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.
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.
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.
Hey HNI’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....
Civie is built around a simple bet: that making civic questions anonymous, quick, and recurring lowers the barrier to participation, even if the resulting data isn’t perfectly representative.Each day, you answer 1–3 short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous, and results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those aggregates stick around and remain open for anyone...
I started working on Civie (https://civie.org) 2 months ago, which also focuses on anonymous, low-friction daily civic polling with time-boxed questions and an emphasis on privacy by default. Different implementation choices, but the same core belief: participation should be easy, frequent, and not require turning your identity into the product.
Would love to chat sometime if you're interested in comparing notes and implementation!