James-K-He

Thank you! Good tips haha, we've made a more polished launch video but thought to do a more dedicated loom for HN - feel free to check it out here: https://youtu.be/k6uo8PAn2vY

Thank you so much! Let us know what you think!! Free to try at app.societies.io :)

Very sorry that it came across that way for you! We built Societies in the hope that the better people can understand each other, the better we can innovate solutions that meet people’s wants and needs - much of bad policymaking and bad product designs came from not being able to foresee the unintended consequences, and we hope that one day we can help flag those risks in an artificial society first, before taking the bet that could impact real people in real life :)

thank you!! feel free to try it out by visiting app.societies.io on your computer :)

Thank you so much!

so sorry about this! fixing it now. we simulated how our content would land, but alas couldn't test the site before it was built :`)

Thank you! We 100% agree. My research back in Cambridge was on misinformation, so we take the danger of misuse very seriously even as a tiny team of 3 people right now. As a social science researcher, one big challenge we faced was just how difficult it was to run experiments - it's quite unethical (and impossible) to have 100k people under policy A and 100k under policy B, so as a result, we as a society struggle to find the "golden path" with big issues like misinformation, climate change, or even everyday economics.

That's what motivated me to start researching in the area of creating "Artificial Societies" - first as an academic project, now as a product everyone can use, because I believe the best way to build a new technology is to try to make it useful for as many people as possible, rather than reserving it for governments and enterprises only. That's why unlike other builders in this space, we've made it a rule to never touch defence use cases; that's why we've gone against much business wisdom to produce a consumer product that anyone can use, rather than going after bigger budgets.

We totally agree that synthetic audiences should never replace listening to real people - we ourselves actually insist on doing manual user interviews so that we can feel our users pain ourselves. We hope what we build doesn't replace traditional methods, but expands what market research can do - that's why we try to simulate how people behave in communities and influence one another, so that we capture the ripple effects that a traditional survey ignores because it treats humans like isolated line items, rather than the communities we really are.

Hopefully, one day, just like a new plane is first tested in a wind tunnel before risking the life of a test pilot, a new policy will also first be tested in an artificial society, before risking unintended consequences in real participants. We are still in the early days though, so for now, we are just working hard to make a product people would love to use :)

Thank you for trying us out! Yes, most of our personas are built from social media profiles + other deep research of publicly available data. For this reason, our customers have made the most of us by simulating professionals who are otherwise really hard to survey.

indeed - human societies are very complex haha. we have managed to predict how social media react to messages at a 80%+ accuracy, but still early days in making the simulation accurate across all contexts and all populations :)

Thankfully humans do tend to hallucinate haha

Thank you so much!! Indeed, we were very inspired by the Stanford team's work as well :)