14 ms·

Polis – Large Scale Discussions

92 points by manx 5y ago

eterps 5y ago
This is really interesting technology for people to find 'common ground' in polarized discussions. I really wish more research would be done in this direction.
BeefySwain 5y ago
I thought this looked really cool, but couldn't find a way to browse existing discussions/polls, so I created one: Topic: ZFS in Mainline https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme
- manx 5y ago
  Here is a big one from Taiwan: https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/report/r77xrzjr7nnf6872eiddp/ https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/report/r77xrzjr7nnf6872eiddp/ And an interesting article about how they're using it: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...
  - colinmegill 5y ago
    This is a solid article and entry point. A chapter of Carl Miller's Death of the Gods is one of the better narrative deep dives: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gods-Global-Power-Grab/dp/1785151339 https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gods-Global-Power-Grab/dp/17851... As well as Chris Horton's piece in MIT Tech Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simpl...
  - rytor718 5y ago
    Yeah this should be linked in the top comment because I couldn't really grasp what Polis was even for by going to the link on this topic. This article really does a great job of clearing up its purpose and benefits. Thanks a lot for linking this!
- Rygian 5y ago
  Really confused as to why that page tries to load javascript from facebook.net
  - colinmegill 5y ago
    Old login code, I'm assuming, but it's OSS if you want to check.
rocauc 5y ago
you know, Jared Polis would likely appreciate this.
- colinmegill 5y ago
  He did not.
  - namlem 5y ago
    Did he not like the name?
humanistbot 5y ago
So you upvote and downvote comments, which are presented randomly and by themselves. No support for replies or threading? Seems a step backwards to me.
- colinmegill 5y ago
  Correct. For smaller discussions in the 10s, or potentially 100s of participants, the limitations of randomness and no direct replies are unnecessary. They become useful assumptions given thousands and tens of thousands of participants. The comments are sent out semi-randomly: https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/ https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
- wffurr 5y ago
  The lack of replies is a feature, not a bug. Polis is about generating consensus from what I’m reading about it, not about maximizing engagement ala Twitter, FB, et al. From the Polis FAQ: https://compdemocracy.org/faq/ https://compdemocracy.org/faq/ “Structured replies also eliminate the possibility of trolling by replying directly (and thus provoking further response).” This Wired article has more: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... “Using the Internet to pull people together rather than split them apart requires designing an environment very different from the usual online forums for political debate, such as Twitter or Facebook.” “Polis has reengineered many of the features we take for granted on social media. No reply button – hence no trolling. No echo-chambers, replaced by an attitudes map showing you where you are in relation to everyone else. The platform does not highlight the most divisive statements, but gives more visibility to the most consensual ones.”
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    They under estimate trolls. "ZFS is over-hyped; FAT-32 is the best filesystem"[1] [1] https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme
    - wffurr 5y ago
colinmegill 5y ago
Hi everyone! Co-founder here / AMA. We've been working on this for coming up on 10 years. We launched on HN in August of 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974 Brief technical description: 1. produce a matrix of C comments (submitted by participants) * V votes (in 1, 0, -1 form for agree, disagree, pass). 2. Run dimensionality reduction (PCA) and clustering (K-means). 3. Find out which comments best differentiate clusters, show those to everyone https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/ https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/ 4. Identify comments in which the majority of every cluster is voting the same, way, show those to everyone: https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/ https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/ For more, we've recently published a paper describing the underlying methods: https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147 https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147 The 501c3 works around the world (USAID, UNDP, cities, countries) to help advance the usage of the method in deliberative democratic settings. Multiple cities (such as Amsterdam) now have their own deployments. We'd love to hear from you! If interested in the project or volunteering, please reach out to: hello@compdemocracy.org
- kodah 5y ago
  Does agree/disagree/pass really reflect what people think even in short form? A lot of voting may occur on a particularly emotional point, even though a voter may disagree with the rest of a statement. I've seen this on Reddit and here, and it's always made me wonder how we can actually capture the net of people's sentiments accurately.
