[keiferski]

I understand the sentiment of this app but personally think it’s the opposite of what will actually solve acrimonious political discussions. In a democracy, opting out just means someone else decides for you.

I would really prefer to see AI tools used to summarize complex events and issues and then present them in a nuanced accessible way. Nearly every single political discussion I see happening nowadays is full of misconceptions, lack of knowledge, or just outright hatred of the opposite side.

Interestingly LLMs are pretty good at summarizing texts, which means they might be quite useful for this purpose. The hardest part I think is making it “cool” enough to actually get attention from the people that are overly-argumentative and from those that would prefer to just opt out. That thin line is the real sociopolitical challenge.

[roenxi]

> In a democracy, opting out just means someone else decides for you.

Someone else decides for you anyway. In any election it is hard to do more than decide what the most important issue is for you then vote for the person who best represents that issue. That means there isn't bandwidth to signal your stance on anything (except, literally, maybe one issue).

It is unusual for me to have an election where one of my top-5 issues is both represented and that the representative has a perspective that I would like to endorse. For the one that involves statistical education, I doubt any of the representatives I can vote for even have the training to understand what I want exactly. And that dynamic could only be replicated for anyone who doesn't choose what their top issues are by outsourcing the entire decision making process to the media.

I can summarise most of the topics in the political discourse without the use of AI - "this is a distraction and nobody is even pointing at a policy document they would like to implement". In fact, an AI to detect if there is a concrete proposal on any given issue would be quite welcome.

[keiferski]

This kind of fatalism is more and more common, and it can be hard to disagree with in a literal sense, but to me it mostly just indicates that democratic mechanisms need reform — and not that we ought to just stop caring and live with someone else deciding and democracy not “working.” Because that leads to some very bad situations, historically speaking.

I do like the idea of a tool that filters political speak from actual concrete proposals and likelihood of it being implemented.

[a9dhalaan]

Until you have reform in the sense of replacing the First-past-the-post voting with a more representative system that allows the survival of more than 2 centrist parties, or have a system where there are meaningful referendums at a meaningful frequency, then where is the value of being "politically informed" on new/current politics?

Democracy in many western nations, at least in the US, is more or less an illusion of choice. Being sucked into the liberal/republican squabbling, drama and even the occasional political issue is nothing more than mere entertainment for the peasant class. For lobbies and corporations, who actually have much more leverage into governance, then yea being politically informed for them is prudent.

[roenxi]

Democracy doesn't need reform, it works great. The real problem is people keep trying to ram tens or hundreds of solutions through a centralised system that can only be held accountable for 1 decision every few years and needs to concentrate on the military. There isn't a democratic way to process large numbers of issues without outsourcing the decision making because people can't think about that many disparate topics.

[drivingmenuts]

Or to put it another way:

There's nothing wrong with democracy. It's the people that are screwed up.

[keiferski]

Well that’s why I wrote democratic mechanisms, not democracy.

[bityard]

Hot takes and arguing with strangers on the Internet is not participating in democracy. It's just a hobby that some people have the spare time/energy for and some do not.

[ksynwa]

I don't think the service aims to solve the problem of political discussions. It is for the type of person who either gets their political content from somewhere else or someone who is socioeconomically comfortable and perceives political discussions as noise.

[keiferski]

It is a tiny tool that pushes people further into echo chambers. Opting out into the “I don’t need to know anything about politics” is itself an echo chamber, usually by well-off people (as you mentioned.)

It would be really great to see people making little tools that go in the opposite direction.

[krapp]

We don't need people to make tools that go in the opposite direction. Politics is everywhere on the internet. No one needs a tool to find political opinions online any more than one needs a tool to find cockroaches in a sewer.

[keiferski]

I don’t think you understood my comment at all, the point of which was to create tools that help people understand each other better.

[krapp]

I don't think that's a problem that can be solved with technology. And sometimes people understand others perfectly well, and their choice to avoid those people isn't the result of ignorance or fear.