UN for the People
Vote on the world's biggest issues — no account needed
Just set up the product page for UN for the People — a global voting platform on wars, climate, human rights and democracy. No account or email required, results update live as people from different countries vote.
A few things that turned out harder than expected while building this solo:
Anti-fraud without accounts. No login makes it easy for one person to vote many times. Solved with OTP-based verification that doesn't require storing identity — just enough friction to stop casual abuse.
Legal exposure I didn't see coming. An early "credibility scoring" feature for public figures got flagged in a legal review. Reworked it to attribute all scores to third-party sources (Freedom House, RSF, V-Dem) and published the full methodology.
Cold-start problem. Early polls with 3 votes are meaningless, sometimes misleading. Now results stay hidden until a minimum vote threshold is hit.
Currently migrating off Netlify to a serverless setup and tightening security.
Would love feedback on the anti-fraud approach, and any thoughts on scaling participation without it becoming an echo chamber.
7 Comments
The minimum-vote threshold is an interesting choice, but I wonder if sample size is only half the cold-start problem.
100 votes from one highly motivated community can look more legitimate than 10 while still representing essentially the same group. For something framed as global public opinion, where those votes come from may eventually matter as much as how many there are.
That's a sharp point, and honestly one I don't have fully solved yet. Right now the threshold only guards against "too few votes to mean anything" — it says nothing about diversity of origin. A few things I'm considering: showing a geographic breakdown alongside results (not just the headline number) so people can see concentration for themselves, and eventually weighting or flagging polls where participation skews heavily from one region or referral source, rather than pretending the raw number is neutral.I don't think there's a clean fix — any global platform without gatekeeping will have this tension. But I'd rather surface the skew transparently than hide it behind a single aggregate number. Open to how others have handled this.
I appreciate you unpacking that. The distinction between having enough votes and having representative enough votes is exactly the part that caught my attention.
I'd be interested in continuing the conversation by email if you're open to it. What's the best email to reach you on?
Interesting concept — getting engagement without accounts is a strong hook.
The challenge usually becomes retention and repeated participation.
Are people coming back to vote multiple times or mostly one-off visits?
Honestly, too early to say for sure. Seeing a mix — some one-off votes, some people returning when a new poll on a topic they care about goes live. Betting cadence + the quiz section will help retention over time. Will share real numbers once I have a proper cohort. Curious if you've seen what drives repeat visits for similar light-touch products?
The pattern I've seen in light-touch products: One-off visitors are usually "novelty-driven" (they came from a specific share or HN front page). Return visitors are "topic-identity-driven" — they don't come back for your product, they come back because they consider themselves "someone who knows about X."
The retention gap: you're building features (quizzes, betting) to make your product sticky. But the stickiest no-account products make the topic sticky — Reddit doesn't retain because of upvotes, it retains because r/MachineLearning has new papers daily.
Quick test: Look at your return visitors by entry topic, not by feature used. My guess is 80% of your 7-day return comes from 2–3 topic verticals, and the quiz section won't move the needle on the other 80% of topics.
I run PreLaunch AI — we simulate visitor segments to find which topics create habitual return vs. one-off curiosity. Happy to do a quick sim on your traffic if you want to see which topics are actually driving LTV. No strings.
Really useful framing . The novelty vs. topic-identity distinction makes a lot of sense, and matches roughly what I'm seeing informally. Makes sense that quizzes alone won't fix retention if the underlying pull is topic-specific rather than product-specific. I'll dig into return visitors by entry topic like you suggested that's a more useful lens than what I've been looking at. Appreciate the offer on the sim, I'll pass for now but might revisit down the line.