That is just used for general website analytics. The first-party functional cookie that I am using (very similar to the auth login cookie) is used to prevent duplicate anonymous votes. Neither of these track the user and both are for on-site only. The functional cookie works much better than the fingerprint (actually less invasive too), but is…

Are you rate limiting at the subnet/prefix level for IPv6?

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#16

Post by ps2026 »

boldslogan wrote: post #14

feature request? dumb question, but can you add underneath or after you click your vote and before you show it. can you ask "What do you think most people answered" for that question. It is cool to see the distribution of yes/no. But maybe when you do that you can do a kind of....how far off was i type result that lets people learn about their...biases? or just a fun surprise. Anyways fun idea!

Haha so like "guess" which way you think public sentiment leans before you submit your vote? Were you thinking like "what percent agreed" or something? You type 55% then it shows you actually 22% agree sort of deal?

That could maybe be a little optional thing to make it more "interactive". The original idea was to be dead simple, two big buttons. The issue is attracting people to come back since they hit the big button, go "that's interesting", then forget it ever existed.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#17

Post by 1e1a »

ps2026 wrote: post #12
kjshsh123 wrote: post #6

I think it would be cool to track how votes differ depending on where a user was linked from. Being able to see e.g. "x% from hackernews support death penalty, y% from x". You wouldn't just be polling but also showing differences between users of different sites.

That would actually be really interesting since most of my users so far are from Reddit and Bluesky. Seeing how that breaks down would be telling of how sites primary users feel. The only issue is, while Plausible analytics that I am using is really nice since it is privacy focused and doesn't track people, I have noticed it doesn't do a great job of understanding what links brought someone there. I am sure Google An…

Plausible is probably just looking at the Referer header.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#18

Post by ps2026 »

1e1a wrote: post #15
ps2026 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Plausible does count raw statistics without "tracking" specific users. That is just used for general website analytics. The first-party functional cookie that I am using (very similar to the auth login cookie) is used to prevent duplicate anonymous votes. Neither of these track the user and both are for on-site only. The functional cookie works much better than the fingerprint (actually less invasive too), but is…

Are you rate limiting at the subnet/prefix level for IPv6?

Actually no, I'm rate limiting per individual IP address right now. Good catch... I should probably normalize IPv6 to /64. I was originally thinking about not blocking universities or large groups that share IPs, but I guess that is more of an IPv4 NAT concern. Thanks for pointing it out! I didn't really think about a user rotating through IPs. I didn't add the rate limiting on voting until I removed the fingerprint, so that is for sure a valid concern.

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#19

Post by boldslogan »

ps2026 wrote: post #16
boldslogan wrote: post #14

feature request? dumb question, but can you add underneath or after you click your vote and before you show it. can you ask "What do you think most people answered" for that question. It is cool to see the distribution of yes/no. But maybe when you do that you can do a kind of....how far off was i type result that lets people learn about their...biases? or just a fun surprise. Anyways fun idea!

Haha so like "guess" which way you think public sentiment leans before you submit your vote? Were you thinking like "what percent agreed" or something? You type 55% then it shows you actually 22% agree sort of deal? That could maybe be a little optional thing to make it more "interactive". The original idea was to be dead simple, two big buttons. The issue is attracting people to come back since they hit the big butt…

The death penalty should remain legal. Yes/No

user clicks Yes. new one pops up Show Results (button) or Guess which was more popular: Yes/No. This is more simple than guessing a percentage. but both could work.

So you then show the results and then you show the "meta" results which is like a "line" that is labelled where it shows what others thought of other people. The dead simple idea is a nice draw, this like...ah hah learning moment to learn or see more about the world I think is maybe a nice feature to add. to get more people to come back?

Re: Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

#20

Post by observationist »

oersted wrote: post #9

Cool project! The results of all the archived votes made sense to me, but I was most surprised by this one: > The U.S. was right to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) > 62% Agree - 38% Disagree I didn't know that the WHO had such a negative reputation. We are quite fond of such international institutions in the EU at least (ranging from a force for good to fairly harmless). What's the context? The rest…

One of the reasons is that the US pays for a whole lot of those international institutions, creating policy and governance issues that end up beyond local accountability. The "force for good, or fairly harmless" rubric changes when it's your money. Then it becomes "why are they spending my money on that bullshit when we have fires to put out at home?"

Covid era politicization and the fallout from that has a lot to do with it as well.

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