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Show HN: Choose a Word

chooseaword.com

40 pointsromes30 comments

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?

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

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

anxiety. patience. truth. the three tribes lived in harmony. then, everything changed when the anxiety tribe attacked.

it appears that the purpose is to join a tribe and vote for the worst option (usually "poop"), thus restoring order between the tribes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've given some thought to it, and it is a good suggestion. If not more, the next round will be played like this.

I strongly advise you not to do this. As an internet stranger take that with a grain of salt, but here is my reasoning:

Without vote counts, this experiment will die because there will no longer be any sense of a tribe. There won't be any reason to check back during the day. The chance that you pick the winning word will be very low. So what point is there for the user? To log on every day, pick a word, and then find out tomorrow that their word lost again?

Worse, if word distributions are identical across tribes, then over time the tribes will become indistinguishable from each other because you don't know how your fellow tribe-mates are voting. If you get rid of vote counts you must reduce the number of choices otherwise it's very unlikely for any word to win by a clear margin.

@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) c @ 7aeb0c9c85f0c65bfb0b.js:2

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I will try to fix this soon

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

As of now it is not being used at all

Hmm:

    Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

    Firefox detected a potential security threat
    and did not continue to chooseaword.com.

Ten hours later and it's loading fine. It may have been temporary, you may have fixed it, but it was real while it lasted.

Checking the website from my Android Firefox. NoScript and PrivacyBadger are not showing any dangerous stuff apart the typical Google analytics/tracking (which I always block). I wonder if someone from a desktop with more comprehensive tools can see if there is any sneaky frames that my tools didn't see.

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?

FWIW I'm on Firefox as well and the site loaded just fine.

My "go to" answer for these issues is to run the address in virustotal.com, which will tell you about any blacklisting issues the domain may have.

In this case however, and firefox on my machine, I cannot find any issues.

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

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.

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. )

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

Venus

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