A new social media platform built to unite people

Back in the day, one of the newspapers in Denver would put out a "Best Of..." issue every year. One year, they said the question they get asked most often is why they published curated content for the list instead of taking votes. Their answer was simple -- because when they tried taking votes, every year the best Mexican restaurant was the same: Taco Bell.

I think about this when I see ideas like this. You aren't going to get the best responses. You are going to get the least common denominators. Not what people like the most, but what people dislike the least. The answers that are the least divisive, not most insightful.

And even that assumes that you don't just get infected by botfarms, vocal minorities, or straight-up trolls.

You cannot have democracy without belief in objective truth.

You have described a platform that supports mob rule, not one that supports democracy and not one that supports objective truth.

You sound pretty young, and I certainly remember thinking things like what you wrote. Now that I am older, peace is a less attractive word. Far too often peace means someone not resisting the use of force, rather than peace meaning force not being used. The distinction is subtle but deeply important.

If you want to become a little more politically mature, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder is probably both a person you would agree with from a values perspective and a person who would say you are very wrong.

You sound motivated and like you want to help the world with Tech. In my early 20's I scoffed at the government. Having grown older, I wish I had not been so anti-government. If you want to help the world with tech, you should checkout the USDS and put your skills to use there.

If fairtalk picks up, it will just be a conservative echo-chamber because it describes a conservative belief system. Liberal people would never want to be a part of it because the idea of objective truth, truth without contradiction, is a core liberal belief. If 70% of the people don't believe in global warming, that doesn't matter if there is actually global warming. The majority thinking there is global warming has no bearing on whether there is actually global warming or not.

> Fairtalk is a social platform that lets the majority decide everything.

I hope you understand that this describes "might makes right."

What he's saying: mob rule can also be marketing that's being pushed out by the governments.

Take a look at the Philippines, where the son of the thief of the biggest tax heist in history now reshaped his image into something like "I did it to protect you"... And is now the president.

Statistical truth is not objective truth, and that's why corporates and their lobbyists are in power; because they have the means to change the statistics.

Examples that come to mind are the works of Noam Chomsky, and especially the propaganda machines that Goebbels invented in the second world war, and these mechanics are still used today to propagate the image of the "free cowboy that smokes because it is cool".

> And if we want our leaders/governments to listen to us, all they have to do now is read through the archives on Fairtalk and that'll give them a much better idea of what the majority of us want.

This is not really how it works as far as US politics is concerned. Your best chance to voice your opinion to your Senator or Congress person is direct communications like written letters or phone calls. Show up to their “town hall” meetings if they do those. Digital communication, if you are lucky, will be read by a staffer and promptly trashed. Social media posts? - forget about it.

That's just an example of what Fairtalk can eventually become and will either take decades or will simply never happen. Right now there's a growing frustration in the world because people feel like their voices are not being well represented or heard. This is why people go out to protest in the first place. Whenever someone protests, they'll be considered lucky to have their cardboard sign broadcasted on a popular television channel for only a few seconds. And how can you possibly convey your frustration and the message you want to share in only 3 to 5 words? It's simply impossible and there should be a better solution. We hope to make Fairtalk this new solution by giving everyone a fair chance to speak up instead of always having to release their anger on the streets.

The “scoring” mechanism would perpetuate cultural issues we currently suffer, where people with informed but unpopular opinions are marginalised, and only the most popular opinions and narratives are allowed to be discussed

The argument to that is we simply don't know yet.

There's not a single social platform out there that has the same voting system that we've built so it's a completely new experiment and we simply can't come to any final conclusions yet.

You're right. We can't come to final conclusions yet.

However we can make some predictions. And it's not hard to predict how this will fail.

The root issue is that you've based your app on a number if assumptions, but your assumptions themselves are flawed.

For example you've assumed that the majority of people (as in more than 50%) agree on -anything-. You are assuming that the majority knows best. You're assuming that somehow politicians aren't already working this exact system.

In the real world everything is highly nuanced, and are a result of balances and compromises.

