Show HN: Tripartisan – an echo-resistant political news aggregator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tripartisan – an echo-resistant political news aggregator

tripartisan.io

42 pointsmrbodoia46 comments

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).

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.

Also, OP could add an OCEAN score or similar using broad questions to get a sense of where a user is coming from. As soon as a site gets big enough for abuse, it seems simple voting has always broken down quickly.

This is a good idea. In fact, it might be interesting to include answers to these questions as part of a user's profile. So if you're curious about the particular political stance of a fellow user, you could look at their profile and see their answers to a handful of political index questions.

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.

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.

I identify with conservative economic policies but liberal social policies. My views around a whole bunch of topics have changed over time. What option should I select when I sign up?

If I were you, I would select "Neither". My intention was to make the "Neither" category a catch-all for those who don't strongly identify with either the left or the right. However, as other commentators have noted this isn't obvious, and I'm going to rework the signup page to make it easier to choose a category.

A nice feature would be to add a personal "bubble index", based on how much time users spend reading articles from "the other side". Some warning, "hey you live in a bubble, try reading this even if you disagree".

Also it would be nice to be able to rank articles by "least partisan".

Granted, I think the market for true nonpartisanship is pretty small. Kinda like health foods, where basically you just repackage sugary stuff with pictures of mountains on the box; with news you just have to convince the public that your extremely partisan corp is the balanced one.

My intention was that the "best" sort would be equivalent to "least partisan". Under this ordering, posts which have strong support from all three user groups are ranked highest (specifically, it's ordered by log(left_votes) + log(right_votes) + log(other_votes)). But perhaps I should change the name from "best" to something that better conveys the lack of partisanship.

I like the idea of a bubble index. So maybe when you login, the landing page shows you the partisan distribution of the posts you've read/commented on/upvoted, and you can see for yourself how deep your bubble is.

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.

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.

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.

If you're interest in incentivizing honesty, check out these papers on the Bayesian Truth Serum:

https://nel.mit.edu/bayesian-truth-serum/

Actually, more than just no incentive to tell the truth, people have a strong incentive to create false accounts that "identify" and largely vote (on the site) in opposition to their true identity, but selectively upvote high-value propaganda from their actual side. If the site becomes popular, I guarantee this will become a popular abuse.

dragonwriter is spot on, but there is also the other side of the coin. A lot of people identify themselves one way, but actually, in action, lean one way. This is where a lot of the trust in certain media outlets goes out the window. Journalists declare themselves neutral observers but actually lean. There will be people doing the voting manipulation as dragonwriter suggests, but also those that lean without thinking they do.

Plus, what we think we are is a bit problematic these days. The extremes of both sides of the scale take up some of the room we thought we had on the sides. If you are honest with yourself, there is a lot of self examination going on.

Even if you haven't changed, things around you have. Hell, relatives I once supported have sold their integrity and feel justified in it, but I have had my own questioned because of them. Its just a weird world.

As to the site, the default front page was basically all "left" outlets when I looked. If you actually want both sides to compare, then you probably need to look at source as much as people.

Looking back at past threads, dragonwriter and myself don't agree often, so take it for what its worth.

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.

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.

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

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

Political compass is sort of like MBTI; it's been around for a while and is, in that sense, established, but has no real validity. (It's very similar to, and likely has a similar kind of partisan motivation—though for different parties in a different country—as, the US Libertarian Party propaganda "world's smallest political quiz", which uses the same axes.)

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

From the "About Us" page (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.

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

I didn't initially use a political test because I wanted the three categories to be less policy-based (e.g. what's your view on abortion/gun control/immigration) and more focused on people's emotional, "tribal" affiliation. I was hoping that all the people who feel a strong connection with either the left or the right would pick those two, while people who were less sure would feel comfortable picking neither.

However, as many commenters have pointed out, the current design makes it somewhat difficult for people without strong partisan affiliations to choose a side. I'm going to look into some sort of short quiz like the political compass that might make signups easier for people (and also increase the signal, as you mentioned).

> more focused on people's emotional, "tribal" affiliation

Maybe I'm missing something, but that's basically all we have right now. Is the goal to get people to be tribal and emotional in the same place instead of apart?

Also, I have strong affiliations, especially on particular topics, but I can't really identify as right if Trump is "far right" or left if Warren is "far left". It doesn't make me confused about who I am. It's just that people aren't even measuring right or left on the same axes.

That's basically the goal, yeah. I think it's very difficult to prevent people from being tribal and emotional at all, but I think the bigger issue right now is that existing platforms for political discussion encourage people to ensconce themselves in bubbles of like-minded people. I'm hoping to create a platform where people will at least be exposed to representative members of the other tribes, rather than whatever strawmen manage to make it through their bubble.

Your beliefs notwithstanding, I think that there are a fair number of people who do identify as either unambiguously right-leaning or left-leaning, and I intended the blue and red categories on the site to be for them. I was hoping that people like yourself that don't feel comfortable with either label would be comfortable choosing "neither". It's meant to include both people who are confused about their stances, as well as people who are sure but don't identify with either the right or the left.

However, it looks like people didn't interpret the categories the way that I expected them to. I'm going to rework the signup page to try and make the third category more appealing to people like yourself (and like myself!) who have strong views but don't see themselves on either the left or the right.

Maybe I wasn't clear. In particular, people identity themselves and each other as "right" and mean drastically different things. People would inevitably interpret your categories differently because there is no consensus or even discussion about what the words even mean.

I don't identify myself as "independent", so I suspect I won't really be served by a grab bag group (1). To put it another way, I suspect politics is becoming increasingly "long tail", so I suspect that even three categories will have issues.

Though in a long tail world, maybe there's a niche for that even.

(1) https://xkcd.com/774/

I think it'd be cool if instead of left, middle, or right, the user was allowed to drag a dot that approximated their leanings onto the graph that these fancier tests usually display. That'd give the user a lot more flexibility and would provide more information about their self-perspective.

The most important thing to remember in all such engagements is that self-reported values are never reliable. People are always subconsciously biased to report themselves as more like what they want to be, and what they want to think of them as. A real evaluation of their place on the political spectrum would need to be compiled from data on their history/expressed opinions.

Though it'd be difficult, an interesting potential use of a site like this is helping people realize that they are more left or right leaning than they previously thought. You'd have to be careful about the messaging since a lot of people would be offended if the computer told them "I know you said you're a lifelong Democrat, but we think you agree with Trump 75% of the time". But if it's done right, this type of tool could open a lot of minds and neutralize the poisonous, vindictive political discourse that people often use to pit groups against one another.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sure, I'd love to hear your ideas!

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.

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.

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.

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.

You might be able to alleviate it with NLP so you can divide articles into categories. I'm not entirely sure how you could use that to avoid the abuse, but it seems like it'd help be able to help.

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?

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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

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).

I would classify you as "neither". However, I acknowledge that this category is likely to be a lot less ideologically homogeneous than the other categories (though as you point out, the right has become less cohesive lately as well).

I think part of the issue here is that "neither" is not a very appealing group name. People like yourself have devoted a lot of thought to each of their various political stances, and I imagine its not very exciting to have all of that nuance summed up by the label "neither". I'm going to try to rethink the best way to name the categories and present them at signup.

However, I don't know that allowing more options would solve the problem. The intention of the three groups is not to put each person in a group with ideologically identical people, but to create a broad partition of the users to try and get a little more signal out of their votes.

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