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Show HN: Race to the Bottom

race-to-the-bottom.onrender.com

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Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#2
What an interesting idea! Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each "start" resets previous choices? What`s your plan for this? A public platform? Maybe connection to a specific purpose? I can see attaching non profits links to some causes might help some.

Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.

Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#3
post #2

What an interesting idea! Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each "start" resets previous choices? What`s your plan for this? A public platform? Maybe connection to a specific purpose? I can see attaching non profits links to some causes might help some. Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.

Thanks, sadly it didn't pick-up on HN The diff per region/state would be fantastic! The stats are shared, nothing "per user". At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There's a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great

Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#4
post #2

What an interesting idea! Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each "start" resets previous choices? What`s your plan for this? A public platform? Maybe connection to a specific purpose? I can see attaching non profits links to some causes might help some. Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.

Thanks, sadly it didn't pick-up on HN The diff per region/state would be fantastic! The stats are shared, nothing "per user". At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There's a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great

This is fantastic! The voting statistics of the community would have been very interesting. I have emailed the moderators to see if they would consider giving this post a second chance at /pool.

Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#7
Really didn't fancy this work.

You just have context-free character strings to work with here.

And then I peeked at the leader board and *really* didn't care for the things ranked best at all.

Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#8
Rankings not all consistent:

  - private military 6 but defense 39;
  - surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
  - polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
  - scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
  - influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);
Though some are: e.g.,

  - lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
  - escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)

Re: Show HN: Race to the Bottom

#10
An interesting experiment could be re-wording some of these and seeing how different the rankings are.

So have an alternate card titled "Promoting your country" rather than "Propaganda" or "Personal Safety" rather than "Firearms".

Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as "Exploitative Gig Economy" is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn't be ranked as poorly.

"Advertising" -> "Promoting your product"

Or some of them are so broad it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like "Telemarketing", "Advertising", or "Pharmaceuticals". Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.

---

Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of "Personal Responsibility" to "Social Responsibility".

It gauges how the crowd thinks of harm. For instance, Environmental Pollution is bad because it harms everyone and no one _chooses_ to be polluted on necessarily while something like Sugary Drinks is largely a personal choice that affects no one else.

Maybe another axis of "Protection" to "Liberty" where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.

So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty/Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection/Social.

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