This is how it works. One question per day about current events. Agree or Disagree. Each poll runs for 24 hours (midnight to midnight ET) and then close permanently. You do not need an account to vote. The main idea is to capture sentiment at a specific point in time, before the news cycle moves on and people's opinions drift.
For this app, I tried to make privacy the point and not just a feature. I originally used a browser fingerprint for anonymous voting, but recently changed it to a simple first-party functional cookie. It uses a random string and the PollId to see if your browser had voted before. The server stores a hash of the cookie to check for duplicates while the poll is live, then deletes all hashes when the poll closes. Only the aggregate counts remain. The browser fingerprint had way too many device collisions where it would show someone they voted even though they had not (an odd thing to see when you go to a poll). The HttpOnly cookie is also available during prerender, which helped eliminate loading flashes I was getting.
This app was built with .NET 10 Blazor with a hybrid Static SSR + Interactive Server. The static pages (about, privacy, terms, etc...) don't need SignalR connections. The interactive ones (voting, archive, results, etc...) do. Mixing these modes was a new experience for me and ended up being pretty tricky. I ended up with data-enhance-nav="false" on most links to prevent weird state issues.
The two biggest things I learned during building this app was how to prevent weird blazor flashes and duplicate queries during pre-render, hydration, and state changes. I used the _ready pattern from preventing the hydration flashes (gate rendering until data is loaded by setting the flag before the first await). Preventing the duplicate queries was possible by using a 2-second static caching during prerender to hydration.
This isn't scientific polling and these are obviously not representative samples. The 24-hour window means smaller numbers than longer surveys and it's only a survey of those who choose to participate. The Agree/Disagree binary choice basically flattens nuance (like I sort of agree), but I am okay with all of this as I think a lot of people feel they never get to participate in these sorts of polls.
I recently also added discussions with AI moderation (Claude Haiku 4.5 as a "first-pass" filter which flags things clearly out of the community guidelines for human review), a reaction system where counts stay hidden until the discussion closes, and news coverage from across the political spectrum shown after you vote for more perspective on the topic.
Thanks for checking it out and happy to dig into any of the Blazor SSR patterns or anything else that sounded interesting. I know Blazor is less frequently used and especially for a public facing website. It did have its challenges, but so far, it has been a blast to work with overall.
Like you say, it's not scientific or representative. Is it for entertainment, do you want to gamify it? Is it pedagogical? Why is it anonymous? Do you want it to get picked up by the media? Are you trying to demonstrate something about public opinion or polarization? Do you want it to become popular? Do you want it to become more accurate? Or is it just a toy?
I have so many questions just because it could be so many different things, and the idea of a single daily poll on the main current event feels like it could have legs. (Though I don't know what today's poll about the death penalty has anything to do with today's or yesterday's news cycle?)
Very clever domain name btw.
The reason it is anonymous is I do not want to tie users to votes. A couple reasons being liability. If I know who you are, how you are voting, and your demographics, that is pretty powerful, but also a ton of liability. If something happened and that data got leaked out, that could be awful. I also don't think users are as likely to create an account, give away their information, just to hit two big buttons. The goal was no barrier to entry, sign up if you want more and not to farm political data from users.
Of course I would like it to become popular, be a place for thousands to discuss hot topics, and get enough votes that it washes out any abuse and grabs enough diversity to see real sentiment. I don't know if it will ever get to that point though. I don't plan to make it scientific as that would require removing the anonymous nature of it. I have thought about it as a free tool for universities or high schools to use for current events polls and discussions.
The short version, I have no idea haha. It really is a fun side project for now, it was fun to code and get something out there, but I am interested to see where it goes.
> The U.S. was right to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO)
> 62% Agree - 38% Disagree
I didn't know that the WHO had such a negative reputation. We are quite fond of such international institutions in the EU at least (ranging from a force for good to fairly harmless). What's the context? The rest of the votes seem quite liberal leaning otherwise.
Most of my voters have come from Reddit and Bluesky so far, which is primarily where the left leaning is coming from. My X account was unfortunately suspended lol. I put an appeal in, but was originally flagged I think do to a new account, political content, and lots of links to the polls. I use an OG dynamic card generator so if I post a link to that poll or result, it creates a card for it on the fly. I think X didn't like that since I wasn't established.
That one was interesting, I am not really sure why that one skewed so far the other directly. I did not have the discussion section open yet (and just slowly getting a few active users), but that was the original reason I added the discussion. I don't know who users are, what their demographics are, etc.. (and I don't want to store that info), so hopefully in the future polls like that people will explain the "why".
I need to build some more analytics into the site (both frontend and backend) so I can analyze the data and visualize it, and so users on the frontend can get better ideas on what is happening.
Covid era politicization and the fallout from that has a lot to do with it as well.
The only issue is, while Plausible analytics that I am using is really nice since it is privacy focused and doesn't track people, I have noticed it doesn't do a great job of understanding what links brought someone there. I am sure Google Analytics or others would do a better job, but it sort of circumvents the anonymous idea. Especially since this is a side project mostly for fun/interesting, I don't really want to be responsible for linking people to political choices.
It is cool to see the distribution of yes/no. But maybe when you do that you can do a kind of....how far off was i type result that lets people learn about their...biases? or just a fun surprise.
Anyways fun idea!
That could maybe be a little optional thing to make it more "interactive". The original idea was to be dead simple, two big buttons. The issue is attracting people to come back since they hit the big button, go "that's interesting", then forget it ever existed.
user clicks Yes. new one pops up Show Results (button) or Guess which was more popular: Yes/No. This is more simple than guessing a percentage. but both could work.
So you then show the results and then you show the "meta" results which is like a "line" that is labelled where it shows what others thought of other people. The dead simple idea is a nice draw, this like...ah hah learning moment to learn or see more about the world I think is maybe a nice feature to add. to get more people to come back?
I am hoping the general public finds this interesting as a lot of the major polls (who to be fair do it scientifically) only ask a couple thousand people. Many never get to participate. While this is not scientific, anyone can participate and eventually with enough people, we can maybe gauge and see how sentiment shifts after time.
"No tracking" is a different concept than "Google analytics alternative".
Also, you kind of have to "track" users to some extent for a site like this - otherwise it would be simply for someone to stuff votes.
It counts raw aggregate statistics and is compliant with GDPR without requiring a banner. While it is "tracking" I suppose, it doesn't "track you". Do you think my wording doesn't work? I am open to suggestions.
From their website:
"By using Plausible, you don’t need to have any GDPR, CCPA or PECR prompts and you don’t need a complex privacy policy about your use of analytics and cookies. With Plausible, you are not tracking any personal data after all. Your visitors can enjoy your site without any annoyances and distractions."
You can't even tell if the same person comes back on a different day.
You can see their full privacy statements here: https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics.
Honestly, I don't even really need them. I may just remove it entirely. I am not a B2C or B2B website. It doesn't really matter to me that much to have the stats, but it is nice in general to see how it is doing. The votes submitted sort of count the users for me anyways.