Hi Ali. Great idea. Let me know how I can help. I know a few others that have similar goals and would love to chat and see how we can create synergy here. Let’s connect when you have a chance.
Just dumping a thought here — I’d love to see a world where we can objectively evaluate politicians based on their goals, promises, and actions. We’re way past the point of relying on biased news outlets or viral social media clips to form opinions. With today’s tech and LLMs, we should be able to track political figures and hold them accountable.
As someone with a data engineering background, I imagine a simple one-pager dashboard for any politician or political group — showing what topics they focus on and how they’re actually performing. The public deserves that. Right now, most people make emotional decisions based on what they hear in the news or see online. That’s not a healthy trajectory.
Such resources already exist. See Ballotpedia for example.
Most voters don't actually want to spend the time -- esp on local races. They want a shortcut.
That said, the "supervoters" on Sway (leaders writing a voter guide for 100s of followers) would totally benefit from this info. We can also help them boil it down into tweet-length recommendations for the average voter.
Love the registered voter authentication (ie qualified leads for candidates) as well as the implied social endorsements via supervoters. Excited to see where this goes, will certainly be cheering Sway on!
My 2 cents: the core of voter frustration is around a perceived lack of agency and responsiveness/listening from politicians at all levels of government. Government generally fails to meet the speed and relevancy thresholds that are table stakes in all other domains of our lives.
The current vision for Sway definitely attacks this problem, but I’m curious how else Sway could restore voter agency.
Are there other ways to show voters their political currency that politicians may be responsive to (besides just money)? For example, a large hyper-localized social following, or the number of impressions that a lawn sign on your property could generate for a candidate (or a candidate’s opponent)?
It would be useful to include a temporal component to this system... The 'theta' is inverted here: the closer you are to an election, the more valuable sway scoring becomes. Add to this the calendar cycles associated with bicameral legislatures that exist everywhere in the US at least, and you can start to help leaders devise longer-term strategies for change, and timelines along which to accomplish it. Keeping voter morale up through this longer process is critical to Sway's success, so transparent data along these axes is important.
Hey Ali, politics is something that's becoming increasingly important to me, but I'm extremely skeptical of this.
For transparency in case it isn't visible otherwise, this is Ryan Kwon, of ancient and hidden Neo Scholar history.
My opposition is on two fronts, mechanical and philosophical:
_Mechanical_:
1) Sway's "Vote With" feature doesn't strike me as meaningfully impacting two core issues: that some sense of alignment with a politician doesn't necessarily mean that things I care about get advanced, and that I don't necessarily become more informed more easily about issues. Instead, Sway abstracts both core problems by embedding trust in singular persons, and avoids answering them (they're also extremely difficult).
2) My gut instinct with all "follower"/"followed" or democratized "supplier"/"consumer" setups is they naturally concentrate attention and power in a top handful. Twitch or YouTube are my go-to examples here, where almost all "suppliers" are tiny, but enormous weight and stickyness fall to a number of charismatic individuals. It's not clear to me that the country I live in is better off if Mr. Beast is a major voting bloc.
3) I don't know how this'll be funded. Is it to remain a forever-non-profit? How do you _guarantee_ neutrality? What does neutrality even mean in a world where we struggle to agree on whether factuality is important?
_Philosophical_:
1) I think the past decade has shown how devastating concentrated techologies can be. A lot of these technologies concentrate naturally. Bigger things tend to become bigger. But it is far from clear to me that the answer to "we must build another enormous technical platform" when there are clearly better functioning democracies that don't have this.
2) I think it's hard to ignore the enormous amount of arrogance that has basically poured out of Silicon Valley as well the past few years. A technocratic solution to American democracy has lost _significant_ legitimacy, because we see that happening and it _seems_ to be devastating. I oppose a powerful platform coming from a place where we're so tiny, and we seem to struggle so much to be basically decent people.
Totally agree on the risk of concentrated power — follower models naturally tilt that way. One thing Sway should build in is a decay rate for influence, so even someone like Elon can’t ride old clout forever. It won’t solve everything, but it keeps the system from calcifying and buys time to tackle the deeper engagement vs. deliberation tradeoffs.
