

How To Build A Political Social Network - kandu
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/24/blueprint-for-a-democracy-transforming-startup/

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cjoh
The article all but ignores the fact that there _are_ political social
networks that exist. Experienced political organizers already know this, which
is why so much effort goes into courting the endorsements of unions like AFT,
NEA, AFSCME and SEIU and churches and their leaders like Billy Graham.

These _ARE_ social networks, and they're WIRED, and have a lot of structure at
the local level where, as O'Neil instructs us, is where all politics is
anyways. Any up-start "political social network" that ignores that existing
infrastructure is like Facebook ignoring colleges.

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lucasdailey
I certainly wasn't advocating ignoring them, I agree with you completely that
all interest groups (which I think is a better definition than calling them
political social networks) should take part, and I'm sure they will.

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BruceIV
It strikes me that one aspect of the "get 100,000 people on the legislature's
front lawn" mode of political speech is that it also proves that each and
every one of those 100,000 people _cares_ enough to spend hours arranging
transport and then standing around outside. Short-circuiting that process by
putting it on a webpage with an upvote button that takes orders of magnitude
less time to click blunts the message by a similar factor.

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kandu
Indeed, the advantage of online political tools is that they reduce
significantly the effort required to contribute.

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BruceIV
That's not always an advantage. I consider one "political social network" I've
seen, the comments section on the political articles the CBC puts up - they're
dreadful, nearly as bad as YouTube, because it makes it ridiculously easy to
sound off anything that comes into your head (mostly terrible puns on parties
and leaders names) and have it be "heard". I doubt anyone who doesn't comment
on CBC articles takes the comments at all seriously.

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kandu
Most developed countries are democracies, and democracy means that governments
should obey the will of the people. The exercise of democracy means
aggregating social information, and this is so easily done now through the
internet. However, the use of internet for exercising democratic rights seems
very limited. Why it is so? Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a
political social network where the opinions they share could have direct
positive impacts on those aspects of their live that depends on government and
legislation?

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gurkendoktor
> Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a political social network

I would guess: Because time spent on Facebook is relaxing, whereas most
internet discussions feel like a drunk fist-fight without winners. (Of course,
that may be the nature of democracy itself.)

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jellicle
I'm not sure what problem is supposed to be solved here. Sharing political
opinions? I can't walk down the street without hearing someone's political
opinions. That's all humans DO, is share political opinions.

The shortage is not of opinions, but attention. Why should I or anyone pay
attention to your site? I can write my political opinions anywhere: Obama
sucks. See? Look how easy that was.

I'm a voter. Why should I use your site? No reason.

I'm a politician. Why should I use your site? No reason.

You need to rethink. Go talk to some actual political people. No one has any
reason to use your site or to give you any money. Most importantly, there's no
virality factor - no one has any reason to try to get their friends to use it.

I just went to your site. It asked me something about a bike lane in Madison
Wisconsin. I don't have the slightest idea what it is talking about and have
never been to Madison Wisconsin. I voted no.

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kandu
I guess that those websites should serve the interests of the voters, not of
the current politicians.

Why should a voter use such a website? Because his/her humble click on a
Support/Oppose button could aggregate with many others' clicks and make a
difference when the number of people expressing an opinion is high enough to
get the attention of the politicians and of the media. The random expression
of an opinion on the street influences just the few listeners that happen to
be arround.

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lucasdailey
And for what it's worth if anyone had any questions or comments I'd love to
talk about them here. <3 HN.

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waterlesscloud
Why do you think our political system is broken? I think it works pretty well,
all things considered.

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lucasdailey
There's a long list, almost every problem in this country and worldwide
ultimately comes down to political failures. We have almost zero long-term
consideration going into political decision making. We have a terrible voting
system that forces citizens to either vote for who they want OR effect the
outcome of the race. This causes the two parties to eternally maintain their
monopoly of political power, they'll continually shift to absorb any upstart
interest groups. Which in turn leads to only two solutions being proposed for
each political issue, each targeted to appeal to their constituency instead of
solving the problem. Each party only needs to be less hated than the other by
50%+1 of the population.

So yeah, I think it's broken, it barely ever worked well.

And in the context of this article, I think we do a ridiculously poor job of
listening to constituents, largely because there isn't a successful near-
universal political social network that forces politicians to listen.

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waterlesscloud
If the people can't even select representative well, why would they be able to
decide issues well?

What would any of these proposals do to increase long term thinking? Making it
easy to express opinions on 10 topics a minute seems virtually certain to
increase short term shallow thinking.

In other words, in what concrete ways would any of this make anything better?

