Where models contribute
AI updates leader news, aggregates leader feedback and supports comment moderation. Opinion classification and organization remain planned rather than presented as live behavior.
All experiments
Experiment 04 / Demopulse / 2024–26
What happens when product freedom meets governance?
A civic-feedback product tested whether people could follow public leaders, receive current context and express a structured view without turning the product into another news feed.
01 / Hypothesis
A direct feedback loop can make civic sentiment more legible.
The starting question was whether a serious direct-democracy MVP was technically feasible. The product moved from leaders to news discussion and back toward leaders, exposing a harder issue: flexibility without a clear anchor can weaken the product’s purpose.
02 / Smallest loop
Connect current context to structured leader feedback.
- 01
Follow a public leader.
- 02
Receive a weekly digest of current public facts.
- 03
Rate the leader and add qualitative feedback.
- 04
Aggregate feedback without enabling direct reactions to news.
Current context enters. Structured civic feedback leaves.
- 01User anchorFollow a leaderThe relationship starts with a public representative.
- 02Context layerCurrent digestRecent public facts and source links frame the moment.
- 03Citizen inputRate · explainQuantitative and qualitative feedback stay connected.
- 04Governed outputAggregate sentimentModeration applies without enabling reactions to news.
Core mechanismNews provides context; the leader remains the feedback anchor.
Control boundaryIdentity and moderation improve accountability while increasing adoption cost.
03 / Division of labour
Probabilistic help. Explicit accountability.
Where responsibility stays
Users choose whom to follow and what feedback to submit. I remain accountable for the product boundary, identity requirements, moderation rules, privacy trade-offs and production decisions.
04 / Product evidence
The current anchor is the leader, with news as context.
These production screens show the feedback proposition and a leader-centered news digest. They demonstrate the live interface boundary without claiming adoption or engagement.
Reality check / governance narrowed the design space
By July 2026, Apple had rejected the app eight times. Review requirements pushed the product toward accounts plus application-wide blocking and hiding. That improved moderation robustness while increasing adoption friction and the amount of sensitive political data the service had to hold.
Next test
Whether leader-centered feedback is a strong enough anchor to justify the identity and moderation cost.