
Show HN: Tripartisan – an echo-resistant political news aggregator - mrbodoia
https://tripartisan.io
======
mrbodoia
Hey everyone! In light of recent discussions about how political news is
propagated, I thought some of you might be interested in a side project I've
been working on.

Tripartisan is a news aggregator (similar to HN, reddit, or voat) focused on
politics. The key difference between Tripartisan and other aggregators is that
it asks users to identify their political stance on signup. Users choose
between three broad categories: left-leaning, right-leaning, and neither. This
makes possible a number of features which don't exist on other aggregation
sites. For example:

1) You can see not just the number of votes a post or comment has received,
but what the partisan distribution of those votes is.

2) You can sort posts by partisan affiliation, or use the "best" sort, which
prioritizes posts that received votes from across the political spectrum.

3) When viewing a user's profile, you can see both the partisan distribution
of the people who upvoted that user, as well as the partisan distribution of
the posts/comments that user upvoted.

I'm hoping that this explicit partitioning of users could help prevent the
echo chamber/hivemind problems suffered by other political news aggregators
like r/politics or voat. At the moment Tripartisan just a prototype, but I'd
be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on it (both the concept and the
implementation).

~~~
jawns
This is a great idea.

One thing you may need to refine, if the site picks up steam, is how you
define the categories. "Left" and "Right" mean different things in different
parts of the world. And "Neither" can mean "Neither left nor right," or
"between left and right," or "I don't know where I fall." Being able to
differentiate between those three things would be helpful.

~~~
mrbodoia
Thank you!

This is a good suggestion, and something that other commenters have mentioned
as well. I was purposefully vague about the category names because I didn't
want them to be too strict. The original implementation had "liberal",
"conservative", and "independent", but I realized that a) those terms are
specifically American, and b) there are a lot of people who are left-wing but
not liberal, or right-wing but not conservative. So I tried to back off and
make the categories broader, but as you point out that leads to some
confusion.

My thinking was that, at least in the US, a large portion of those who are
vocal about politics would be content (perhaps even proud) to label themselves
as either left-leaning or right-leaning. I figured that third category would
be for those who couldn't immediately choose between those two options. So
"Neither" can mean "neither left nor right", "between left and right", or "I
don't know". I should definitely make this clearer on the signup page though,
and I will likely incorporate some quick political orientation questions or
something along those lines.

~~~
humanrebar
Since internationalization is a priority, it's worth noting that 'left' and
'right' don't mean the same thing in Europe and America.

The right in Europe, historically, had a lot to do with conserving a national
identity, often including a monarchy of some sort. The American right was more
interested in conserving a (classically) liberal Constitution and Bill of
Rights.

The rise of Trump has changed American politics some, mostly by providing a
focal point for big government nationalism that is fairly new to America.

To put it another way, there are very distinct camps, and very distinct echo
chambers, even within the Republican party. Some of the most fervent
#nevertrump people are conservatives concerned about abuse of government
power.

------
laretluval
A serious problem with this idea is that people have no incentive to tell the
truth about their political leanings. Everyone has an incentive to identify as
Neither, and thus appear unbiased. It's interesting to think how you might
create incentives for true self-identification here.

~~~
mrbodoia
Yes I agree. The potential for lying about your affiliation is in my opinion
the biggest problem with this concept. I'll have to see how much of a problem
this is in practice, and whether there are ways I could incentivize users to
be truthful.

If it does become a problem, one thing I'm considering is using voting
behavior as a way to try and identify and ban "false-flaggers". So if a user
has classified themselves as left-leaning, but their voting behavior and the
way other users vote on their posts/comments looks a lot like a right-leaning
user, they could be banned or forced to change groups.

~~~
cookiecaper
You can give the user the option to self-identify, and then basically ignore
it and use an internal index for the actual determination based on their
voting patterns, etc. I think that's better than punishing people for "being
open-minded", i.e., identifying as left-leaning but playing devil's advocate
for the right, or finding their political leanings beginning to shift.

------
legostormtroopr
Maybe figure a way to dial down the flair or something. One of the first
things I saw on the front page was "I will ABSOLUTELY punch Nazis".

I'm not a fan of Nazis, but I don't like violence or the people who support it
in cases like this.

~~~
mrbodoia
I think this speaks to a larger question I'll have to answer, namely what is
the threshold for "inappropriate" comments/behavior and how will moderation be
enforced?