What you are proposing already exists. They're called elections, referendums and so on. Get enough people angry enough about something so they'll vote for you to stop it.

For example Brexit. An objectively stupid proposal, which convinced a majority through lies and false promises. Majority rule in action.

To be sure there are ways to make a difference. Political systems exist at each level. Get involved with your local council. Stand for office. Spend time understanding both sides of a position.

But another social network? It's too early to make a final conclusion, but I can make some pretty solid predictions.

While Fairtalk's focus on politics and world issues is admirable, it may limit its potential impact to a specific group of people who are already passionate about these topics. To create a more sustainable and diverse community, Fairtalk could consider expanding its scope to include a wider range of topics that can connect people across different generations and cultures.

By encouraging conversations that bring together people from different backgrounds and age group, Fairtalk can help to bridge gaps and promote greater understanding and unity.

Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok - are similar on the backend, but what sets them apart are their unique communities of users. So your initial community will also decide the future of Fairtalk.

Here is blunt (but helpful) advice you are wasting your time with the version as described. If I asked people what they want, would be faster horses... (or whatever Henry Ford said). Also "sane" people often don't have time to spend hours on social media.

Also2, you don't even provide links to your app.

I'm not entirely sure I completely understood what you said but I appreciate the response.

Here are the links.

Link for Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fairtalk.f... Link for Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fairtalk-create-vote-posts/id1...

It is _extremely_ unlikely that the highest ranked post will get even a majority of users having upvoted it, much less a majority of people - first past the post voting rarely achieves a majority even with only a handful of candidates to choose from. If you're curious about this as an experiment, my suggestion is to start much smaller and less divisive than world politics with infinitesimally small market penetration. Try your neighborhood, school or organization where you have a hope of double digit market penetration and some hope of getting buy-in from the decision makers you are trying to influence.

By "majority", I mean the majority of all users within the app. For each message, there's a total of 3 voting options to choose from (+) (=) (-). Each user can only vote once for every post because we've built a verification system that only allows verified users to vote. Other platforms will charge a 7$/month fraudulent fee for your account to get verified, on Fairtalk it's completely free.

Voting (+) gives the message a score of +1 Voting (=) gives the message a score of +0 Voting (-) gives the message a score of -1

At the end of 7 days, the message that received the highest score gets saved and archived on our platform forever. So yes the message that gets archived everyday is always chosen by the majority of users on the platform.

When you open the app, there's a home screen where all messages can be filtered in different ways (highest score, most recently sent, National countries, voting cycles, etc.)

By default, messages are filtered by highest score so users know which messages are about to get archived and if they disagree with that message then they can always cast a (-) vote to decrement its score by -1 so that another message gets archived instead.

It's a very simple system that works very similar to a democracy but instead of voting for a politician to represent you, we're instead voting for the best ideas and messages that were shared on the platform.

Hope that makes sense, cheers my friend.

To clarify my point, especially in politics there is a good chance that the post with the highest score might not even have support from a majority of people who voted (it could be 45+/15=/40-, so 45% support), might not even be voted on by a majority of the people who see it (10% of views vote, so that's 4.5% of viewers support), might not even be viewed by a majority of users (10% of all users view the post, so 0.45% of all users support), and a majority of electors are not users of your app (generously 10% market penetration is now 0.045% of electors support). I'm not sure decision makers would take these numbers seriously until you get huge market share and huge engagement/participation. I would suggest starting in much smaller markets where you can increase those percentages dramatically, and then expand from there.

Do not spend more time on this. The pitch demonstrates a remarkable lack of awareness about how the world works.

Thank you. I could tell from the length of the post, didn't even have to read it, that OP needs a bit more grounding in real life and how trade-offs work.

mob rule or elite rule. I will choose elite rule every single time. You have lived in a bubble and would be shocked by mob decisions by popular votes.

Hint : remember the most voted youtube comments from years ago?

Good luck with your launch. I think it will be helpful. But it will be important for you to earn the trust of the audience first.