  - patcon 5y ago
    This is a great question. I've been using Polis for maybe 5 years. The "pass" is a catch-all for many things[1], including "rejecting a premise". It's non-obvious in the current interface, but there's room for coaching/learning how to engage with "complex/mixed" statements. For example, statements you encounter that conflict with your own emotional or factual sensibilities, which you're reluctant to respond to in a simple way (with agree/disagree). In this case, users can just "pass" on that statement, and immediately go below and submit a new "corrected" statement, or alternatively divide that one statement into a few separate ones, that can be reacted to more authentically. That way, you're not forced to weigh in on things you find to be leading statements or overly simplistic. And the pool of statements for everyone becomes ever-more-nuanced through these sorts of interactions, and the map of the sentimental landscape becomes more high-resolution :) [1]: https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/discussions/774 https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/discussions/774
patcon 5y ago
If anyone is interested in a visual walk-through of Polis' emergent dynamics, using a live example discussion from the UK, a few of us fans of the tool created a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_9Pz9AbcG2z&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul... (we'd intended to make more, but life got busy) EDIT: There's an unofficial Polis User Group in a Discord channel. We used to run weekly open calls to help people learn, but for now we just have the Discord. Details: https://link.g0v.network/pug https://link.g0v.network/pug
bijant 5y ago
In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended contracting an agency which had experience with Polis as many of the core developers worked there. The NGO did just that, and paid a huge sum for the deployment. The first discussion resulted in a total overload of their servers. The NGOs marketing spent for this project was completely wasted and its reputation tarnished. I was brought in in the aftermath to communicate with the Agency and to scale the deployment. They were unable to scale even to 100s of simultaneous users. We tried to deploy it on our own, only to find out, that the public source code on github did not match the one deployed by the agency. The OpenSource Version on GitHub lagged the version the agency deployed by about a year. Some files critical to deployment were completely missing from the public release. Furthermore the Code was a complete mess. Apparently they never had a successful deployment. The fact that 3 years later in this very thread people are still pointing out that it was used years ago in Taiwan (which was the PoC that convinced the execs at my NGO in 2018) is a testament to that. If you look at their GitHub (which they don’t promote a lot on their website) they explicitly say: „ If you'd like to set up your own deployment of Polis, we encourage your to reach out to us for support. We look forward to working together“ This is the real purpose of their project, they try to get consulting gigs for themselves and extract a maximum of money out of unsuspecting NGOs and Govermental Orgs. They have sweet talking sales people but are unable to deliver on their promises. Never Again!
- colinmegill 5y ago
  Feel free to DM me on twitter if you care to elaborate and want to discuss, this is strange and I'm not sure what you're referring to. The reason we're a registered 501c3 is that the overwhelming majority of the consulting services we provide around the world are done pro bono or at a loss. I'm not sure what provider you're referring to.
  - bijant 5y ago
    The question is why your consulting services are necessary in the first place. Most Open Source Projects I know can be set up by anyone who is competent in the underlying technology. You explicitly warn people that they will be unable to set it up on their own and that they will need your services. You had years to simplify deployment and haven’t done so. Your Github is still lagging the version that you’re privately deploying. Can You point to logs of any recent deployment that scaled to 100s or 1000s of simultaneous users ? Somewhere else in this thread you claim that OSS software has a competitive advantage in the EU. Is this the reason you pretend that your software is OSS while in practice it is not ?
stanislavb 5y ago
The homepage is https://pol.is/home https://pol.is/home (shared for tracking purposes, so that we can know the alternatives to Polis).
- colinmegill 5y ago
  OSS repo (AGPLv3): https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis Main hosted instance of the OSS tech: https://pol.is https://pol.is && https://twitter.com/usepolis https://twitter.com/usepolis 501c3 supporting the tech & implementation: The Computational Democracy Project https://compdemocracy.org/about https://compdemocracy.org/about && https://twitter.com/compdem https://twitter.com/compdem
  - stanislavb 5y ago
    thanks

92 points by manx 5y ago

This is really interesting technology for people to find 'common ground' in polarized discussions. I really wish more research would be done in this direction.