Very insightful, Neelan. I agree that it's bad for someone to "ride old clout forever." Not sure how a decay rate would work. I've considered a "term limit" or other such mechanisms. One related idea is that certain events might trigger Sway to ask followers to reaffirm whether they want to continue receiving a leader's election alerts -- for example if the leader changes the #topic.
Hi Ryan, good to hear from you! Thank you for your feedback! I'll address it point by point.
1) You complained that Sway doesn't guarantee that the causes you care about will get advanced. This is a good thing! If you want a system that guarantees to advance your causes, what about other citizens who have opposing causes? Sway offers a balanced mechanism.
You also complained that Sway doesn't make you more informed about issues. We're not trying to be a news platform. That said, we envision letting each leader send limited text blasts to their followers (just as a Partiful host can notify guests). Over time, this should favor leaders that keep followers informed.
Both mechanisms do hinge on trust. This is by design. People prefer relying on trusted relationships, and trust is what's missing in politics (esp local politics!). Most voters can't name their State Senator or County Clerk -- let alone trust them. Most voters don't want to spend the time getting informed. Relying on a trusted friend whose values align with yours on a specific issue is something most voters would welcome.
2) You said that "follower" arrangements concentrate power in a top handful. I'll agree and generalize it: every new medium since the printing press has amplified the voice of a few. Should we destroy the printing press? No. We should just be obsessively vigilant about subtle details.
The details impact how a network behaves. The analogies that inspire Sway aren't Twitter or Twitch, but Change.org and Partiful. When you "Vote With" somebody, the experience will be similar to RSVPing on Partiful (where the "event" is an election). Partiful doesn't concentrate power among a few people.
Let's also be practical: today's political landscape is the epitome of concentration. Is there a political system anywhere that doesn't consolidate power among a few? Populist demagogues are ascending, partly because they're filling a vacuum left by failing political parties.
A healthier system for power to bubble up from the grass roots can reduce this concentration. Sway is inspired by Liquid Democracy, which shifts power to the grass roots.
3) We haven't decided how it will be funded, and we're willing to wait years to cross that bridge. That said, if you think "forever-non-profit" guarantees ethical behavior, I invite you to learn about the non-profit world! There are for-profit businesses that are much more ethical than most non-profits, and Sway will aim for that.
You asked how to "guarantee" neutrality. There are no guarantees in life. If enough members of a certain ideology decided to boycott Sway, they'd prevent Sway from representing their views.
We're not promising perfection. We're offering a path to improve on the status quo, which is far from perfect.
Lastly: if you're calling us arrogant or challenging whether my team or I are the right people for this work, please do it based on what we say or do, not where we reside. I shared links to some of my own work in politics, and Claire and Kayla's work eclipses mine. I've made many, many mistakes in my life, and I invite you to criticize those.
I began my essay with a question: "what would representative democracy look like if it were invented today?" What's your answer for this? You said "there are better functioning democracies." Which one inspires you the most, and can you see a path to make the rest of the world adopt their system?
There's going to be a lot of text here, but I think the most interesting part is just the last chunk, which I'll differentiate out. The "less interesting details" are going to be me responding to some of the points, but the "interesting chunk" is probably the core conceptual divergence here.
==== Less Interesting Details ====
I think (1) is a misunderstanding of my point. My concern isn't so much that my particular thoughts end up becoming policy; (hopefully) part of the value of having elected representatives vs. a more direct democracy allows for people who are more enmeshed in the issues to come out with practical solutions.
Both information and voter-representative alignment are core problems that I think are pretty notable in American democracy, but there's a host of them, and I'll actually move this discussion to the "interesting chunk".
I think I'll say up-front that:
A) Sway by itself is not a fundamentally terrible thing. I don't really have any issues with the concept of Liquid Democracy (though applying it directly to the US I'm more lukewarm on, since we both know that while issues and specific policies probably drive a lot of voter engagement, voters vote on people). I think we're probably also not that far from this in practice.
I've gone through and read bills and proposals, and it's obviously a mind boggling amount of work, and it's extraordinarily difficult if not practically possible for someone who doesn't have that much spare time to know the details about most issues. The current system strikes me as Sway because I have a handful of individuals in the media I trust to be more informed and hopefully a mix of objective and/or aligned with my philosophically, I read their opinions, and that forms a lot of the information I have.