I'm personally inclined to be fairly hands-off, since I think that censorship
(particularly when politics is involved) is a slippery slope. But I also agree
that no moderation at all can be a turn-off for many users. I'll have to think
about what kind of user content policy would strike the best balance.

~~~
benologist
The reason HN discussions stay good is because there are strict civility rules
that are proactively enforced.

------
jerkstate
Asking people to self-select a single question is not going to give you much
signal. Why not use an established test like political compass? -
[https://www.politicalcompass.org/test](https://www.politicalcompass.org/test)

~~~
grzm
_Your Morals_ is an interesting alternative. It was set up by, among others,
Jonathan Haidt, probably most commonly known for his book _The Righteous
Mind_.

[http://www.yourmorals.org](http://www.yourmorals.org)

From the "About Us" page
([http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php](http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php)):

 _This website is a collaboration among social psychologists who study
morality and politics. Our goal was to create a site that would be useful and
interesting to users, particularly ethics classes and seminars, and that would
also allow us to test a variety of theories about moral psychology. One of our
main goals is to foster understanding across the political spectrum. Almost
everyone cares about morality, and we want to understand --and to help others
understand -- the many different ways that people care._

~~~
mrbodoia
I'll take a look at this. I thought his book was insightful, hopefully this
quiz will be similarly so.

------
hyperpape
It seems like a nice idea, and I hope it goes well, but I have my doubts. The
premise seems to be that the best content is liked by both sides. The
underlying intuition seems to be that each side has some truth to it.

However, I think it's more accurate to say that on an issue by issue basis,
which side is being awful changes. Liberals are idiots about X, conservatives
are idiots about Y (and sometimes they're both wrong, and sense is only found
outside the mainstream). And it's not guaranteed that each side is right about
50% either.

So if you can get people to read things shared by people on the other side,
that's good. But I think you're creating a new filter that will screen off a
lot of what people actually need to read.

------
andreareina
This is neat. I think that {left, right, neither} is too broad a
categorization, and suffers from the usual problem of self-reporting: most
people are bad at judging themselves, and this is before you factor in the
desire to paint themselves in a better light. An open affiliation could also
make some people reluctant to participate (particularly with point (3) in your
top-level post, seeing the distribution of posts upvoted).

Instead of having users explicitly choose from {left, right, neither} I would
suggest not asking at all, and using analysis to find groups that vote the
same way. You don't even need any labeling, just scores for how much the
article agrees with the user's previous voting pattern and how broad of a
group the article appeals to.

Now that I'm done insisting that the bike shed be painted blue I hope this
takes off -- echo chambers do no-one good.

~~~
mrbodoia
Haha don't worry, I appreciate your input!

I agree that some kind of cluster analysis could be an interesting alternative
to the explicit categorization that the current site uses. I thought that
self-selection would probably be the best way to start, since clustering would
be difficult without a large existing user base, but if the site takes off I'm
definitely going to look into more advanced techniques for identifying
partisan affiliation.

~~~
weq
Hey ive had a side-project in the works for a while now aimed in a very
similiar manner to what you are trying todo here. I wouldnt mind throwing some
ideas your way, as im not sure mine would get off the ground. Can u hit me up
on weq at mooh org and we could chat a little?

~~~
mrbodoia
Sure, I'd love to hear your ideas!

------
swsieber
This is a nice idea. Once it gets large enough though, you're going to half to
infer political leaning from what a person votes for, or else it'll be very
easily abused.

I do think it's great though. I think I'll give it a whirl.

~~~
mrbodoia
Thank you! Yeah the potential for abuse of ideological self-identification is
definitely what I'm most worried about.

I'm hoping that as long as there are enough truthful users, I can build a
classifier based on their voting/commenting behavior and use it to detect
"false-flagging." But for the time being I'll just have to manually moderate
that kind of behavior.