BeefySwain 5y ago

I thought this looked really cool, but couldn't find a way to browse existing discussions/polls, so I created one: Topic: ZFS in Mainline https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme

manx 5y ago
Here is a big one from Taiwan: https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/report/r77xrzjr7nnf6872eiddp/ https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/report/r77xrzjr7nnf6872eiddp/ And an interesting article about how they're using it: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...
- colinmegill 5y ago
  This is a solid article and entry point. A chapter of Carl Miller's Death of the Gods is one of the better narrative deep dives: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gods-Global-Power-Grab/dp/1785151339 https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gods-Global-Power-Grab/dp/17851... As well as Chris Horton's piece in MIT Tech Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simpl...
- rytor718 5y ago
  Yeah this should be linked in the top comment because I couldn't really grasp what Polis was even for by going to the link on this topic. This article really does a great job of clearing up its purpose and benefits. Thanks a lot for linking this!
Rygian 5y ago
Really confused as to why that page tries to load javascript from facebook.net
- colinmegill 5y ago
  Old login code, I'm assuming, but it's OSS if you want to check.

rocauc 5y ago

you know, Jared Polis would likely appreciate this.

colinmegill 5y ago
He did not.
- namlem 5y ago
  Did he not like the name?

humanistbot 5y ago

So you upvote and downvote comments, which are presented randomly and by themselves. No support for replies or threading? Seems a step backwards to me.

colinmegill 5y ago
Correct. For smaller discussions in the 10s, or potentially 100s of participants, the limitations of randomness and no direct replies are unnecessary. They become useful assumptions given thousands and tens of thousands of participants. The comments are sent out semi-randomly: https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/ https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
wffurr 5y ago
The lack of replies is a feature, not a bug. Polis is about generating consensus from what I’m reading about it, not about maximizing engagement ala Twitter, FB, et al. From the Polis FAQ: https://compdemocracy.org/faq/ https://compdemocracy.org/faq/ “Structured replies also eliminate the possibility of trolling by replying directly (and thus provoking further response).” This Wired article has more: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... “Using the Internet to pull people together rather than split them apart requires designing an environment very different from the usual online forums for political debate, such as Twitter or Facebook.” “Polis has reengineered many of the features we take for granted on social media. No reply button – hence no trolling. No echo-chambers, replaced by an attitudes map showing you where you are in relation to everyone else. The platform does not highlight the most divisive statements, but gives more visibility to the most consensual ones.”
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  They under estimate trolls. "ZFS is over-hyped; FAT-32 is the best filesystem"[1] [1] https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme
  - wffurr 5y ago

colinmegill 5y ago

Hi everyone! Co-founder here / AMA. We've been working on this for coming up on 10 years. We launched on HN in August of 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974 Brief technical description: 1. produce a matrix of C comments (submitted by participants) * V votes (in 1, 0, -1 form for agree, disagree, pass). 2. Run dimensionality reduction (PCA) and clustering (K-means). 3. Find out which comments best differentiate clusters, show those to everyone https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/ https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/ 4. Identify comments in which the majority of every cluster is voting the same, way, show those to everyone: https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/ https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/ For more, we've recently published a paper describing the underlying methods: https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147 https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147 The 501c3 works around the world (USAID, UNDP, cities, countries) to help advance the usage of the method in deliberative democratic settings. Multiple cities (such as Amsterdam) now have their own deployments. We'd love to hear from you! If interested in the project or volunteering, please reach out to: hello@compdemocracy.org

