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by verdverm 131 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

> 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

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
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

No worries, I appreciate the intention. It definitely feels like we’re getting close to not having any easy indicators whatsoever.
They are now writing their HN launch readmes before any code...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009000

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

Consider me an ATProto Toucher :)
lol, changing that name has been bikeshed a number of times