
Show HN: Choose a Word - romes
https://chooseaword.com/
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mellosouls
I feel stupid asking this, but what is the point of this exercise?

Seriously - I don't understand what I have achieved by choosing a word and
being designated a tribe - beyond the literal interpretation of that.

No snark intended, I've returned to the site but there's no about page.

I've chosen a word as per the site name.

Mission accomplished?

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melicerte
I agree with you. A word of explanation from the OP or the author(s) would be
interesting... For now, I’m just intrigued.

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romes
i might make an about page when i get home. the intrigue and the suggestion to
interpretation of the website is part interesting, i believe

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krackers
This is clever in its simplicity. I suggest that the votes on the "choose a
word" page for your tribe be hidden though, to avoid everyone just piling on
the highest vote and encouraging people to look through the list.

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phailhaus
I think that's the core reason why it works, actually. If you don't show the
votes then all three tribes will end up being functionally the same: x people
choosing more or less randomly between n options. The chances that you vote on
the winner is very low, which means that you never feel like part of a tribe.
But when you have vote counts, you can see the kinds of people in your tribe
and each tribe can develop a personality. The rise and fall of a word over the
course of a day is more interesting than voting on a word and then waiting
until tomorrow to see what the most voted word was.

~~~
mellosouls
X people _who 've favoured a particular word_ out of n words in the first
list.

So n (possibly) different base perspectives. And are the secondary word lists
the same in each case?

I agree with the parent comment - the values will bias the decision on next
word, but then I don't understand the point of the exercise yet.

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phailhaus
I'm not saying that the values don't bias decisions, I'm saying that they
_must_ bias decisions for this to be an interesting experiment. Without vote
values there is no sense of a tribe, no reason to check in during the day,
it's just a daily random voting exercise with no purpose.

Once you add vote counts there is an actual narrative that plays out over the
course of a day (as words rise and fall relative to each other), and each
tribe will actually develop a personality independent from the others.

If you're concerned about early votes being disproportionately influential,
then you can use Reddit's approach and hide vote counts until enough people
vote.

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wingi
@firebase/database: FIREBASE WARNING: The Firebase database 'haikus-cfec8' has
reached its peak connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider
upgrading. ([https://haikus-cfec8.firebaseio.com](https://haikus-
cfec8.firebaseio.com)) c @ 7aeb0c9c85f0c65bfb0b.js:2

~~~
romes
I am working on this now, do you think the webpage would lose strength if it
had an ad? I could use it for the server payment

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ASalazarMX
Naive question: would't a local SQLite database be more than enough?

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furyofantares
I hope I remember to come back tomorrow. I could see something like this
becoming my new tab page. I like to have a word or thought of the day and
doing it as a group exercise with one of these “tribes” sounds delightful.

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phailhaus
Update: after dropping vote counts, I'm now seeing words "win" in a tribe with
a comically small percentage of the vote. Don't really see the reason to keep
voting when "relax" wins in the red tribe with only 17 votes out of 600+ tribe
members. Compare that to "kindness" in the yellow tribe which won with 449
votes out of ~1000 when vote counts were enabled.

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Fission
Unfortunately it's easily broken by a bad actor. There's no unique identifier
in its POST request, which allows unlimited upvoting of a particular option.

[https://imgur.com/a/jnwgfRs](https://imgur.com/a/jnwgfRs)

Though maybe this is simply bringing balance to the word choices. I'm very
surprised the top choices were actually reasonable, and not Boaty McBoatface-
type words at all.

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romes
I will try to fix this soon

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Fnoord
(How) is my data or the dataset being used?

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romes
As of now it is not being used at all

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ColinWright
Hmm:

    
    
        Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
    
        Firefox detected a potential security threat
        and did not continue to chooseaword.com.

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romes
Hm, how would I look into that? Does it have a log you could share with me?
And is anyone else getting this kind of warning?

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cellis
Probably a DNS / dnssec / https configuration? And fwiw, doesn't happen to me.

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tptacek
I wonder why people on HN lately keep thinking network problems are caused by
DNSSEC. Nobody uses DNSSEC (certainly this site doesn't). You can almost
always assume DNSSEC isn't the problem.

~~~
cellis
Good to know, thanks! I did once have a domain where DNSSEC was misconfigured
and it broke the site for certain types of queries, e.g. example.com would
resolve on my ATT router but not on my LTE. And I had no idea why, but I ran a
dns checker against it and it said misconfigured DNSSEC. Why don't browsers
tell you when (DNSSEC misconfigured) happens?

( Honestly I _still_ don't know why I wanted DNSSEC, but since dnsimple /
google domains suggested it in their UX, I figured I should do it. )

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quickthrower2
I chose the red word as the colour made it stand out.

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test1004
Venus