You're right that this doesn't inform or keep me updated on local politics, where I rely more heavily on specific organizations to provide voter guides, and I need to go out of my way more to read on individual people and proposals.
Also, unfortunately, it means that my opinions may not differ much from my trusted sources, and those sources may or may not deserve any iota of trust.
2) Sure, I concede this point. Though as-described, I will say that Sway sounds closer to a social network, and consequently its follower distribution, than something like Change.org.
I think there's other things that are really fascinating here, but I'll (again) defer that to the interesting chunk.
3) You're right. All organizations have bias, and reality unfortunately tends to have some form of winner or loser. The farmer who just grows wheat to give away still depletes the soil and lowers the price of wheat for other farmers.
> There are for-profit businesses that are much more ethical than most non-profits, and Sway will aim for that.
I agree. Unfortunately though, many organizations are not as ethical as I'd like them to be. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that, for good or ill, some organizations are not driven by ethics, and some organization's ethics are extremely opposed to mine.
> You asked how to "guarantee" neutrality. There are no guarantees in life. If enough members of a certain ideology decided to boycott Sway, they'd prevent Sway from representing their views.
I also agree. The more interesting question is probably "what are Sway's core principles, biases, and goals?" Is it diversity of viewpoint? Is it to strive to "objectively" capture the American political landscape, no matter how it shifts or ruptures? Is it to counter misinformation when we're adrift in a sea of noise? Does it oppose the notion or practice of an ethnostate in the United States?
> Lastly: if you're calling us arrogant or challenging whether my team or I are the right people for this work, please do it based on what we say or do, not where we reside. I shared links to some of my own work in politics, and Claire and Kayla's work eclipses mine. I've made many, many mistakes in my life, and I invite you to criticize those.
Sure, to be extremely transparent, I have little to no doubt that that individual achievements and positive contributions of your team probably outweigh mine by an order of magnitude. I would have the same opposition I think to anyone who proposed a similar idea.
The problem is not where you live, the problem is the idea, which is a good segue to what I think is the interesting chunk of discussion.
==== More Interesting Chunk ====
I think the end goal between the both of us is the same in broad strokes (American democracy should be "healthier"), but the approaches are categorically different, which colors the concrete goals and what's in-scope/out-of-scope.
The important problems I think are not the platform the system sits on (which isn't great), the problem is outgrowths of the system that should be trimmed down. Also there are just really fascinating problems that we as a society have to decide on in some way or form, and I'm not sure we'll do that.
There's voter suppression, biased and irregular gerrymandering, enormous inflows of money into politics on relatively low-noise issues creating government-influenced inefficiencies for profit, how we handle or balance the simultaneous needs of an effective system with badly-needed reform, how we handle or balance some notion of truthfulness or responsibility with people's right to be a moron, how do you maintain the legitimacy of the legal system or enforce things on powerful people, how do you embark or promise long-term projects while still keeping us out of political stagnancy or creating (more) defacto aristocrats? How do you balance the long-term health or viability of a community with short-term/medium-term standard of living? How do you balance minority rights with majoritarian opposition, what do those rights look like, how do you differentiate between minorities and legal or practical undesirables that are OK to push back on, and how do you ensure that differentiation is clear and consistent? (Whether that's people who oppose mask/public health measures during COVID, or people who sit in front of bulldozers in front of new development.)
In some ways these are impossible problems. I don't expect them to be solved in my lifetime, but I want people to chip away at them in their billion-headed forms because (I hope) that in 30 years hence my kids have a nicer life than I do, and I want them to live in a democracy that's healthy. And I hope that the size of that "democracy" is bigger than a weird colored dot in a random state.
--
Also Ali, for transparency, I'm not going to read or respond to anything I think. Writing this was a multi-hour process of thinking and writing, and it's exhausting. In all honesty, you should obviously do whatever you think is right to do. In frankness, I have even less to do with this than normal since I'm currently trying to think through leaving the US for the safety of me and my loved ones.
About time! Count me in.
There are organizations such as no label but your vision is creative and a game changer.
