You should probably seed some interesting political discussions to get the comments going. I'm surprised it took you 3 years to build this-- it could have been done in a weekend and with a much better UI.
EDIT: Also, the amount you have may not be necessary. It just makes your site look dead when you have 350 pages of legislative bills with no comment activity or voting activity. You would have been better off starting with just a few and building it up from there. Personally, I would have done medical marijuana bills because everyone has something to say about that.
That's exactly what I did. I created bots for every single state. I wanted to scrape as much data as possible so I went for all the data available that every state had. Writing each bot took only a day or two, but running them took much longer. I also did all of this in my spare time on top of a full time job. If I worked on it full time, I probably could have done it in 6 months.
I think your site needs some work, both the design and the chicken and egg participation problem. However obviously there is some value in having scrapers for every state legislature. Maybe you should pivot and become an api provider for this info?
Good point. I will definitely be providing an API at some point, and will also open source everything after some independent code reviews. The design was an afterthought. I spent so long gathering data that that was my main focus. Now that I am done, I can really focus on marketing and design.
Every successful website starts with a focus area and it grows outward. You simply can't target every legislative policy in every state without overwhelming your visitors or pointing out the fact that your website isn't active.
A site like yours, if done properly, could go viral in certain online communities, but not in its current state.
If I was in your shoes, I would pony up a few thousand dollars and get it done right by someone who has some experience building websites that receive traction.
Building a website that has the potential to gain traction requires understanding how and why your users are going to use your site. Sure he can A/B test it himself, but at this rate, he's going to spend another 3 years figuring it out and by then he will have burned out and lost motivation.
People that want to visit a website that lets you vote on legislative policies and then talk about it, would likely be of above average intelligence. The fact that he has a comment system and nothing but a few "I agree" type posts and submitted it to HN for feedback is a clear sign that he doesn't understand the mechanics of building a website that people want to visit.
I'm not sure why everyone these days thinks they can just throw up a website and people will magically appear and start using it-- it's not that easy!