Show HN: PolliticalScience – Anonymous daily polls with 24-hour windows

One of the reasons is that the US pays for a whole lot of those international institutions, creating policy and governance issues that end up beyond local accountability. The "force for good, or fairly harmless" rubric changes when it's your money. Then it becomes "why are they spending my money on that bullshit when we have fires to put out at home?"

Covid era politicization and the fallout from that has a lot to do with it as well.

Thanks for checking it out!

Most of my voters have come from Reddit and Bluesky so far, which is primarily where the left leaning is coming from. My X account was unfortunately suspended lol. I put an appeal in, but was originally flagged I think do to a new account, political content, and lots of links to the polls. I use an OG dynamic card generator so if I post a link to that poll or result, it creates a card for it on the fly. I think X didn't like that since I wasn't established.

That one was interesting, I am not really sure why that one skewed so far the other directly. I did not have the discussion section open yet (and just slowly getting a few active users), but that was the original reason I added the discussion. I don't know who users are, what their demographics are, etc.. (and I don't want to store that info), so hopefully in the future polls like that people will explain the "why".

I need to build some more analytics into the site (both frontend and backend) so I can analyze the data and visualize it, and so users on the frontend can get better ideas on what is happening.

Dang, perfect timing, ran into an issue with GitHub actions being down. Then the container timed out in Azure after manual publish. Should be back up now.

I am not really sure honestly. I thought of the idea a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. I follow politics and current events, but never really participated in online discussions of it. I have a background in data analytics and have loved stats since I was a kid. I always followed sports stats and election poll stats. I have been working on an enterprise application for ~ 3 years now, that I hope to beta test this year and it has been pretty heavy. I decided to take a short break and just get this idea I had out there and see how it goes.

The reason it is anonymous is I do not want to tie users to votes. A couple reasons being liability. If I know who you are, how you are voting, and your demographics, that is pretty powerful, but also a ton of liability. If something happened and that data got leaked out, that could be awful. I also don't think users are as likely to create an account, give away their information, just to hit two big buttons. The goal was no barrier to entry, sign up if you want more and not to farm political data from users.

Of course I would like it to become popular, be a place for thousands to discuss hot topics, and get enough votes that it washes out any abuse and grabs enough diversity to see real sentiment. I don't know if it will ever get to that point though. I don't plan to make it scientific as that would require removing the anonymous nature of it. I have thought about it as a free tool for universities or high schools to use for current events polls and discussions.

The short version, I have no idea haha. It really is a fun side project for now, it was fun to code and get something out there, but I am interested to see where it goes.

That would actually be really interesting since most of my users so far are from Reddit and Bluesky. Seeing how that breaks down would be telling of how sites primary users feel.

The only issue is, while Plausible analytics that I am using is really nice since it is privacy focused and doesn't track people, I have noticed it doesn't do a great job of understanding what links brought someone there. I am sure Google Analytics or others would do a better job, but it sort of circumvents the anonymous idea. Especially since this is a side project mostly for fun/interesting, I don't really want to be responsible for linking people to political choices.

I should probably add that. I do plan to add some more international statements, but yeah, right now it is very U.S.-centric.

I'm based in the US and trying my best. I'll have some more broad polls at some point. At one question per day, I'll have a hard time getting everything and everyone included.

A lot of the statements are "general" sentiment as well. Social media, drinking age, phones and children at school, death penalty as a whole (even if it does say remain legal), etc...

Any particular international topics you'd find interesting as a poll statement?

Haha so like "guess" which way you think public sentiment leans before you submit your vote? Were you thinking like "what percent agreed" or something? You type 55% then it shows you actually 22% agree sort of deal?

That could maybe be a little optional thing to make it more "interactive". The original idea was to be dead simple, two big buttons. The issue is attracting people to come back since they hit the big button, go "that's interesting", then forget it ever existed.

That is a great idea! So I actually have two "meta" tags that will be used as I get going more. One is "revisited". This one will tag statements that have been asked before and I'll then add in more analytics to see how sentiment shifts. The other one is "recurring". I'll likely ask some of the more boring straightforward "The country is headed in the right direction" statements. Then set up some charts to see how it tracks over time.

I am hoping the general public finds this interesting as a lot of the major polls (who to be fair do it scientifically) only ask a couple thousand people. Many never get to participate. While this is not scientific, anyone can participate and eventually with enough people, we can maybe gauge and see how sentiment shifts after time.

You're right on that. That is one reason I am avoiding scientific polling and calling it "public sentiment".

The binary, with all its flaws, is dead simple. I see a statement, do I agree or disagree with that statement. If I don't fully support one or the other, the discussion section I intended for them to make their case.

I am trying to keep the same similar format for each poll. X should Y or X was right to Y in hopes people get used to the wording. On the backend I have a bias rating I give each poll as well as a temperature. The bias is LeansLeft, Center, LeansRight. The temperature is Cool, Warm and Hot. For most warm to hot polls, the statement has to be worded in the affirmative towards one side or the other. I try to keep the wording bias somewhat balanced so I don't post too many in one direction.

I am playing around with the idea of having two steps though, Agree/Disagree (required) then an optional follow-up to rate where on the scale you fall. I want to keep the simplicity as the primary target, but it could be interesting to see where people fall on a range. It would still be anonymous but rather this vote was agreed and they leaned 75% towards that side or something.

Maybe it was changed quickly, but I can't find anywhere that is says "No tracking". It specifically says "We don't track you around the internet." and "doesn't track you across sites" in the terms and about pages.

Also, you kind of have to "track" users to some extent for a site like this - otherwise it would be simply for someone to stuff votes.

So the site does use Plausable analytics. I chose that one because it does not use cookies, does not identify the user in any way, and does not follow you across the internet.

It counts raw aggregate statistics and is compliant with GDPR without requiring a banner. While it is "tracking" I suppose, it doesn't "track you". Do you think my wording doesn't work? I am open to suggestions.