Hi Ali. Great idea. Let me know how I can help. I know a few others that have similar goals and would love to chat and see how we can create synergy here. Let’s connect when you have a chance.
Just dumping a thought here — I’d love to see a world where we can objectively evaluate politicians based on their goals, promises, and actions. We’re way past the point of relying on biased news outlets or viral social media clips to form opinions. With today’s tech and LLMs, we should be able to track political figures and hold them accountable.
As someone with a data engineering background, I imagine a simple one-pager dashboard for any politician or political group — showing what topics they focus on and how they’re actually performing. The public deserves that. Right now, most people make emotional decisions based on what they hear in the news or see online. That’s not a healthy trajectory.
Such resources already exist. See Ballotpedia for example.
Most voters don't actually want to spend the time -- esp on local races. They want a shortcut.
That said, the "supervoters" on Sway (leaders writing a voter guide for 100s of followers) would totally benefit from this info. We can also help them boil it down into tweet-length recommendations for the average voter.
Love the registered voter authentication (ie qualified leads for candidates) as well as the implied social endorsements via supervoters. Excited to see where this goes, will certainly be cheering Sway on!
My 2 cents: the core of voter frustration is around a perceived lack of agency and responsiveness/listening from politicians at all levels of government. Government generally fails to meet the speed and relevancy thresholds that are table stakes in all other domains of our lives.
The current vision for Sway definitely attacks this problem, but I’m curious how else Sway could restore voter agency.
Are there other ways to show voters their political currency that politicians may be responsive to (besides just money)? For example, a large hyper-localized social following, or the number of impressions that a lawn sign on your property could generate for a candidate (or a candidate’s opponent)?
It would be useful to include a temporal component to this system... The 'theta' is inverted here: the closer you are to an election, the more valuable sway scoring becomes. Add to this the calendar cycles associated with bicameral legislatures that exist everywhere in the US at least, and you can start to help leaders devise longer-term strategies for change, and timelines along which to accomplish it. Keeping voter morale up through this longer process is critical to Sway's success, so transparent data along these axes is important.
This is a bit over my head, and it's fascinating. I'd love to hear more.
Hey Ali, politics is something that's becoming increasingly important to me, but I'm extremely skeptical of this.
For transparency in case it isn't visible otherwise, this is Ryan Kwon, of ancient and hidden Neo Scholar history.
My opposition is on two fronts, mechanical and philosophical:
_Mechanical_:
1) Sway's "Vote With" feature doesn't strike me as meaningfully impacting two core issues: that some sense of alignment with a politician doesn't necessarily mean that things I care about get advanced, and that I don't necessarily become more informed more easily about issues. Instead, Sway abstracts both core problems by embedding trust in singular persons, and avoids answering them (they're also extremely difficult).
2) My gut instinct with all "follower"/"followed" or democratized "supplier"/"consumer" setups is they naturally concentrate attention and power in a top handful. Twitch or YouTube are my go-to examples here, where almost all "suppliers" are tiny, but enormous weight and stickyness fall to a number of charismatic individuals. It's not clear to me that the country I live in is better off if Mr. Beast is a major voting bloc.
3) I don't know how this'll be funded. Is it to remain a forever-non-profit? How do you _guarantee_ neutrality? What does neutrality even mean in a world where we struggle to agree on whether factuality is important?
_Philosophical_:
1) I think the past decade has shown how devastating concentrated techologies can be. A lot of these technologies concentrate naturally. Bigger things tend to become bigger. But it is far from clear to me that the answer to "we must build another enormous technical platform" when there are clearly better functioning democracies that don't have this.
2) I think it's hard to ignore the enormous amount of arrogance that has basically poured out of Silicon Valley as well the past few years. A technocratic solution to American democracy has lost _significant_ legitimacy, because we see that happening and it _seems_ to be devastating. I oppose a powerful platform coming from a place where we're so tiny, and we seem to struggle so much to be basically decent people.
Totally agree on the risk of concentrated power — follower models naturally tilt that way. One thing Sway should build in is a decay rate for influence, so even someone like Elon can’t ride old clout forever. It won’t solve everything, but it keeps the system from calcifying and buys time to tackle the deeper engagement vs. deliberation tradeoffs.
