About Us

We're problem solvers.

The problems:

The age of information has a dark side. Because of the massive amount of data we are required to process, we are forced to rely on experts to tell us what to believe. But experts are only human, and are bound to serve their own interests before those of the public. Thus, expert opinion can be purchased, and used as a tool of the rich and powerful to manipulate and exploit the public. The public needs a source of information they can trust. It can't be a person, for reasons stated above. Can't be AI, because it can be programmed. The only thing the public can trust is itself. It must draw on humanity's logic, reason, and goodness to determine truth.

Also, much effort is spent in the society debating the same things over and over again (such as capitalism vs. communism), with the outcomes of these debates lost in the ocean of information. It would be helpful if a debate on something important could be had between the best minds on the subject and made available for everybody to learn from.

Our mission:

Our mission is to provide a solution to the aforementioned problems. To provide a place people can visit to get the best arguments from both sides of any issue and make up their own minds.

We accomplish this by providing a simple structure to a forum. By allowing people to only upvote posts they agree with and only respond to posts they disagree with, and by prioritizing the display of the most upvoted posts, after a while, what you end up with is an easily traversable dialog between the strongest opposing arguments on any topic. This should help people decide for themselves what makes the most sense to them.

You might argue that this structure will not result in the best arguments, but rather the most popular ones. We believe that the popular arguments will be popular precisely because they will resonate the most with the people - appeal the most to their sense of reason and logic.
Our solution can work only if the people feel free to say whatever they want. Therefore, we've designed this website to offer maximum possible privacy while still protecting the information's integrity.

To ensure that people don't upvote themselves, we require two-factor authentication (sending an authentication code as a text to a smartphone) just to gain the ability to post and upvote.

And to protect our member's privacy we've designed the system to make user accounts untraceable. For example, we do not log IP addresses and the phone numbers given to us for 2FA are completely disconnected from the accounts. We've even created many hundreds of dummy accounts that are indistinguishable from the real ones. In case it's not obvious, the dummy accounts are necessary to introduce dummy phone numbers into our database, so that, if necessary, our users can deny having anything to do with us. We keep all the phone numbers used for 2FA; they are just in a separate database mixed in with dummy ones. There is more to it, but there's no need to go into detail here. Suffice it to say that we've taken many precautions to protect your identity. Even our servers are set up such that if hackers were to gain access to our back-end they would still not gain access to the databases.

The only thing beyond our control is the email address you choose to use, and there is a service (10minutemail.net) that lets you have a totally private, disposable email. With that email it's possible to achieve total anonymity with us. A VPN doesn't hurt either.

You might be wondering why anybody would want to participate in this experiment. After all, writing strong arguments takes effort. We have a plan to provide a financial incentive. Sometime after launch, when we have a decent amount of traffic, we will introduce ads and membership to raise money. We're planning on distributing most of the profits back to the community. The plan is to split up 80% of our monthly profits amongst all the upvotes received that month and put the remaining 20% towards site growth and advertising, which is also helpful for our posters. For example, if we made a million dollars profit in a month, and there were a million upvotes cast that month, then each upvote would be worth 80 cents. Each account that had posts upvoted that month would gain credits for that month and once they had over $5 in their account, they would be able to "cash out". If someone made a quality post that many people appreciated and upvoted, that post could generate substantial income for many years.

This system would reward people for quality posts and help make this community active and healthy.