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Show HN: Race to the Bottom

https://race-to-the-bottom.onrender.com
36•maxwellito•12h ago

Comments

DaryaHr•12h ago
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.

maxwellito•11h ago
Thanks, sadly it didn't pick-up on HN The diff per region/state would be fantastic! The stats are shared, nothing "per user". At first I just wanted to see if it would trigger some interest. There's a huge room for improvements, your suggestions are great
susam•2h ago
This is fantastic! The voting statistics of the community would have been very interesting. I have emailed the moderators to see if they would consider giving this post a second chance at /pool.
Torgin•1h ago
Interesting idea -- ran through it for a few minutes and thought the leaderboard was informative. Definitely could expand this!
AndrewKemendo•1h ago
The cool thing here is that when you look at the whole list it’s just a snapshot of the economy
smitty1e•1h ago
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.

jsrozner•1h ago
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!)
marcus_holmes•1h ago
my take on that:

- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.

- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.

- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.

- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.

- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.

totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)

pimlottc•1h ago
Text sizes for the subtitles are very small on mobile. The thin font doesn’t help either.
DylanSp•56m ago
They're very small on desktop as well.
madamelic•1h ago
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.

---

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.

somewhatgoated•1h ago
Social media is ranked worse right now than Oil&Gas and Weapons - what?
akersten•1h ago
Based on the recent comments I've seen around here, selecting whether "Social Media" or "Private Prisons" are worse for society is somehow, inexplicably, a tough decision.

Many of the options here are also confusing. "Pharmaceuticals" as one of the options among other generally-considered bad things? Pharmaceuticals have saved millions of lives. Am I supposed to assume we're talking about the opiate crisis specifically or something?

x3n0ph3n3•55m ago
Yea, the last 2 are good things, not bad things.
dlivingston•31m ago
Some of these tripped me up as well.

Oil & Gas are necessary for a country's survival. Good!

The Oil & Gas Industry operate political lobbying and climate change disinformation campaigns. Bad :(

So, which of the two should I consider in my rankings? Both? Neither?

OutOfHere•1h ago
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.
jjmarr•1h ago
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.

david_shi•57m ago
What technology isn't surveillance technology these days?
antisthenes•5m ago
Does it ever end? I got bored before seeing the "leaderboards" or whatever.

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

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