Show HN: Civie. Anonymous civic questions. Open results. No yelling

[gucduck]

Hey HN

I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers to civic participation. Most people don’t show up to town halls. They don’t respond to traditional surveys. And a lot of online political spaces feel loud, adversarial, or exhausting.

So I started wondering what happens if you make participation radically lightweight.

That’s where Civie comes in.

Each day you answer one to three short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous. Results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those responses accumulate into an open dataset anyone can explore.

This isn’t scientific polling, and it’s not pretending to be. The samples are self selected and nuance gets flattened. That’s an intentional tradeoff. The bet is that if participation is fast, anonymous, and recurring, more people might actually show up.

Civie is built around a few core pillars. Lower the barrier to participation. Make it safe to answer honestly. Keep the results transparent and open. And allow signal to emerge both from individual questions and from patterns over time.

I’d really value feedback on the core concept. Does a daily cadence make sense? Is anonymity enough to meaningfully lower friction? Are open aggregate results actually useful, or just interesting? What would make this something you’d return to?

If you’re curious, you can join the beta waitlist at civie.org. I’m onboarding early users in small batches and would love thoughtful testers, skeptics, and critics.

Any level of feedback and discussion welcome. Thanks!

--

A few implementation details

Civie is currently built with Next.js on the frontend and Firebase (Auth + Firestore) on the backend. It’s deployed on Vercel. The data model is intentionally simple: questions are versioned objects, and responses are stored as structured documents tied to a question ID and timestamp.

On anonymity: responses are not publicly tied to user profiles. There are no public accounts, no comment threads, and no way to see how an individual answered. The system stores responses separately from any identifying information, and aggregation happens at the query layer before display. The UI only ever exposes aggregate counts and distributions.

On identity verification: participation can require account creation to limit spam and abuse. Verification status (for example, SMS verification or identity verification via a third-party provider) is stored separately from response data. The system tracks whether a response came from a verified participant, but does not attach identity to the answer itself.

[pibaker]

This thread got only 6 upvotes as I am typing this comment and there are two replies from green accounts, both registered within the past few hours and show zero other activity on this website, both talking in the same positive tenor with exclamation marks. Surely I am not the only one finding this suspicious right?

Anyway, how exactly do you plan on deterring astroturfing and other sorts of public opinion manipulation? Heck, how do you convince us that you are not the one working on an influence campaign yourself?

[gucduck]

Totally fair to question it. I did ask a couple friends to go through the workflow of reading the post, trying the beta, and optionally commenting.

Astroturfing is actually one of the problems I’m trying to solve. Civie has optional identity verification (via Persona), and anonymous responses can be filtered down to verified-only. The idea is to make participation easier while still giving people a way to look at results that are harder to game, with everything aggregated and publicly inspectable.

On the “influence campaign” part, I’m honestly just trying to get feedback during an early beta, not shape anyone’s opinions. And for trust more broadly, you probably shouldn’t just take my word for it. The only real answer is transparency over time. That’s why I’m attempting to build this in public and gather as much feedback as I can.

[gucduck]

And for what it’s worth, I appreciate the skepticism and questions.

[verdverm]

I get the concept, but why is this interesting to HN?

The page has very little about how it works (security / trust / identity), there is nothing about tech stack or open source. These are going to be paramount in any civics platform, b/c transparency and the trust-pocolipse.

[gucduck]

That’s fair feedback. I’ve updated the post to include a section with more implementation details.

It’s currently built with Next.js and Firebase. Responses are stored separately from identity data, there are no public profiles, and only aggregate results are exposed in the UI. Verification is used to increase resistance to bots, but answers are not tied to public identity.

I agree that any civic platform lives or dies on transparency right now. I’m actively considering showing the question schemas and aggregation logic so the mechanics are inspectable rather than opaque.

If you have strong opinions on what absolutely must be open versus what can reasonably remain closed, I’d genuinely value that perspective. This is still early and the landing page is pretty barebones, but the core web app and data model are where most of the effort has gone so far.

[verdverm]

> That’s fair feedback.

This is increasingly looking like the tell tale for Ai bots masquerading as humans. I've heard essentially this phrase as the first in several recent interactions which ended up being bots.

Can you prove your humanity? Bots and agents are not allowed on HN

[gucduck]

Oh that's just part of my vocabulary. lol. Um, my username is gucduck on all socials if that helps? And this is my personal website: gucduck.com

[verdverm]

I've been dealing with clawd spam, and likely being more/overly sensitive to it

it's good vocab and writing to have! I wonder how much longer we will have easy indicators

[gucduck]

No worries, I appreciate the intention. It definitely feels like we’re getting close to not having any easy indicators whatsoever.

[verdverm]

There are people working on similar ideas in the ATmosphere / ATProto, are you tuned into that at all?

[gucduck]

I wasn’t before, but I am now. Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll dig into AT Protocol and see what’s happening there.

[verdverm]

AT has people generally working on the next generation of shared infra for social and much more. Come join us!

https://discord.atprotocol.dev (should work, best entrypoint to the dev community)

I like sharing this one for new devs: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

[gucduck]

Consider me an ATProto Toucher :)

[uhmdoesthiswork]

this is interesting, what was your biggest motivation for building this? had you been thinking of this longer than the recent current events related to civic unrest in the US?

[gucduck]

Appreciate that. I’ve thought about anonymous polling before, but the real push came from doomscrolling earlier this year. IG and TikTok were both feeding me nonstop political US content weeks on end, and I started feeling restless and helpless. Didn’t want to just keep consuming, but wanted to add my voice somehow, so I decided to build something. That urgency is what finally got me moving.

[lanoflight]

I've tried this out and I really like it! It's cool to see different people's opinions in an anonymous format. You're not biased by other people's choices before you answer, and you can skip as well. Honestly if more people used it I think you'd get a very accurate response of how the average person thinks!

[gucduck]

Really appreciate you trying it out.

The answer-before-results flow was intentional to avoid anchoring, and the skip option is there to keep participation low pressure.

On accuracy, I’m a bit cautious. Since it’s self selected, it won’t be statistically representative. The hope is that with enough diverse participation, it can still produce meaningful directional signal.

That tradeoff between accessibility and representativeness is basically the core experiment.

[heytastyfood]

Looks awesome!

[gucduck]

Thank you! If you’re curious, would love to have you on the beta list.