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Congratulations on launching and on the architecture choice and dev insights! With regards to the product, there are several consequences you are about to see

by dzink 6y ago

Congratulations on launching and on the architecture choice and dev insights! With regards to the product, there are several consequences you are about to see and need prepare to mitigate. I worked on something similar and need to rewrite it, thus the learnings. 1. The site looks like a dream come true for political recruiters/promoters. You have a place full of users self-identifying with political labels in great detail and you can reach out to anyone. You will see a ton of spam from companies, parties, surveyors, you name it. You may want to throttle it by limiting number of new people that can be reached by a user in 24 hrs. 2. Scammers or predators could bait people into in-person meetings or worse. All they have to do is mimic the typical profile of their targets. There is no verification of truth in others, but there is a lot of personal exposure of yourself. 3. It was strange to see people’s likes and dislikes as a profile. It gives you a lot to potentially dislike in a person, but nothing really to draw you to them as a person. In a community, the more preferences one lists, the more odds they have of alienating their neighbors, instead of bringing them together. Labels and stereotypes have one thing in common - they pidgeonhole people instead of giving them personality. You have shown you can execute. The above is just feedback on the inherent intended or unintended consequences behind this new funnel for mixing people. Social products can be quite dangerous but also fun. It’s critical to reduce downside risk.

pitherandd 6y ago
This is very good insight and I definitely agree. With regard to your first point, I'll look to add a limit to how many users a person can message per day. I spent some time already and plan to spend a lot more on moderation tools to mitigate the effects of your second point. Ideally fake profiles can be both reported and detected, but as of yet I have not invested too much time into these efforts, other than adding basic reporting features and a moderation page for those with sufficient power. I tried to mitigate your third point by only allowing users to see your total cluster vote as opposed to your individual card votes. As a result, there is a bit of plausible deniability as your vote for each card is somewhat masked by the average. This could be furthered by reducing the cluster count and thereby making each cluster larger and mask more individual card votes.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  > I tried to mitigate your third point by only allowing users to see your total cluster vote as opposed to your individual card votes I find these clusters really strange. For example, this cluster: > War on Drugs, War on Terror, Fossil Fuels, Drone Strikes, Dark Humor, Military, Police Officers And > Yoga, Lower Drinking Age, Gym, Alcohol, TikTok What does Yoga and Gym have to do with lowering drinking age, or with TikTok? Very weird. So if I create a profile and I am positive towards Yoga and Gym then people are going to think that I want to lower the drinking age? And likewise, they are going to think that just because I support having a military force (which I do), that I also support the war on drugs (which I don’t). Would be better to not do clustering at all than to group a whole lot of unrelated stuff together and give the wrong impression I think.
  - pitherandd 6y ago
    So, the clustering situation is a bit of a double-edged sword. Here's the pros and cons I've found: Pros: 1) Allows for instant similarity-searching. I am using the Postgres CUBE data structure to index users' votes and it has a limit of 100 items. So, if I didn't use clusters then there could only be 100 cards maximum, but ideally you would have even less than that because the CUBE can start to slow down when you approach that limit. 2) It's also a bit of a privacy feature as people can only see how you voted along cluster lines, and not how you voted on individual cards. This provides the aforementioned plausible deniability. Cons: 1) Not all clusters are ideal, as you've seen. I spent a lot of time exploring different clustering algorithms and none of them were perfect. Some cards were naturally a part of multiple clusters and others didn't align to any at all. I'm sure a lot of this comes down to card choice, which I definitely could improve. 2) Can be confusing to users as opposed to just listing theirs and others votes on cards. --- If you'd like to help and create better clusters, I'd definitely be open to tweaking them. Most of the required data can be found by navigating to the Cards page. For example, if you go there and click "War on Drugs" and then click "View Correlations", you'll find that "War on Terror" correlates the most with "War on Drugs". This data can then be used to try and create your own clusters. I've found it to be a very tricky puzzle satisfying all the constraints. In the end, for performance reasons, I felt like I had to choose between either having clusters or only 50-75 cards, and I chose clusters. There's probably a better way of doing it, but I was unable to find it at the time.
matt_f 6y ago
Upvoted: People who take time from their day to give positive constructive feedback and encouragement to a total stranger about his/her project are what make this place a good community.

by dzink 6y ago

pitherandd 6y ago

This is very good insight and I definitely agree. With regard to your first point, I'll look to add a limit to how many users a person can message per day. I spent some time already and plan to spend a lot more on moderation tools to mitigate the effects of your second point. Ideally fake profiles can be both reported and detected, but as of yet I have not invested too much time into these efforts, other than adding basic reporting features and a moderation page for those with sufficient power. I tried to mitigate your third point by only allowing users to see your total cluster vote as opposed to your individual card votes. As a result, there is a bit of plausible deniability as your vote for each card is somewhat masked by the average. This could be furthered by reducing the cluster count and thereby making each cluster larger and mask more individual card votes.

codetrotter 6y ago
> I tried to mitigate your third point by only allowing users to see your total cluster vote as opposed to your individual card votes I find these clusters really strange. For example, this cluster: > War on Drugs, War on Terror, Fossil Fuels, Drone Strikes, Dark Humor, Military, Police Officers And > Yoga, Lower Drinking Age, Gym, Alcohol, TikTok What does Yoga and Gym have to do with lowering drinking age, or with TikTok? Very weird. So if I create a profile and I am positive towards Yoga and Gym then people are going to think that I want to lower the drinking age? And likewise, they are going to think that just because I support having a military force (which I do), that I also support the war on drugs (which I don’t). Would be better to not do clustering at all than to group a whole lot of unrelated stuff together and give the wrong impression I think.
- pitherandd 6y ago
  So, the clustering situation is a bit of a double-edged sword. Here's the pros and cons I've found: Pros: 1) Allows for instant similarity-searching. I am using the Postgres CUBE data structure to index users' votes and it has a limit of 100 items. So, if I didn't use clusters then there could only be 100 cards maximum, but ideally you would have even less than that because the CUBE can start to slow down when you approach that limit. 2) It's also a bit of a privacy feature as people can only see how you voted along cluster lines, and not how you voted on individual cards. This provides the aforementioned plausible deniability. Cons: 1) Not all clusters are ideal, as you've seen. I spent a lot of time exploring different clustering algorithms and none of them were perfect. Some cards were naturally a part of multiple clusters and others didn't align to any at all. I'm sure a lot of this comes down to card choice, which I definitely could improve. 2) Can be confusing to users as opposed to just listing theirs and others votes on cards. --- If you'd like to help and create better clusters, I'd definitely be open to tweaking them. Most of the required data can be found by navigating to the Cards page. For example, if you go there and click "War on Drugs" and then click "View Correlations", you'll find that "War on Terror" correlates the most with "War on Drugs". This data can then be used to try and create your own clusters. I've found it to be a very tricky puzzle satisfying all the constraints. In the end, for performance reasons, I felt like I had to choose between either having clusters or only 50-75 cards, and I chose clusters. There's probably a better way of doing it, but I was unable to find it at the time.

matt_f 6y ago

Upvoted: People who take time from their day to give positive constructive feedback and encouragement to a total stranger about his/her project are what make this place a good community.