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Show HN: JuryNow – Get an anonymous instant verdict from 12 real people
After 16 years, I have just launched my game JuryNow. Imagine having a truly diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices. You can ask a moral dilemma, or a fashion dilemma (you can upload 2 images), you can use JuryNow to give you an independent perspective on a family argument, or a workplace problem, or even a trivial thought. You can also ask a mini political poll and receive global verdict in real time.
It’s anonymous, fast (under 3 minutes), and...when there are more than 13 people playing simultaneously, completely AI-free.
How do you pay for this priceless fun? With JuryDuty. While you wait 3 minutes for your verdict, You answer other people’s questions. There is no commentary, just a binary choice.
You can ask things like:
“Do I have a moral duty to go to my brother’s third wedding? We have no parents?”
“Do you feel guilty when you kill mosquitoes?”
"Should I take away my mother's car keys? She is 84 and had two near misses this month."
As a 58F, I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms.
Would love your feedback! It’s totally free, no sign-up needed for a first play.
https://jurynow.app/ https://jurynow.app/
if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence!
- countWSS 1y agoWhat AI? What version/parameters?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1659447091 1y agoFirst congrats on launching, from personal experience that's the hard part. Are there filters or monitoring for the more violent or maleficent types of things that people have a habit of gravitating towards? Depending on the number of people online and the balance, I could easily see groups jumping on and choosing the negative or harmful choice for lolz
- sarah-brussels 1y agoHello there! Thanks so much for trying it! Indeed, there is a filter to weed out any hate speech, self harm content, there is also a feature for jurors to report comments, and there is the User Agreement! But indeed, this was a big worry for me and put me off trying for a long time!
- af3d 1y agoNeat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoThanks SO much for trying! Honestly, interacting with real people who have tried my game after thinking about it non stop for 16 years is truly exciting! Indeed, the AI part is necessary (well I don't want to say evil but...) in order to show off he game as it will be, and after posting it on Reddit last week, it was working like a dream with real live juries answering! My dream jury will be age 16 - 99, from every continent, every profession and culture...because I do believe the more diverse the jury, the better the verdict!
- rixed 1y agoAfter thinking about it non stop for 16 years? This indeed sounds fishy.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoWhy fishy? I had the idea 16 years ago but lacked any type of expertise or finance to create an app. I've been pestering everyone I could think of ever since and the idea developed and I became more desperate and determined (but still lacking expertise and finance). And last year came across a way to make an app with no coding. I had already tested out the concept during lockdown with family & friends on a live anonymous Zoom with the polling so I knew it would work. Made the MVP on Bubble and here it is. So, what's the fishy part - I genuinely want to know so that I can maybe rewrite it so it doesn't look fishy!
- rixed 1y agoSorry, but in this age of post-truth anything that sounds unusual is immediately suspect.
- p_ing 1y agoFor Jury, I would give a "skip question" option. I found one relating to Christianity that I had _no_ idea what the "correct" answer would be based on the two options. I thought clicking "Ask a new question" then going right back into Jury Duty would give me a new question, but I landed on the same one. I think the asker providing the two valid responses is flawed. It doesn't allow the "jury" to draw their own conclusion, or provides leading answers (one about "is it rude" to eat by themselves when they're socially exhausted in a work context -- one is "yes they would be offended", the other "no they won't be" -- well, they certainly may be but it is your right to eat alone, so the answer could have been "they may, but you need to take care of yourself").
- _JoRo 1y ago2nd this. Already getting weirdos posting pictures of two children and asking "this" or "this"...
- SoftTalker 1y agoThis is why we can’t have nice things
- rsyring 1y agoAgreed. There are some questions with answers, neither of which I want to support by selecting. Might also report skip rate to question asker.
- Nevermark 1y agoSkipping unanswerable questions would be good for everyone. Any answer would be misleading. But answer choices should not be qualified by anything, because that systematically creates unanswerable regions. There should be Context and Question, narrowed down any way the questioner wants. Then just “Yes” or “No” without qualification. That is what a jury does. Or: allow answer qualifications, followed by an automatic “None of the above”. Anyone getting a lot of the latter is getting accurate feedback that the choices they posted were too narrow. Without either fix, the basic logic of the utility will often be broken. Maybe both? Allow questions to be yes/no, or n choices with NOTA.
- James_K 1y agoIt just gets stuck on the same question with badly formatted boxes and does nothing if I click either of them.
- panarky 1y agoSame here. And when asking a question, it just keeps telling me to "moderate the question". My question isn't profane or controversial, so I don't understand what I'm being asked to do.
