Political website idea - gauging interest

Politics & News
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I was asked to pass this along - it is a pitch for a website idea. A political site - think of it like a hybrid forum/fact checker site. I didn’t write this, but I endorse it and think it’s a great idea. Please give me your honest thoughts, but please don’t be a jackass. The guy that wrote this is a very nice and talented product manager in tech and knows what he’s doing and may read this. ignore the chain email format, this is just to gauge interest. I would want the users here to test out a beta/alpha version.

Recently, like many of us, I’ve been thinking a lot more about politics than I usually do. No matter what your beliefs are, I think we can both agree that politics has changed.

But you know what has not changed? The way we engage in politics. We are limited to being passive observers, with our lips sealed and our hands tied. We don’t have a way to actively participate in politics, even though important political decisions are made for us daily.

Politics affect every single aspect of our life. So in this modern day, why do we accept this old school way of civic engagement?

Wouldn’t you like to actively participate in our political system? Discuss, express yourself and hear from fellow Americans on everything as they occur?

Wouldn’t you like more accountability from the elected officials? And have them engage in a continuous dialog with you?

Wouldn’t you like a more transparent view of government operations?

Take the impeachment as an example.

Dozens of experts have expressed their opinions. But what about you? Where do you express yourself without risking your relationships with your family, friends and coworkers?

Similarly, how can you directly hear directly from your fellow Americans, without any bias of popular media and lack of integrity of social media?

To me, this is not acceptable any more. I believe, we can and we should, change this current state of affairs.

What if we had a dedicated civic engagement platform - let’s call it Pulse - which changes the way we participate in politics? What if you could use Pulse to:

  • Freely express your views without risking your personal and professional relationships.
  • Hear from others, but know which opinion is from a fellow American vs a foreign friend.
  • Hold your elected officials accountable because everything they say and do will be easily accessible to you.
  • Expose what the government is truly doing.
  • And much, much more …

Don’t you think that it will forever change the face of democracy?

If you believe it will, then simply respond to this email with a ‘Yes’ . I’ll send you a follow up email with more details.

Please help me spread the word . If you know others who might also feel the same way, regardless of their political belief, then please forward this email to them. And please ask them to directly respond to me at: (redacted - contact jmakin if you would like to contact him directly)

Thanks for reading this far. I look forward to hearing from you. Let’s change the country for the better. Together.

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So Facebook, basically?

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I’m just trying to understand the product a little better.

Does this mean anonymized? Or is the main point here that it’s something other than Facebook, therefore you engage in the discussion outside of your circle?

Curious about what this means too. I guess this would require some sort of account verification to prove US citizenship?

My first thought here is what information gets provided regarding what they say and do, and who provides it. Mainly, how do you make sure people are working with relevant information and also how do you make what is provided balanced/unbiased?

I guess maybe all the “how’s” here have already been thought through and this email is really just to gauge interest in the “what”. I’m just kinda curious what an MVP looks like and how they stop the same issues creeping into this system that are in every other system that has information/discussion mixed with humans and all their biases (overt and subconscious).

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Is this a coup?

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Feels like it’s been done

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Does this mean anonymized?

Yes, my understanding is that it would be anonymous.

Curious about what this means too. I guess this would require some sort of account verification to prove > US citizenship?

I can’t speak for him, this is just my best understanding, but no, just identity verification. The “foreign friend” I believe is referring to Russian/Chinese troll farms. I don’t know the “how” there.

My first thought here is what information gets provided regarding what they say and do, and who provides it. Mainly, how do you make sure people are working with relevant information and also how do you make what is provided balanced/unbiased?

I guess maybe all the “how’s” here have already been thought through and this email is really just to gauge interest in the “what”. I’m just kinda curious what an MVP looks like and how they stop the same issues creeping into this system that are in every other system that has information/discussion mixed with humans and all their biases (overt and subconscious).

You can get a lot of this information from publicly facing sites but hardly anyone knows what congress people actually voted for and the news is really unreliable. I think that’s the idea - news sources are hard to find nowadays.

I think overall this site (unstuck) and his idea have a lot of the same aspirations.

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Like to clarify, this pitch is more or less exactly Facebook except without the “lack of integrity of social media”, only there’s no description of what that means exactly or how this iteration would avoid it. Facebook already disallows anonymous accounts, but it’s a huge amount of work to enforce this policy. Work means paying people, that means making money, again we’re back to “this is Facebook”.

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Freely express your views without risking your personal and professional relationships.

Enjoy your nazi social media site!

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I understand where a lot of you are coming from, and these are very real issues. But if we focused not on the “how” but rather the “what” - is this website (unstuck) enough for getting your information and discussing ideas? Or would it be nice to have something like this? I know a lot of us post in various places on the web, like CP or facebook groups. I personally would love to see a site that, in real time, tells me what is going on in the government, who’s voting for what, what laws are being passed, and maybe some critical analysis. That’s really lacking in our news media.

I honestly like the idea a lot and know a little more than I am saying but I don’t feel at liberty to discuss the finer points too much because it is not my idea and I respect the guy a great deal.

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I thought about this too.That would be a difficult problem. I think there’d probably need to be heavy moderation.

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The only way something like this works is if there’s a way to verify citizenship. Good luck with that.

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I look at govtrack.us all the time. You can find pretty much all the votes there. senate.gov, congress.gov and house.gov as well.

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Those sites are awful

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How so?

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Also, I dunno about calling this idea Facebook. Like it’s a tiny part of Facebook - a very specialized Facebook - and don’t people mostly use Facebook with just people they know? So, not really like Facebook.

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Well, there are political groups and local pages you can join that have lively discussions. I have been trolling a few of those for years now.

But this definitely isn’t facebook - I just don’t see the comparison either.

Those sites suck - they are poorly designed and there’s a really bad signal to noise ratio. To find info I really care about I have to dig really deep. Another problem is I didn’t even know that existed. And it is state run - I do not trust this particular government to present information to me fairly and easily. But it is a good data source, for sure. If it were possible to track local politics I think that would be really important as well, but that would be a huge undertaking IMO.

I really believe that making the general public know what is going on in politics is very important. I guess we are trying to do that but I don’t really know the long-term plans for this site, nor am I trying to compete with it. People just generally have no clue what is going on, even myself a lot of the time. News media is completely failing. How do we get people to actually care enough to look at this stuff though? That I have no idea.

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Votesmart and ontheissues do some summaries.

It’s not like it’s impossible for a new political site to be successful. There will certainly be new sites and new social media platforms. There will be good ideas that fail and bad ideas that succeed and maybe vice versa. Execution and luck.

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Yeah I agree with ggoreo. I think the idea is coming from a great place, but I think the current state of things is a people problem, not a platform problem.

Making a custom platform for highly engaged voters to have informed discussions is a noble idea, but I think putting it out there can only be net positive in terms of trying to help solve the problem. But it seems like to solve the other issues that similar sites have it needs to add in some sort of verification (which may cause people to not bother or be wary) and a lot of moderation to keep people discussing things in a constructive way using accurate information.

I also agree with microbets post just now that of course this could find a place - I just think its only ever going to hit a niche, because people willing AND capable of having informed and intelligent conversations is unfortunately also a niche.

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Yeah. My daughter’s bf has a political site. They had like 500 readers and then did a couple months of well targeted Facebook ads and got like 20000 readers. That’s awesome and really successful, but still, he drives uber to make a living.

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My general impression is that this idea is both noble and naive. The only way something like this moves the needle is if you could force elected officials to participate and interact with people who disagree with them.