I posted this here a while back and received plenty of useful feedback. Any additional votes, comments, or questions are welcome!

Not sure what purpose this is trying to fulfill. It's not really gathering any useful data, since the responses are just whoever is sent the website and decides to respond. It's essentially a useless survey group as it doesn't represent anything meaningful.

Possible to create surveys?

The mapping of votes to laws is really interesting. I guess I need to move to Spain.

Anything where your respondents choose to participate is subject to response bias. This seems to lean very left for the US at least

Hi. Could you explain this to me please? Like, if it’s a random person survey and assuming the randoms are telling the truth about how they feel, why wouldn’t it be useful somehow?

I believe the concern is that the sample of respondents is not random, and indeed, not really representative of any particular population. Thus, the data reflects the bias not of the population of that specific area alone but also the channels via which this program is disseminated.

Oh for sure. I get that. My own bias showed even though I tried not to.

Bots, Brigading, Poorly structured questions, Typical public survey manipulations Also the slide to vote if not done correctly could present false positives for selecting your vote

It looks like Reddit.

I thought Reddit = reality?

That's a good point. I'm hoping that this website (or something like it) can become a useful tool for democracy - very quickly giving local governments a rough idea of what the people want

Thanks for the list - I tried to make it trickier for bots by using invisible captcha. I couldn't find any real solutions for the rest

Haha share it with an enemy?

Once you get to the voting part, you can also create a new poll of your own! Look for the "New Poll" option in the top menu

Also self reported data is often flawed in and of itself

Sites like this get shared among super liberal places like reddit. But can you imagine grandmothers on Facebook using it? No.

So you get skewed distributions of things. It only represents those people that take the survey, and by the nature of the site those people will all strongly think the same.

Also the questions aren't useful. Should abortion be legal? Simply a yes/no doesn't give any meaningful information. The debate is basically down to 'if it should be legal, when should it be legal'. The current left wing stance is that it should be legal up to 1second before labor happens. The right wing stance is 'sometimes legal, often before heartbeat'.

But according to that poll site everyone supports abortion.

Not supposed to be scientific (I think), I see it more like Wii everybody votes channel where you can just vote for fun and see what other people think.

Maybe would be interesting if users had basic demographics linked to their votes to see how it skews.

It won't be. There's no way to do that accurately without some way to prove who the voter is. The voting will just be manipulated.

This site is about as useful as a buzzfeed poll.

At this point it's a survey of reddit opinions. Everyone knows reddit opinions aren't representative of normal people.

ITT: Americans finding out they're more right leaning in general.

It’s separated by region.

>Haha share it with an enemy?

The fuck?

This is a neat why to get reddits opinion on this around the world. Hopefully it reaches a wider audience. If so it might be a really neat data source.

>The debate is basically down to 'if it should be legal, when should it be legal'. The current left wing stance is that it should be legal up to 1second before labor happens. The right wing stance is 'sometimes legal, often before heartbeat'.

Lol what absolute horseshit of a take, nonsequitur to boot. 🤡🤡

Edit : surprise surprise they're also a bigot

Where is the source code?

Sorry, not open source (yet?). If there's enough demand, I can change that

I did add some voluntary demographics :) Every design choice ends up being a tradeoff between getting useful info and asking for too much personal info

He means give it to someone with an opposing viewpoint

Cool project! Well done!

> My own bias showed even though I tried not to

Maybe so, but that’s not the entirety of the issue here.

The other main problems are sampling bias (ie, the survey is sent to folks who are not representative of the broader population), and non-response bias (ie, the types of people who elect to respond to such a survey are not representative of the broader population).

That's... the actual legislation the Democrats tried to pass (H.R. 8296), compared to the actual legislation as passed in 80% of the American Midwest states.

If that wasn't the party stance, why would they write and vote for a bill that contains it?

Edit: As you've blocked me, and I see a automod deleted comment beneath this one, I don't think anyone saw your response. But I assume you're pivoting to personal attacks rather than discussing the facts, because the facts are not on your side.

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Behold the awesome power of this fully operational echo chamber!

It’s a cool website honestly, I enjoy the concept a lot. Obviously I’m forced to view the results through the lens of “this is what people on reddit think” but it was cool to see a bit of variation regardless. I think you could take it to the next level by importing a much larger dataset of responses to similar questions and using that as a baseline. Then, the user can answer the questions and look at the demographics to see how they compare, but without actually incorporating their response unless it is desired. If they want their response recorded, just overlay that onto the baseline (which would let you keep the data separate if you also wanted to include a feature that compares responses directly from the website to those of more traditional polling methods). This way you don’t have to collect personal information for somebody to view the results, but they have the option to willfully hand it over.

But of course, that would be a giant time commitment to implement. Visualizing demographics is a very important concept though

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What's your infra look like if you don't mind sharing?

“Are video games a healthy hobby?”

Has this been controversial in the last 5 years?

It tells us no valuable information. Also it’s only about the same bullshit political “issues” which should not even be issues. These have mostly been addressed and dealt with in most democratic developed countries, but of course America is still fucking arguing about these things so they don’t pay any attention to the fact that the government, our laws and policies have all been bought and owned by the richest. And also that 99.99% of our entire wealth is in the pockets of like 11 people.

Yeah let’s argue about abortion and guns some more.

“Oh… I’m afraid the vote bots will be fully operational when your comments arrive.”

FYI the signup process redirects to the website without https (Downgrade) and same whenever you try to make a new poll.

ITT: Redditors

Thanks for letting me know - definitely wanna sort that out. I haven't been able to recreate this on safari or chrome; will you please let me know which web browser you're using?

This brought back memories lol

Happy to talk about how it's setup (spoiler alert: AWS for everything).