Very insightful, Neelan. I agree that it's bad for someone to "ride old clout forever." Not sure how a decay rate would work. I've considered a "term limit" or other such mechanisms. One related idea is that certain events might trigger Sway to ask followers to reaffirm whether they want to continue receiving a leader's election alerts -- for example if the leader changes the #topic.
Hi Ryan, good to hear from you! Thank you for your feedback! I'll address it point by point.
1) You complained that Sway doesn't guarantee that the causes you care about will get advanced. This is a good thing! If you want a system that guarantees to advance your causes, what about other citizens who have opposing causes? Sway offers a balanced mechanism.
You also complained that Sway doesn't make you more informed about issues. We're not trying to be a news platform. That said, we envision letting each leader send limited text blasts to their followers (just as a Partiful host can notify guests). Over time, this should favor leaders that keep followers informed.
Both mechanisms do hinge on trust. This is by design. People prefer relying on trusted relationships, and trust is what's missing in politics (esp local politics!). Most voters can't name their State Senator or County Clerk -- let alone trust them. Most voters don't want to spend the time getting informed. Relying on a trusted friend whose values align with yours on a specific issue is something most voters would welcome.
2) You said that "follower" arrangements concentrate power in a top handful. I'll agree and generalize it: every new medium since the printing press has amplified the voice of a few. Should we destroy the printing press? No. We should just be obsessively vigilant about subtle details.
The details impact how a network behaves. The analogies that inspire Sway aren't Twitter or Twitch, but Change.org and Partiful. When you "Vote With" somebody, the experience will be similar to RSVPing on Partiful (where the "event" is an election). Partiful doesn't concentrate power among a few people.
Let's also be practical: today's political landscape is the epitome of concentration. Is there a political system anywhere that doesn't consolidate power among a few? Populist demagogues are ascending, partly because they're filling a vacuum left by failing political parties.
A healthier system for power to bubble up from the grass roots can reduce this concentration. Sway is inspired by Liquid Democracy, which shifts power to the grass roots.
3) We haven't decided how it will be funded, and we're willing to wait years to cross that bridge. That said, if you think "forever-non-profit" guarantees ethical behavior, I invite you to learn about the non-profit world! There are for-profit businesses that are much more ethical than most non-profits, and Sway will aim for that.
You asked how to "guarantee" neutrality. There are no guarantees in life. If enough members of a certain ideology decided to boycott Sway, they'd prevent Sway from representing their views.
We're not promising perfection. We're offering a path to improve on the status quo, which is far from perfect.
Lastly: if you're calling us arrogant or challenging whether my team or I are the right people for this work, please do it based on what we say or do, not where we reside. I shared links to some of my own work in politics, and Claire and Kayla's work eclipses mine. I've made many, many mistakes in my life, and I invite you to criticize those.
I began my essay with a question: "what would representative democracy look like if it were invented today?" What's your answer for this? You said "there are better functioning democracies." Which one inspires you the most, and can you see a path to make the rest of the world adopt their system?
Hey Ali,
There's going to be a lot of text here, but I think the most interesting part is just the last chunk, which I'll differentiate out. The "less interesting details" are going to be me responding to some of the points, but the "interesting chunk" is probably the core conceptual divergence here.
==== Less Interesting Details ====
I think (1) is a misunderstanding of my point. My concern isn't so much that my particular thoughts end up becoming policy; (hopefully) part of the value of having elected representatives vs. a more direct democracy allows for people who are more enmeshed in the issues to come out with practical solutions.
Both information and voter-representative alignment are core problems that I think are pretty notable in American democracy, but there's a host of them, and I'll actually move this discussion to the "interesting chunk".
I think I'll say up-front that:
A) Sway by itself is not a fundamentally terrible thing. I don't really have any issues with the concept of Liquid Democracy (though applying it directly to the US I'm more lukewarm on, since we both know that while issues and specific policies probably drive a lot of voter engagement, voters vote on people). I think we're probably also not that far from this in practice.