- hagbard_c 1y agoSame here, I got out of that conundrum by cr34t1v3ly f0rm4tt1ng my questions It seems there is an overly active nanny filter somewhere in the chain.
- bb88 1y agoThe big problem is kinda the same as what happens in push polls -- in that they ask misleading or suggestive questions trying to boil the issue down to a good and bad answer. The reality for many of these questions is pretty complex. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but I'm saying forcing users to choose on some topics aren't black and white. It's maybe worthwhile getting information on things like people who aren't knowledgeable, people who don't care or have no preference, or people who don't want to answer because the answers are skewed towards one side.
- exsomet 1y agoI think you’re correct in that lots of things aren’t black and white, but the reverse is also true. Lots of arguments end up being over-litigated when a black and white answer (even if imperfect) will suffice. As with most things like this, you get out what you put in. Ask a biased question, and get a biased answer. At some point, the responsibility has to lie with the user that if they want something like this to be interesting and unbiased, they need to think about ways to use it to accomplish that.
- Balgair 1y agoYeah, so add a lawyer/judge option. Like, someone comes with a problem, great. They suggest 2 options. Lets assume one is super biased. The asker is just fishing for compliments. The jury decides on a third option of 'No, actually, your dilemma is terrible, we need to re-word this' Then you get some people to recraft answers for it. One person gets to craft one answer, another the other answer. Then a third person to adjudicate that both are acceptable. Then it goes to the jury. Annnnnnd like the game 'Werewolf', we're expanding this to have all kinds of fun little jobs. Because of course we're going to need a bailiff, and a court reporter, and a stenographer, etc. For getting this off the ground, yeah, there needs to be a 'send this back' button. But once it does get going, then more fun little jobs will be good to have as updates to keep people interested.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago[dead]
- kylecazar 1y agoThe first question I received had two options that were essentially the same decision worded differently.
- krisoft 1y agoI love the concept. One tiny recommendation: on my phone the page both for voting and to see the voting result requires me to scroll. When content wise it could very easily fit within a single screen what is being displayed. That is mostly a problem with the results page where i wanted to make a screenshot to show it off to my friends but couldn’t.
- krisoft 1y agoAlso, i see repeated questions? As in i see one question. I vote, the “bar” moves forward, but i see the same question, so i vote again and the same happens. So whoever was picking up skateboarding again in their 30s, but just suffered a hip injury after a fall. I voted that it is time for you to give up like four times. (Which i stand by as an opinion, but perhaps I shouldn’t be so overrepresented in your jury?)
- sarah-brussels 1y agoso sorry about that! there was a bug 3 months ago (when i was just testing it with family and friends) when that happened, and one random question would repeat! And it's just come back tongiht!! (just as I post on hacker news!) i think it's fixed now! And thank you again!
- zargon 1y agoIt's still happening.
- feraldidactic 1y agoAnd still happening
- sarah-brussels 1y agoThanks for that - my post on HN induced a massive spike creating a few unexpected bugs (despite testing it for scalability for nearly 4 months) . Working on it!
- mbil 1y agoNice idea! I think it would be useful if the jury members could provide context on their decision as well as see the other jurors’ responses.
- seb1204 1y agoCongratulations on the launch. I had two huge yes/no boxes that I thought where missing an image. So I reloaded and lost my question.
- redeux 1y agoI would definitely like a skip question button for jury duty. I also think it’s allowing me to vote multiple times on a single question, potentially when the queue is empty.
- tdrz 1y agoCongrats on the launch! Very nice idea! Looking forward when more people are playing so I get answers from real people. While I was waiting, I had to answer the same question multiple times. Is this by design?
- titaphraz 1y agoBrilliant idea. To make it more accurate: - Don't force people to participate in jury duty when waiting for jury answer. Many of them will just click random answers. - Provide "I don't know/Skip" as an answer. Otherwise the options are "Pick a random" and "Logout" - Allow jury to write text feedback or at least give them a button saying "All provided answers are wrong / NA / Fallacy / ... " - "your verdict is simulated by AI" if there aren't enough people logged in. Don't do that. I have no interested in that answer.
- konaraddi 1y agoCool idea and execution! The use of AI unless there are sufficient humans is a clever way to beat the chicken and egg problem
- sarah-brussels 1y agoThank you so much Konaraddi!
- jtchang 1y agoI love it. Could definitely see more features where you can see the results of the jury questions.
- lllars 1y ago^ this. It gets boring pretty fast being a juror, but it would be a lot more compelling if you could see the verdict.
