Show HN: Race to the Bottom (race-to-the-bottom.onrender.com)

What an interesting idea! Quick question: Do you store user data in any way or each "start" resets previous choices? What`s your plan for this? A public platform? Maybe connection to a specific purpose? I can see attaching non profits links to some causes might help some.

Also curious to see diff per region/state and maybe as some further vision connection of it to a specific regional stats regarding the topic.

Interesting idea -- ran through it for a few minutes and thought the leaderboard was informative. Definitely could expand this!

The cool thing here is that when you look at the whole list it’s just a snapshot of the economy

Really didn't fancy this work.

You just have context-free character strings to work with here.

And then I peeked at the leader board and *really* didn't care for the things ranked best at all.

Rankings not all consistent:

  - private military 6 but defense 39;
  - surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
  - polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
  - scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
  - influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);

Though some are: e.g.,

  - lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
  - escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)

Text sizes for the subtitles are very small on mobile. The thin font doesn’t help either.

An interesting experiment could be re-wording some of these and seeing how different the rankings are.

So have an alternate card titled "Promoting your country" rather than "Propaganda" or "Personal Safety" rather than "Firearms".

Some of these cards definitely present biases that could prime someone to vote a certain way such as "Exploitative Gig Economy" is clearly biased. I would strongly guess if certain cards were worded more positively, they wouldn't be ranked as poorly.

"Advertising" -> "Promoting your product"

Or some of them are so broad it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad like "Telemarketing", "Advertising", or "Pharmaceuticals". Some of it is awful while other parts are between great and ok.

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Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of as I was answering was the axis of "Personal Responsibility" to "Social Responsibility".

It gauges how the crowd thinks of harm. For instance, Environmental Pollution is bad because it harms everyone and no one _chooses_ to be polluted on necessarily while something like Sugary Drinks is largely a personal choice that affects no one else.

Maybe another axis of "Protection" to "Liberty" where something is a personal choice but could be seen as bad because it is addictive or otherwise tries to trap the person.

So Adult Platform would be fairly squarely in Liberty/Personal while something like Online Gambling would be Protection/Social.

Social media is ranked worse right now than Oil&Gas and Weapons - what?

I don't like this candidate list at all because it obviously reflects the author's beliefs on what viable candidates are. There are many entries there that do not belong in such a list. There also are many other things that could've been viable candidates, but aren't in the list, e.g. moneyprinting, inflation above 1%, health insurance preapprovals and denials, etc.

Would be cool if it ran until you had an intransitive preference. A is worse than B, which is worse than C, which is worse than A.

I thought the point was to show how ranking industries based on "evil vibes" is subjective.

What technology isn't surveillance technology these days?

Does it ever end? I got bored before seeing the "leaderboards" or whatever.

Also, some of these things are definitely not like the others.

worthwhile to give a sense of how many times to click in order to get through to all the categories.. like a completion bar. have a feeling that i haven't seen all but have seen 'cryptocurrencies and prediction markets' like 4x

I thought this was good but then the questions never stopped, not a progress bar in sight, eventually when I clicked the ranking list, I didn’t care because it wasn’t based on my opinions instead I’m assuming based on all votes.

I really thought the author did something here.

Some of the options make no sense at all.

The absolutely terrible rankings made me lose a bit of faith in humanity.

The framing of some of these is interesting. Not a criticism, just an observation.

I think many trigger a visceral negative reaction, like animal testing, but most of these can be broken up into sub-parts that are both obviously good and obviously bad at the same time. Animal testing of cosmetics: bad, animal testing of the safety of a new drug that millions of humans will take: probably good. Chemical manufacturing that produces plastic packaging for things that could use paper packaging: not great, chemical manufacturing for chemicals used in healthcare, probably good. To be clear, these are nuanced topics and I'm not interested in debating them here, just providing illustrative examples.

I realise this isn't really the point of this experiment, but it does go to show how much the framing matters. This is part of why surveys can produce radically different results depending on how you write the questions.

Am I the only one who is bothered by “Choose the worst” with only two options? It should be “Choose the worse”.

This is just bias confirmation theater for a certain worldview.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to be measuring. The data is also probably really sparse -- no idea how alcohol is at 47 at the time of me writing this, it is incredibly destructive on a societal level.

A bit shocking to see how low people rate factory farming, place 34. Arguably the worst thing happening on this planet right now, the only thing is: not to humans, but to other sentient beings.

I wish this had a "I don't mind either of these".

The front page mentions that the intention is to capture the public opinion. I felt that looking at the rankings didn't really meaningfully give me any useful information about a broad consensus on any of the topics. As many have mentioned, there are many nuances to a lot of the options.

Perhaps adding a text input after the selection to ask a user to describe their position on the topic and having that broadly shared would help towards that goal?

The rankings page doesn't give me any sense either of how my opinion broadly tracks against the "public opinion". This would fundamentally change the flow you have going but presenting the options and then asking the user to manually tier list them would allow for that side by side comparison.

This needs like a "both of these things are good" button.

As many have correctly pointed out: A reasonable person cannot pass blanket judgement on many of the entries shown.

This also highlights a major flaw with voting and political campaigning in democracies:

Undifferentiated blanket judgements based on biased framing, polarizing society artificially into totally unnecessary camps of opposition.