I've gone through and read bills and proposals, and it's obviously a mind boggling amount of work, and it's extraordinarily difficult if not practically possible for someone who doesn't have that much spare time to know the details about most issues. The current system strikes me as Sway because I have a handful of individuals in the media I trust to be more informed and hopefully a mix of objective and/or aligned with my philosophically, I read their opinions, and that forms a lot of the information I have.
You're right that this doesn't inform or keep me updated on local politics, where I rely more heavily on specific organizations to provide voter guides, and I need to go out of my way more to read on individual people and proposals.
Also, unfortunately, it means that my opinions may not differ much from my trusted sources, and those sources may or may not deserve any iota of trust.
2) Sure, I concede this point. Though as-described, I will say that Sway sounds closer to a social network, and consequently its follower distribution, than something like Change.org.
I think there's other things that are really fascinating here, but I'll (again) defer that to the interesting chunk.
3) You're right. All organizations have bias, and reality unfortunately tends to have some form of winner or loser. The farmer who just grows wheat to give away still depletes the soil and lowers the price of wheat for other farmers.
> There are for-profit businesses that are much more ethical than most non-profits, and Sway will aim for that.
I agree. Unfortunately though, many organizations are not as ethical as I'd like them to be. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that, for good or ill, some organizations are not driven by ethics, and some organization's ethics are extremely opposed to mine.
> You asked how to "guarantee" neutrality. There are no guarantees in life. If enough members of a certain ideology decided to boycott Sway, they'd prevent Sway from representing their views.
I also agree. The more interesting question is probably "what are Sway's core principles, biases, and goals?" Is it diversity of viewpoint? Is it to strive to "objectively" capture the American political landscape, no matter how it shifts or ruptures? Is it to counter misinformation when we're adrift in a sea of noise? Does it oppose the notion or practice of an ethnostate in the United States?
> Lastly: if you're calling us arrogant or challenging whether my team or I are the right people for this work, please do it based on what we say or do, not where we reside. I shared links to some of my own work in politics, and Claire and Kayla's work eclipses mine. I've made many, many mistakes in my life, and I invite you to criticize those.
Sure, to be extremely transparent, I have little to no doubt that that individual achievements and positive contributions of your team probably outweigh mine by an order of magnitude. I would have the same opposition I think to anyone who proposed a similar idea.
The problem is not where you live, the problem is the idea, which is a good segue to what I think is the interesting chunk of discussion.
==== More Interesting Chunk ====
I think the end goal between the both of us is the same in broad strokes (American democracy should be "healthier"), but the approaches are categorically different, which colors the concrete goals and what's in-scope/out-of-scope.
The important problems I think are not the platform the system sits on (which isn't great), the problem is outgrowths of the system that should be trimmed down. Also there are just really fascinating problems that we as a society have to decide on in some way or form, and I'm not sure we'll do that.
There's voter suppression, biased and irregular gerrymandering, enormous inflows of money into politics on relatively low-noise issues creating government-influenced inefficiencies for profit, how we handle or balance the simultaneous needs of an effective system with badly-needed reform, how we handle or balance some notion of truthfulness or responsibility with people's right to be a moron, how do you maintain the legitimacy of the legal system or enforce things on powerful people, how do you embark or promise long-term projects while still keeping us out of political stagnancy or creating (more) defacto aristocrats? How do you balance the long-term health or viability of a community with short-term/medium-term standard of living? How do you balance minority rights with majoritarian opposition, what do those rights look like, how do you differentiate between minorities and legal or practical undesirables that are OK to push back on, and how do you ensure that differentiation is clear and consistent? (Whether that's people who oppose mask/public health measures during COVID, or people who sit in front of bulldozers in front of new development.)
In some ways these are impossible problems. I don't expect them to be solved in my lifetime, but I want people to chip away at them in their billion-headed forms because (I hope) that in 30 years hence my kids have a nicer life than I do, and I want them to live in a democracy that's healthy. And I hope that the size of that "democracy" is bigger than a weird colored dot in a random state.
--
Also Ali, for transparency, I'm not going to read or respond to anything I think. Writing this was a multi-hour process of thinking and writing, and it's exhausting. In all honesty, you should obviously do whatever you think is right to do. In frankness, I have even less to do with this than normal since I'm currently trying to think through leaving the US for the safety of me and my loved ones.