- Retr0id 1y agoIt would be nice to be able to see the final results of questions I voted on
- LightHugger 1y agoI asked a question that was 4-0, then suddenly 8 votes came in at once that made the score 4-8, i wonder if that was a UI bug or if the 8 votes were the AI kicking in and they all disagreed with the human answer...
- hagbard_c 1y agoI suspect that was the same user clicking on the same answer several times because he was presented the same question over and over again like I've been getting the same question over and over and over (and over) again. And over. There seems to be something amiss in the question pipeline.
- mcherm 1y agoI'm using Firefox on Android. For me, it showed a question and two answers, but all attempts to select an answer failed.
- anonym29 1y agoSame, Firefox on Debian.
- drekipus 1y agoSame, chrome on Android as well
- xivzgrev 1y agoI'm using Chrome on macbook and had same experience
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoMe too using chrome.
- pclark 1y agoSame on iPhone Safari
- jmpavlec 1y agoSimilar experience on Chrome (Android). Just sits there after making a choice. Is it overloaded?
- androng 1y agosame, there are some runtime errors and its the same in incognito https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O-4X56LtufRU6dPWHdwgQfLGD49-NChC/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O-4X56LtufRU6dPWHdwgQfLGD49...
- delichon 1y agoLook, this is good entertainment, you should own up to that and enough with the noble purpose stuff: > I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms. You don't collect demographics, and couldn't verify them anyway, so this game doesn't give insight into those dynamics. And the result is not more objective than a social media consensus. That doesn't mean it isn't fun and even maybe useful in collecting one's thoughts, so go with that.
- jowea 1y agoYeah this sounds like making a webgame out of /r/AITA
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- speef 1y agoAlways (3/3 times, anyway) hangs when it's time to return results. Sometimes hangs during jury questions. Seems like a fun idea, if it worked at all?
- speef 1y agoAlways (3/3 times, anyway) hangs when it's time to return results. Sometimes (1/4 runs) hangs during jury questions. Brave on Android. Seems like a fun idea, if it worked.
- satisfice 1y agoThe premise of this app is undermined by the oversimplified implementation. Truly diverse panel? You have no idea what the diversity is. Far removed from your peer group? You have no idea. "Just a verdict"? Jury duty is not a duty to pronounce judgement. It's a duty deliberate on evidence. There's no evidence, here, and no deliberation. This is no celebration of collective human intelligence. This is silly and cynical.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoDid you try the game?
- grapesodaaaaa 1y agoI asked “ Toddlers should be allowed to be licensed to operate a motor vehicle.” with yes/no answers. It errors out with “ Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it.”
- mulmen 1y agoMaybe because it relates to children? This is a website that accepts input from the public. I rephrased the question as: > Should driving licenses be available regardless of age? > A: Yes, anyone who can pass the test can drive. > B: No, only adults who pass a test should drive. Option B won 10-2.
- grapesodaaaaa 1y agoYeah, I think you’re right. I don’t think anyone has figured out how to moderate AI well, so many of them seem overly-zealous at this point.
- xivzgrev 1y agoFun idea, grabbed my attention right away. As a follow up, I'd guide people on asking questions. More context = better answers. For example, I joined a jury. The question was "Should I go to Belarus?" That's so vague, it doesn't even feel helpful for me to answer. I would much rather the question have said something like "I've always wanted to go to Belarus, but my rent is also due in a week. I only have enough money for one. Where should I spend my money?" That at least gives me something to work with and weigh in on.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoLike with Reddit, an upvote system or moderation queue can (should?) be added to minimize spam. Questions like that are better asked a magic 8-ball.
- lesser-shadow 1y agoYawn, I can't get past the filter. Boring. Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it Apparently "Furry" is enough to set it off.
- VoidWhisperer 1y agoIt appears to have either been hugged to death or something broke on the backend - jury duty now just returns the same question about whether or not it is ethical for a startup to sell an ai as a physiologist.
- juped 1y agoDo your jury duty, stop demanding a "skip" button. Think for half a second about what the consequences of that would be.
- rsp1984 1y agoI don't know. All of this smells fishy. Clearly noone has worked 16 years on this. The whole description is odd. Made by a new HN account. The thing barely works. Sometimes you get stuck in the same question loop. Sometimes buttons are huge. Is it possible that this is some form of clickjacking site?
