Totally fair to question it. I did ask a couple friends to go through the workflow of reading the post, trying the beta, and optionally commenting.
Astroturfing is actually one of the problems I’m trying to solve. Civie has optional identity verification (via Persona), and anonymous responses can be filtered down to verified-only. The idea is to make participation easier while still giving people a way to look at results that are harder to game, with everything aggregated and publicly inspectable.
On the “influence campaign” part, I’m honestly just trying to get feedback during an early beta, not shape anyone’s opinions. And for trust more broadly, you probably shouldn’t just take my word for it. The only real answer is transparency over time. That’s why I’m attempting to build this in public and gather as much feedback as I can.
Appreciate that. I’ve thought about anonymous polling before, but the real push came from doomscrolling earlier this year. IG and TikTok were both feeding me nonstop political US content weeks on end, and I started feeling restless and helpless. Didn’t want to just keep consuming, but wanted to add my voice somehow, so I decided to build something. That urgency is what finally got me moving.
The answer-before-results flow was intentional to avoid anchoring, and the skip option is there to keep participation low pressure.
On accuracy, I’m a bit cautious. Since it’s self selected, it won’t be statistically representative. The hope is that with enough diverse participation, it can still produce meaningful directional signal.
That tradeoff between accessibility and representativeness is basically the core experiment.
That’s fair feedback. I’ve updated the post to include a section with more implementation details.
It’s currently built with Next.js and Firebase. Responses are stored separately from identity data, there are no public profiles, and only aggregate results are exposed in the UI. Verification is used to increase resistance to bots, but answers are not tied to public identity.
I agree that any civic platform lives or dies on transparency right now. I’m actively considering showing the question schemas and aggregation logic so the mechanics are inspectable rather than opaque.
If you have strong opinions on what absolutely must be open versus what can reasonably remain closed, I’d genuinely value that perspective. This is still early and the landing page is pretty barebones, but the core web app and data model are where most of the effort has gone so far.
This is very much in the same space as what I’ve been building, so it’s interesting to see the overlap in instincts here!
I started working on Civie (https://civie.org) 2 months ago, which also focuses on anonymous, low-friction daily civic polling with time-boxed questions and an emphasis on privacy by default. Different implementation choices, but the same core belief: participation should be easy, frequent, and not require turning your identity into the product.
Would love to chat sometime if you're interested in comparing notes and implementation!