Front end: html, css, javascript, and using the tool Mapbox GL JS
Web server: php, written using the Laravel framework, hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Data processing: (bash, docker, python) a scheduled EC2 instance that bins data points and uploads new map tiles to mapbox

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Mozilla Firefox 105.0.1 on Linux kernel 5.19.12

I can see it in the Network tab of Developer Tools, after registering to make a vote count it POSTs to /new_vote and catches a 302 redirect, but the location header of that 302 is Location: http://myworld.vote which is where that downgrade caught my attention. Granted in the majority of cases, a browser will remember an earlier 301 and not follow the URI to be told 301 > https a second time. (But because your reddit post URL specifies https, that was my browser's first time being redirected to it again)

Anyone running an SSL enforcer could get stuck there which I guess is where setting your HSTS headers could save the day in that case. Otherwise fixing that Location string.

Easy change in new_vote I presume. That endpoint also explains why it happened a second time post-registration during another vote.

THIS IS SO COOL! I love the concept even if the sample size isn’t the best yet. Couple of UX suggestions if you’re looking for any.

The slider was a bit too easy to select. Meaning, I went to slide my answer and it would submit the middle option or one slight off center because it was too sensitive. Adding to that, it did let me submit my answer more than once which would probably skew the data if you were actually trying to analyze it.

I liked the ability to change colors of the answers, but some of them in the middle ranges became difficult to identify on the map. Specifically any light green or blues as they blend in with the globe.

I felt myself wanting a numeric scale associated with the slider or something like “never, sometimes, always” to quantify the respective slider placement.

Last, may have missed this, but I’d love an option to see what others in my target demographic selected.

Sorry if you were not looking for suggestions but I just had so much fun picking my answers and surfing the globe, I think this is a fantastic idea! I hope you continue expanding on it.

Edit: the “voters” tab is really neat! Would love a drop down or modal option to view that info for each question. I have a very basic knowledge of development so I know this is all much easier said than done, but kudos all around on this project!

Thanks a lot for pointing this out!

All good. Cool site!

Where can i see the source code

The key is that it's not random at all. Sort of like if you posted a survey on your facebook page, or asked college students at a sports game. There are several layers of bias, and the end result is that you don't really learn anything.

In the first case, you learn what 'your friends' 'who use facebook' and 'who will open the survey and fill it out' think. That's at least 3 layers of selection bias.

In the second case you learn what 'college students' 'at that university' 'who would go to a sports game' and also 'be willing to respond to the survey' think. Also at least 3 layers of selection bias.

If you asked "are sports entertaining?" In your survey, it's pretty obvious the group at the sporting event would have substantial deviation compared to the general population. But those kinds of group deviations can be more subtle or less blatantly predictable as well.

In this case, if this is the only place he's posted this, the survey group is going to be primarily 'redditors' 'with r/internetisbeautiful as a sub' 'who found this interesting enough to click it and fill it out' and so on down the line with a variety of other layers of selection bias. Even if the only flayer of selection was 'redditors' you would find a tremendous deviation from the general population in a wide variety of things.

Love the concept but how do you prevent trolling for hot topics like “should Ukraine sacrifice territory”? Some sort of two factor authentication?

I haven't got a good solution for that yet :/ I'm using reCaptcha to slow down bots but if I start asking for email/social media login, people will be worried about what they share and who has access to it

You could perhaps implement a type of shadow banning. Flag suspicious behavior (like connecting by VPN/proxy or contradicting opinions) and then display their votes client-side as if it was registered but won’t be saved.

I''d go just by 3 basic clicks / drop downs.... gender, age, state / country.

Yes or no questions are the worst questions

Lmao no

They're very easy to plot on a map! I tried to add flexibility by making it a sliding scale, and adding other options like good/bad, high/low, 0 to 10

Thanks for the suggestion. State/country adds a big chunk of complexity to the code!

I covered my butt saying "or something like it". If some random guy like me can whip up a site like this in 6 weeks' worth of spare time here and there, it should be easy for governments to put something useful together and advertise it better than me

I'm over in Australia but I can't believe what I'm seeing coming out of US. This website was heavily inspired by the Roe v Wade decision - I want to see how many people are actually happy with that outlandish outcome.

Thanks for the detailed feedback!! I'll definitely make some changes based on it.

Vote slider: I'm considering adding a cancel button for the user to remove their vote, but voting multiple times isn't an issue - at the end of a slider movement, the user's anonymous profile is updated (max 1 vote gets counted per user)

Colors: good call, I'll change the color pool to avoid clashing with the map.

Slider scale: that could help a lot. I'll try to put something there and see if it makes things too crowded/info dense.

Demographics: I've got the code ready to go for per-demographic stats! The site started with stats and one map data layer per demographic but that scales badly with the number of questions. I removed both at the same time, but I can easily re-add stats.

Very very very few.

The media pumps up quite a lot the idea that the extreme right is supported by a significant portion of our citizens, when it’s really just the ultra rich and the evangelicals trying to do anything to oppress. And people think it’s more than that because they think that lots of people support it. Truth is very very very few do. But the people in power are on a mission to turn us back hundreds of years and have the royalty and peasants kind of society.

I feel like seeing the results before voting makes all of this data still skewed by social pressure and thus worthless.

I mean if you go for education as well, more power to you :)

Here's why it should be libre

A bit clunky design

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Careful going down this path. GDPR doesn't like personal data to be collected like this.

The premise is fine. I've seen sites like this before. However, if you want to invoke honest discussion and change, there should be a way to invoke nuance into the questions like "Should abortion be allowed?" By having a sliding scale (1-10), you have indications of that but not the information of why it's not a binary decision. Same with gun ownership and other questions - while you say it's a voting site allowing for nuance, there isn't feedback on why it is beyond a Positive-Negative graph where we would start at neutral.

youre just bad at your job.