- rafram 1y agoClickjacking hasn’t been a real issue for years. And if it were happening, you’d be able to see it in your web browser’s developer tools.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoMay be it was 16 years to learn programming to the level of making this. 16 years at 58 could mean OP started at age 42 as a career pivot
- sarah-brussels 1y agoFristly, a big thank you for trying out JuryNow and for your feedback! It's very valuable to me! I can promise you it was 16 years since I had the idea. I wasn't working on the app itself for 16 years, but I was working on the idea, the way the game would function and HOW to get an app with no budget (and no tech/coding skillset). indeed, the app has been in test mode for 4 months, testing it with a modest number of friends and family during timed trials. But the scalability was in place for larger numbers. Saturday was a big test, and tbh there were a heavy number of trolls posting hate speech etc which I was prepared for, but not in that quantity! So I just wanted to point out that JuryNow has been worked on for 16 years!
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago>> if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence! Congratulations for a great idea and a fun game, but AFAICT there is no way to stop participants from plugging in an LLM to your site and having the LLM read questions and make decisions. For example, someone might do this to cheat their jury duty and get decisions from others without having to personally invest time and effort. I don't know what you can do about this. Do you have any ideas?
- 0x53 1y agoCool idea. Not sure exactly, but when it went to the jury duty section I just got the same question a bunch of times.
- primitivesuave 1y agoI actually saw this in your previous HN post and tried it out - it's a great improvement to replace the email/password with a captcha, since I anyways filled out a fake email and I'm sure most people would do the same. Super cool concept, congratulations on launching it!
- sarah-brussels 1y agothank you very much!
- technothrasher 1y agoIsn't this what the Internet Oracle is for? It's been giving me rock solid answer to my most troubling questions for over 30 years now.
- ConspiracyFact 1y agoIf I report a question, I should skip to the next one. Why do I have to answer what I consider to be a bad or unfair question? If you’re waiting on a response there’s no way to get to the next question besides answering it.
- rsync 1y agoI ran into the same issue. I had no way to answer a particular question (too little information) so I reported it but ... I was still stuck on that question, seemingly forever. I would suggest two improvements: 1) "report question" workflow should have a text input where the reporter describes why they are reporting the question. 2) "report question" should proceed to the next question.
- bagels 1y agoIt's really unsatisfying as a 'juror' to not see the 'verdict'. It's not objective, because the questions are biased. It's really just an (I assume) real-time online opinion poll with a low sample size. After asking a question, I was 'juror' for the same question approximately 10 times in a row.
- normalocity 1y agoInteresting idea. While waiting for my verdict I was asked the same question (and provided the same answer) over and over. Was expecting a bunch of different questions, rather than the same questions, repeated.
- Triphibian 1y agoI always imagined a system like this could be used for a larger community to self-regulate/moderate. Moderating would be a requirement of membership -- sort of like mandatory military service. So everyone is invested in creating a good community and everyone sees what it is like to be a mod. Maybe it is a naive idea and I am sure it isn't original. Curious to see who has experimented with it before. I bet in RL communes/utopias have attempted something like this.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoit actually is original! I have been working on it for 16 years!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- O1111OOO 1y agoInteresting, fun. Suggestion: I really miss not seeing the results. After answering several questions, I really wanted to see what the final jury decision was. I saw a question from a father asking about leaving his assets to his children. I would want to know what the other 11 random people selected (for various reasons). Without this feature, I think I might start to lose interest because it'll start to feel like I'm clicking into the empty, voiceless void.
- rovr138 1y agoFeels like a test you can't ace or fail. If we don't care, no reason to not pick the first option to get to your answers.
- Larrikin 1y agoIf I'm logged in I should be able to see the final results of anything I voted for as well as the ability to remove a question result from my account. If I'm not logged in I should be able to get a unique identifier that let's me go back to a question and see the results.
- sudahtigabulan 1y ago> diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices If the userbase becomes equally-ish distributed around the world, for many questions, this wouldn't be very useful. Especially when you only get a yes/no answer. People can give you the same answer for opposite reasons. Should I invite 400 people to my wedding? 12xNo 1 from countries where this is too many, 11 from countries where this is too few. (and it depends on who is up, timezones and all) You were hoping for a No, because you can't afford 400 guests, and now you think the world agrees with you. Wrong. With a well-crafted question, this can be mitigated. But I doubt the average user will be willing to put the effort.
- nujabe 1y agoBingo. Further, there are some questions which I don’t the opinions of people from particular countries. If I want opinions to a some moral dilemma, I would probably be inclined to go against the verdict if all or most of the jurors happened to come from Israeli’s.
- feraldidactic 1y agoWould love to be able to offer a nuanced answer, you could still give the questioner 12 answers from people who accepted/responded to framing. I’d also like to see such responses. I’d also like to skip. I’d also like to see my past questions and results, and results for at least questions I recently responded to.
