Comment by mrbodoia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbodoia | Hacker News Reader

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Hey everyone! In light of recent discussions about how political news is propagated, I thought some of you might be interested in a side project I've been working on.

Tripartisan is a news aggregator (similar to HN, reddit, or voat) focused on politics. The key difference between Tripartisan and other aggregators is that it asks users to identify their political stance on signup. Users choose between three broad categories: left-leaning, right-leaning, and neither. This makes possible a number of features which don't exist on other aggregation sites. For example:

1) You can see not just the number of votes a post or comment has received, but what the partisan distribution of those votes is.

2) You can sort posts by partisan affiliation, or use the "best" sort, which prioritizes posts that received votes from across the political spectrum.

3) When viewing a user's profile, you can see both the partisan distribution of the people who upvoted that user, as well as the partisan distribution of the posts/comments that user upvoted.

I'm hoping that this explicit partitioning of users could help prevent the echo chamber/hivemind problems suffered by other political news aggregators like r/politics or voat. At the moment Tripartisan just a prototype, but I'd be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on it (both the concept and the implementation).

A nice feature would be to add a personal "bubble index", based on how much time users spend reading articles from "the other side". Some warning, "hey you live in a bubble, try reading this even if you disagree".

Also it would be nice to be able to rank articles by "least partisan".

Granted, I think the market for true nonpartisanship is pretty small. Kinda like health foods, where basically you just repackage sugary stuff with pictures of mountains on the box; with news you just have to convince the public that your extremely partisan corp is the balanced one.

My intention was that the "best" sort would be equivalent to "least partisan". Under this ordering, posts which have strong support from all three user groups are ranked highest (specifically, it's ordered by log(left_votes) + log(right_votes) + log(other_votes)). But perhaps I should change the name from "best" to something that better conveys the lack of partisanship.

I like the idea of a bubble index. So maybe when you login, the landing page shows you the partisan distribution of the posts you've read/commented on/upvoted, and you can see for yourself how deep your bubble is.

This is a great idea.

One thing you may need to refine, if the site picks up steam, is how you define the categories. "Left" and "Right" mean different things in different parts of the world. And "Neither" can mean "Neither left nor right," or "between left and right," or "I don't know where I fall." Being able to differentiate between those three things would be helpful.

Thank you!

This is a good suggestion, and something that other commenters have mentioned as well. I was purposefully vague about the category names because I didn't want them to be too strict. The original implementation had "liberal", "conservative", and "independent", but I realized that a) those terms are specifically American, and b) there are a lot of people who are left-wing but not liberal, or right-wing but not conservative. So I tried to back off and make the categories broader, but as you point out that leads to some confusion.

My thinking was that, at least in the US, a large portion of those who are vocal about politics would be content (perhaps even proud) to label themselves as either left-leaning or right-leaning. I figured that third category would be for those who couldn't immediately choose between those two options. So "Neither" can mean "neither left nor right", "between left and right", or "I don't know". I should definitely make this clearer on the signup page though, and I will likely incorporate some quick political orientation questions or something along those lines.

Since internationalization is a priority, it's worth noting that 'left' and 'right' don't mean the same thing in Europe and America.

The right in Europe, historically, had a lot to do with conserving a national identity, often including a monarchy of some sort. The American right was more interested in conserving a (classically) liberal Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The rise of Trump has changed American politics some, mostly by providing a focal point for big government nationalism that is fairly new to America.

To put it another way, there are very distinct camps, and very distinct echo chambers, even within the Republican party. Some of the most fervent #nevertrump people are conservatives concerned about abuse of government power.

Also, OP could add an OCEAN score or similar using broad questions to get a sense of where a user is coming from. As soon as a site gets big enough for abuse, it seems simple voting has always broken down quickly.

This is a good idea. In fact, it might be interesting to include answers to these questions as part of a user's profile. So if you're curious about the particular political stance of a fellow user, you could look at their profile and see their answers to a handful of political index questions.

I identify with conservative economic policies but liberal social policies. My views around a whole bunch of topics have changed over time. What option should I select when I sign up?

If I were you, I would select "Neither". My intention was to make the "Neither" category a catch-all for those who don't strongly identify with either the left or the right. However, as other commentators have noted this isn't obvious, and I'm going to rework the signup page to make it easier to choose a category.

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