~~~
vectorpush
Perhaps adding a way for users to tag a story as left or right leaning (or
even more descriptive tags like anti-union, pro-life, anti-regulatory etc)
might also provide some insight to your classifiers. How an individual
classifies a story would only need to be visible to that user, but from a UX
perspective it might encourage more honest input into the system that could be
used to ground political viewpoints. You might find that a lot of partisans
mark themselves as neutral, but most partisans won't be able to resist
labeling a story in a manner that fits their partisan perspective.

~~~
mrbodoia
That's a great idea - so great that it's already on my feature list!

Post tags are something that I'm planning on implementing in the near future,
though I'll need to think a little more about the best way to do them. I was
planning to use them as a way of identifying topics only (e.g. abortion,
immigration, taxes), but I like your idea of tagging particular stances as
well.

------
CM30
It's a pretty neat concept for a site so far. Certainly like the idea of
sorting votes by their partisan distribution for all these things.

However, one question remains here:

How do you plan to market this site?

Because at the end of the day, a community site or aggregator lives and dies
based on the amount of people using it. How do you plan to draw in enough
people to keep the community active in the long term? To overcome the whole
'network effect' issue?

~~~
mrbodoia
Haha that's a great question. I also think that for a site like this, it's
important to not only consider how to get enough users, but how to get high-
quality users. So while a Twitter spam campaign might lead to lots of signups,
it might also cause comment quality to plunge and lead to more time spent
moderating.

My short-term plan was to just mention the site on some
subreddits/blogs/discussion forums frequented by the type of people who I
think might enjoy this site. I'm optimistic because my bar for success here is
quite low - I'm not trying to draw major traffic for ad revenue, I'm mostly
just interested in a site where I can read and discuss politics with other
thoughtful people. So I think it would be possible to achieve long-term
stability with only a few dozen regular users.

Of course, a few dozen is a far cry from the current user base! So for now, I
will plug it on a few websites and see where that takes me.

------
thescribe
Would you be willing to provide some examples or definitions for
left/right/neither? I'm having a little bit of analysis paralysis on the
registration page.

Is there an RSS feed I'm missing? This is the exact kind of product I think
could benefit from RSS.

~~~
mrbodoia
Regarding political categories on signup: I can try to provide some examples.
In some sense though, I think that it should be based less on specific stances
(do you support gun control? more taxes or less?) and more on your gut
feeling. So if you don't have a strong feeling of being on either the left or
the right, it's probably safe to select neither.

However, the analysis paralysis you mention was also something that my friends
pointed out when they tried it, so I will try to come up with a way of helping
people choose a "side".

There's no RSS feed at the moment, unfortunately - but I can put that on the
list of features to add!

~~~
lapis_fenrir
> _So if you don 't have a strong feeling of being on either the left or the
> right, it's probably safe to select neither._

I think the issue with this is that a lot of people in the USA who thought of
themselves as firmly "on the right" prior to the events of 2016/2017, will now
be forced to choose "neither" because they are disgusted with the current
administration's impending meltdown, even though they still consider
themselves the opposite of the "left".

Then you have people like me; I'm not a centrist (I don't think), but I have
views peppered across the spectrum. I am pro-choice in reproduction rights, I
am firmly and proudly pro-2nd Amendment, I believe strongly in LGBT equality,
religious freedom for all religions (even the ones that give me the shivers),
I feel there should be an easier but at the same time more secure path to
citizenship for undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants alike.

I believe in small, efficient, non-intrusive government that serves all the
people, not just select groups and ideologies. I am vehemently against
government surveillance of its own citizens for any reason. I think getting
rid of Obamacare is stupid; improve it, don't scrap it. I think we should
reduce our military presence in countries that don't want us policing them,
yet stand ready to defend countries that truly need our help when they are
attacked by their enemies. I believe the 1st Amendment is vital to the
continued freedom of our nation, and I despise our current president for
attempting to chill free speech and free press.

I believe if you're going to give tax breaks to small businesses (which I
think is a good thing to do), you need to also raise the minimum wage so some
of those savings can go towards improving the quality of life for employees of
those businesses.

So what am I? I'm "right" on a few issues, "left" on others, and somewhere
else entirely on yet other issues. I voted Libertarian again this term because
it's the closest to my own values, yet I don't agree with everything
Libertarian either.

In short, I think you need a few more options than just Left, Right, and
Neither.

~~~
laretluval
What's wrong with selecting neither? You seem like a pretty straightforward
Neither to me.

If there are too many options, then the low-probability tags will proliferate,
and people will tune them out as noise.

~~~
mrbodoia
Yes, this was my intention with the three categories. I was hoping to find the
right balance between too few categories (can't distinguish between
ideological opposites) and too many categories (no meaningful signal from each
category).