- daniel_iversen 1y agoI did a few and would almost not want to respond with boolean answers unless I could provide some commentary (which the recipient could choose to read or not).
- thayne 1y agoTo be fair, from what I understand, in the US judicial system at least, a jury can't provide commentary. Or ask questions. Whether or not that is a good system is another question.
- parl_match 1y agoI feel like there needs to be a third option, which might be "not a good question" or "false dichotomy" or "low quality" for example, i got "Q: Is Luigi Mangione guilty of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare?" Well yes, he shot the guy on camera. Due process and all of that, he's probably guilty. It's like asking is the sky blue. What's the point? That's a low quality question. Did you mean "is jury nullification a good choice" or "is what he did morally right"? Also got asked if I ever had a physical fight with a sibling. Well, I don't have one, so no. Perhaps not what the question was intending.
- omershapira 1y agoThis is peak 2008 internet, and I love it deeply. Thank you.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoThank you Omer! I'm not exactly sure what peak 2008 internet is though!
- dalemhurley 1y agoNeeds the ability to skip questions. For example there is a question is Michael Is natty? I have no idea who that is or want is meant by natty.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoFor the curious, natty means they are bodybuilding without steroids. "Natural"
- tantalor 1y agoThis is not a "game"
- casey2 1y ago7-5 JuryNow is banned.
- kelnos 1y agoThis is really cool! I get why you decided not to include commentary, but I think in some cases it would be useful. For example, if I have a moral dilemma, I might be interested in the moral framework used by each juror; if a juror makes a judgment based on a moral framework I disagree with (or, worse, find reprehensible), I might discard some responses and come up with a different verdict. But it would take a lot more time for a juror to write down a rationale than just picking from two options, so that would make JuryDuty more onerous, and it would take longer than 3 minutes for people to get their responses. I tried JuryDuty and the first question was just "Israel or Palestine?" And... ooof... there is no way to boil that down to a binary decision. I am frankly not interested in choosing either one over the other without any ability to provide commentary or nuance.
- fyrn_ 1y agoEasy to fatfinger report on phone with no way to take back or confirm, and it does not even skip the question
- returnInfinity 1y agoMake it an iphone and android app. more people will join in.
- sarah-brussels 1y agoI would love to! It's the next step fingers crossed!
- FabHK 1y agoI got the same choice presented several times in a row.
- steventhedev 1y agoWhy not juries of 13 people? That way you never have a clean tie?
- sarah-brussels 1y agoA clean tie can also be super helpful! If you are say...choosing between two ties, and you get a 6/6 verdict you know they are equally good (or bad!) But thank you for commenting and reading my post...(not sure if you tried or not, but thank you if you did!) I'm sentimentally attached to 12, but like other things on JuryNow, I've learned to let go these past weeks! I wanted there to be no 'skip a question' option, and no chance of doing JuryDuty without a question, but have embraced the overwhelming feedback on both those!!
- vivzkestrel 1y ago"Sorry, we ran into a temporary bug and can't complete your request. We'll fix it as soon as we can; please try again in a bit!" What is this about? running on firefox 137.0.2 (aarch64) on Apple M1 Sequoia 15.4.1
- earnestinger 1y agoUnsolicited feedback: I felt that some questions (what do you think of new Indian government) require “I have no idea about the topic”, and some (do I have moral duty to visit family member in prison) require “much more nuance nuance exist here”
- saaaaaam 1y agoI just asked a question: the questions I had to answer while waiting were all blank.
- egorfine 1y ago"Neutral" is truly a required option. I have played around a bit and ALL of the questions I've got were undecidable. Like, same shoes in two pics and "which one is better".
- bennydog224 1y agoPretty neat, it’s super slow though when selecting an answer. I exited out of frustration. I like the loading bar though.
- notepad0x90 1y agoVoire Dire is what makes jury trials legitimate, but I do like the idea. It would be neat if there was a way to challenge potential jurors like that.
- SuperV1234 1y agoSorry, but I stuggle to see the point or the fun in this. Having strangers pick a binary choice with zero explanation or chance to provide context doesn't sound useful nor fun for neither the questioner nor the "jury". You also have no way of ensuring diversity and goodwill of the people answering. It seems like jumping on the trend of oversimplification for the sake of it. Do we really need to turn forums/Reddit intova Tinder-like yes/no experience?
- nagonago 1y agoI found that the overzealous AI moderation made it impossible to ask anything remotely interesting, such as the classic dilemma: Would rather eat poo that tastes exactly like chocolate, or poo that tastes exactly like poo?