mrbodoia

Sure, I'd love to hear your ideas!

That's basically the goal, yeah. I think it's very difficult to prevent people from being tribal and emotional at all, but I think the bigger issue right now is that existing platforms for political discussion encourage people to ensconce themselves in bubbles of like-minded people. I'm hoping to create a platform where people will at least be exposed to representative members of the other tribes, rather than whatever strawmen manage to make it through their bubble.

Your beliefs notwithstanding, I think that there are a fair number of people who do identify as either unambiguously right-leaning or left-leaning, and I intended the blue and red categories on the site to be for them. I was hoping that people like yourself that don't feel comfortable with either label would be comfortable choosing "neither". It's meant to include both people who are confused about their stances, as well as people who are sure but don't identify with either the right or the left.

However, it looks like people didn't interpret the categories the way that I expected them to. I'm going to rework the signup page to try and make the third category more appealing to people like yourself (and like myself!) who have strong views but don't see themselves on either the left or the right.

That's a great idea - so great that it's already on my feature list!

Post tags are something that I'm planning on implementing in the near future, though I'll need to think a little more about the best way to do them. I was planning to use them as a way of identifying topics only (e.g. abortion, immigration, taxes), but I like your idea of tagging particular stances as well.

I think this speaks to a larger question I'll have to answer, namely what is the threshold for "inappropriate" comments/behavior and how will moderation be enforced?

I'm personally inclined to be fairly hands-off, since I think that censorship (particularly when politics is involved) is a slippery slope. But I also agree that no moderation at all can be a turn-off for many users. I'll have to think about what kind of user content policy would strike the best balance.

Haha don't worry, I appreciate your input!

I agree that some kind of cluster analysis could be an interesting alternative to the explicit categorization that the current site uses. I thought that self-selection would probably be the best way to start, since clustering would be difficult without a large existing user base, but if the site takes off I'm definitely going to look into more advanced techniques for identifying partisan affiliation.

I didn't initially use a political test because I wanted the three categories to be less policy-based (e.g. what's your view on abortion/gun control/immigration) and more focused on people's emotional, "tribal" affiliation. I was hoping that all the people who feel a strong connection with either the left or the right would pick those two, while people who were less sure would feel comfortable picking neither.

However, as many commenters have pointed out, the current design makes it somewhat difficult for people without strong partisan affiliations to choose a side. I'm going to look into some sort of short quiz like the political compass that might make signups easier for people (and also increase the signal, as you mentioned).

I'll take a look at this. I thought his book was insightful, hopefully this quiz will be similarly so.

Thank you! Yeah the potential for abuse of ideological self-identification is definitely what I'm most worried about.

I'm hoping that as long as there are enough truthful users, I can build a classifier based on their voting/commenting behavior and use it to detect "false-flagging." But for the time being I'll just have to manually moderate that kind of behavior.

Yes, this was my intention with the three categories. I was hoping to find the right balance between too few categories (can't distinguish between ideological opposites) and too many categories (no meaningful signal from each category).

I would classify you as "neither". However, I acknowledge that this category is likely to be a lot less ideologically homogeneous than the other categories (though as you point out, the right has become less cohesive lately as well).

I think part of the issue here is that "neither" is not a very appealing group name. People like yourself have devoted a lot of thought to each of their various political stances, and I imagine its not very exciting to have all of that nuance summed up by the label "neither". I'm going to try to rethink the best way to name the categories and present them at signup.

However, I don't know that allowing more options would solve the problem. The intention of the three groups is not to put each person in a group with ideologically identical people, but to create a broad partition of the users to try and get a little more signal out of their votes.

Yes I agree. The potential for lying about your affiliation is in my opinion the biggest problem with this concept. I'll have to see how much of a problem this is in practice, and whether there are ways I could incentivize users to be truthful.

If it does become a problem, one thing I'm considering is using voting behavior as a way to try and identify and ban "false-flaggers". So if a user has classified themselves as left-leaning, but their voting behavior and the way other users vote on their posts/comments looks a lot like a right-leaning user, they could be banned or forced to change groups.

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.

Haha that's a great question. I also think that for a site like this, it's important to not only consider how to get enough users, but how to get high-quality users. So while a Twitter spam campaign might lead to lots of signups, it might also cause comment quality to plunge and lead to more time spent moderating.

My short-term plan was to just mention the site on some subreddits/blogs/discussion forums frequented by the type of people who I think might enjoy this site. I'm optimistic because my bar for success here is quite low - I'm not trying to draw major traffic for ad revenue, I'm mostly just interested in a site where I can read and discuss politics with other thoughtful people. So I think it would be possible to achieve long-term stability with only a few dozen regular users.

Of course, a few dozen is a far cry from the current user base! So for now, I will plug it on a few websites and see where that takes me.

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.

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.

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.

Regarding political categories on signup: I can try to provide some examples. In some sense though, I think that it should be based less on specific stances (do you support gun control? more taxes or less?) and more on your gut feeling. So if you don't have a strong feeling of being on either the left or the right, it's probably safe to select neither.

However, the analysis paralysis you mention was also something that my friends pointed out when they tried it, so I will try to come up with a way of helping people choose a "side".

There's no RSS feed at the moment, unfortunately - but I can put that on the list of features to add!

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).