kodah 5y ago
Does agree/disagree/pass really reflect what people think even in short form? A lot of voting may occur on a particularly emotional point, even though a voter may disagree with the rest of a statement. I've seen this on Reddit and here, and it's always made me wonder how we can actually capture the net of people's sentiments accurately.
- patcon 5y ago
  This is a great question. I've been using Polis for maybe 5 years. The "pass" is a catch-all for many things[1], including "rejecting a premise". It's non-obvious in the current interface, but there's room for coaching/learning how to engage with "complex/mixed" statements. For example, statements you encounter that conflict with your own emotional or factual sensibilities, which you're reluctant to respond to in a simple way (with agree/disagree). In this case, users can just "pass" on that statement, and immediately go below and submit a new "corrected" statement, or alternatively divide that one statement into a few separate ones, that can be reacted to more authentically. That way, you're not forced to weigh in on things you find to be leading statements or overly simplistic. And the pool of statements for everyone becomes ever-more-nuanced through these sorts of interactions, and the map of the sentimental landscape becomes more high-resolution :) [1]: https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/discussions/774 https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/discussions/774

patcon 5y ago

If anyone is interested in a visual walk-through of Polis' emergent dynamics, using a live example discussion from the UK, a few of us fans of the tool created a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_9Pz9AbcG2z&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul... (we'd intended to make more, but life got busy) EDIT: There's an unofficial Polis User Group in a Discord channel. We used to run weekly open calls to help people learn, but for now we just have the Discord. Details: https://link.g0v.network/pug https://link.g0v.network/pug

bijant 5y ago

In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended contracting an agency which had experience with Polis as many of the core developers worked there. The NGO did just that, and paid a huge sum for the deployment. The first discussion resulted in a total overload of their servers. The NGOs marketing spent for this project was completely wasted and its reputation tarnished. I was brought in in the aftermath to communicate with the Agency and to scale the deployment. They were unable to scale even to 100s of simultaneous users. We tried to deploy it on our own, only to find out, that the public source code on github did not match the one deployed by the agency. The OpenSource Version on GitHub lagged the version the agency deployed by about a year. Some files critical to deployment were completely missing from the public release. Furthermore the Code was a complete mess. Apparently they never had a successful deployment. The fact that 3 years later in this very thread people are still pointing out that it was used years ago in Taiwan (which was the PoC that convinced the execs at my NGO in 2018) is a testament to that. If you look at their GitHub (which they don’t promote a lot on their website) they explicitly say: „ If you'd like to set up your own deployment of Polis, we encourage your to reach out to us for support. We look forward to working together“ This is the real purpose of their project, they try to get consulting gigs for themselves and extract a maximum of money out of unsuspecting NGOs and Govermental Orgs. They have sweet talking sales people but are unable to deliver on their promises. Never Again!

colinmegill 5y ago
Feel free to DM me on twitter if you care to elaborate and want to discuss, this is strange and I'm not sure what you're referring to. The reason we're a registered 501c3 is that the overwhelming majority of the consulting services we provide around the world are done pro bono or at a loss. I'm not sure what provider you're referring to.
- bijant 5y ago
  The question is why your consulting services are necessary in the first place. Most Open Source Projects I know can be set up by anyone who is competent in the underlying technology. You explicitly warn people that they will be unable to set it up on their own and that they will need your services. You had years to simplify deployment and haven’t done so. Your Github is still lagging the version that you’re privately deploying. Can You point to logs of any recent deployment that scaled to 100s or 1000s of simultaneous users ? Somewhere else in this thread you claim that OSS software has a competitive advantage in the EU. Is this the reason you pretend that your software is OSS while in practice it is not ?

stanislavb 5y ago

The homepage is https://pol.is/home https://pol.is/home (shared for tracking purposes, so that we can know the alternatives to Polis).

colinmegill 5y ago
OSS repo (AGPLv3): https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis Main hosted instance of the OSS tech: https://pol.is https://pol.is && https://twitter.com/usepolis https://twitter.com/usepolis 501c3 supporting the tech & implementation: The Computational Democracy Project https://compdemocracy.org/about https://compdemocracy.org/about && https://twitter.com/compdem https://twitter.com/compdem
- stanislavb 5y ago
  thanks