11–20 of 47 posts
I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-an...
Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup ( http://usesthis.com/ ), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.
They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people. Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.
Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.
Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile. I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-netwo…
Our long term vision is to build online electorates, where you come together with people that share your values, and attract candidates to a large voting pool. In a system like that, candidates even with little to no money, can win based on how well they can convince you / match with your values.
Happy to go into further detail!
So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?
I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.
Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?
Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile. I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-netwo…
I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification.
At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-...
Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable.
So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's about ~200M voters (United States only)
I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years. I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.
Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile. I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-netwo…
Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen. I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because sh…
I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.
What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co-opted into more of the same old trap?