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Comment by tadmilbourn | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote.

BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.

Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game.

Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?

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Distributed chess games. One team uses ranked choice, the other uses approval.

Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two systems against each other.

"What feature should we build next?" Could be a good one. I don't know that it's actually a good thing to ask of your users, but I could definitely see people thinking it's a good thing to ask.

Really well done and congrats!

I think the market specifically for “Ranked-Choice Voting” is probably way smaller than the need for “easy/better/awesome polling and survey tools”.

Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with everything

Thanks for the kind words!

And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.

ranked choice is a primitive form of conjoint analysis, so that might be an avenue for exploration. marketers aren't always statistically rigorous in how they poll and analyze markets (which is one of the reasons product management rose in prominence, because of the promise of more analytic rigor). even simple versions of conjoint can be an informative tool in the toolbox, but the studies and the existing tools are expensive.

i don't know for sure that there is a big enough market there for VC, but i'm sure a good marketer could make a nice business out of it.

I've used misc voting systems in product development.

Approval voting for bug triage.

Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs).

Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and hiring candidates.

Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully transparent. Helped a lot with accountability.

Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would self-enforce. aka Empowerment.

Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug tracking and project management tools. A huge win.

Please support Condorcet voting.

How about on HN, you only have 10 article upvotes a day, use them wisely.

What should we get for our team lunch today?

Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.

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