Interesting proposal and cool to see idea of (dominant) assurance contracts being put into practice. Some questions / thoughts.
1. From marketing perspective, I think using icons of shady dudes in trench coats on your front page does not look good. Makes it look a tool for bad actors rather than a force for good. One alternative design is to have neutral images before (like you see as default profile pics on social media) and then cartoony revealed faces after.
2. My instinct is that existence of good tool isn't the only blocker, but actually getting people to do stuff (and implicitly, committing to doing stuff) is bigger blocker. People are often just lazy. This is just pure instinct though. What do you think? Based on your example of people joining slack channel, maybe idea is to have a commitment action that is small enough for people to easily opt into.
3. When I imagine some use cases, I am not sure how this tool will be the difference between success and failure. E.g. in my workplace, I had vague idea of having an 'internal glassdoor' to make it easier for people to compare salaries/benefits. (Whether this is a good idea is separate question of course). I think the hard part in this use case is talking to individuals, explaining in detail what would idea is, finding compromises that work for different people, etc. But again, maybe I am thinking about this wrong and aim of tool is should be to simply find out who is even interested to discuss it, rather than who is ready to commit to doing more.
4. How do you think this relates to forecasting / prediction tools. Ideas being pursued by Metaculus might help with these coordination issues, by helping reveal the predicted consequences of different actions.
Anyway, best of luck with this project! I'm curious to know more about concrete successes
Overcoming inertial barriers to collective action through anonymous coordination
Introduction
This project builds upon the successful ACX 2024 proposal to create a minimal viable product (MVP) of a software platform called Spartacus.app designed to solve collective action dilemmas and coordination problems. Tetraspace and I were awarded $17K each to collaborate on it, and we succeeded! The MVP went live in early June. We're currently conducting closed beta testing in search of high-impact use cases.
I'm seeking additional funding to continue developing this project full-time and to extend our runway for another 9-12 months. Funds would be allocated to operational costs, compensating collaborators, and financing growth strategies (described below) to expand the user base, create a sustainable revenue model, develop case studies, and explore non- and for-profit commercialization options.
Project Summary
Unlike crowdfunding platforms, our primary value proposition isn't raising money but facilitating the formation of purpose-driven groups, organizations, and associations through a novel combination of coordination mechanisms. From there, a group can set goals that can only be accomplished through synchronous behavior. Our design principles focus on lowering the risk and raising the expected value of participation in the group formation process, especially in an adversarial environment.
Despite dissatisfaction with a state of affairs, a stable equilibrium can persist if each person in a system perceives the cost of action to outweigh the benefit to themselves. If successful, Spartacus can transform dispersed and/or suppressed preferences into a consolidated public entity capable of pursuing its interests with power and leverage available only through collective action, inverting the cost/benefit calculus. Where the isolated individual has no incentive to act, the individual within a sufficiently coordinated group does.
Our principle innovation combines an assurance contract framework (e.g., person A commits to an action but only if B, C, D…also agree) with temporary anonymity, only revealing identities if and when the campaign reaches its goal. From a risk mitigation standpoint, this allows for a seamless, almost magical transition from the safety of anonymous, provisional commitments to “safety in numbers.” This phased anonymity also directly addresses the inertia from the disproportionate risk burden incurred by first/early movers.
Here’s a sample use case:
Jeremy is a software engineer at a big AI tech company. He’s concerned that the company is developing some potentially dangerous features in its next release. He could face retaliation or even get fired if he speaks up about it. However, he’s pretty sure he’s not the only one who feels this way.
Jeremy can use Spartacus.app to create a plan of action, covertly gather provisional commitments from other coworkers, and, when they have enough support to make a sufficient impact, reveal their identities to follow through on the plan together.
Jeremy can use settings in spartacus to make sure only people who meet certain criteria can sign up for the campaign, such as ID verification, domain exclusions, or unique invite codes.
Title: Speak up against Project Enigma
Description: Colleagues, I'm deeply concerned about potentially dangerous features in our next release. I know I'm not the only one. We can't stay silent. Let's demand a halt and a thorough ethical review. We have the power to shape a responsible future. If you agree, join the Discord group chat "EthicalAINow" to discuss further action. Together, we can make a difference.
Call to Action: Join the discord group chat "EthicalAINow”
(See a demo of this use case HERE)
Collective Action Problems
Collective action problems have three main characteristics:
Individuals would benefit from cooperating around a common goal.
They don’t because of conflicting interests and incentives.
They lack a coordination mechanism to agree on, transition to a different incentive structure, and/or prevent others from benefiting without contributing (“free riding”).
These kinds of problems are particularly frustrating because everyone following their rational interests, the basis of our economic system, is the source of catastrophe.
Some examples:
Climate: Overfishing, Water Scarcity, Deforestation, Littering, Conservation
Public Goods: Research funding, Open Source, Philanthropy
Public Health: Antibiotic Resistance, Biosafety, Organ Donation, Pollution, Phones in Schools
GroupThink: Institutional Capture, Echo Chambers, Peer Pressure
Political Polarization: Misinformation, Voting Rights, Extremism
Abuse of Power: Data Privacy, Corruption, #MeToo, Class Action Litigation, Whistleblowing
Feedback Loops: Arms Control, "Race to the Bottom" competitive dynamics, AI Safety, Panic Hoarding
Coordination Problems
Solving collective action problems requires stakeholders to override their immediate interests to factor in future and/or collective benefits. This generally entails everyone agreeing to sacrifice for the “greater good," i.e., their future collective well-being. But if only some people changed their behavior and others didn’t, those who did would be comparatively worse off, tolerating “cheaters” would destroy incentives to cooperate, and the dilemma would remain unsolved. Knowing this, a rational person has no reason to adjust their behavior unless there’s a way to coordinate action with other stakeholders and enforce compliance. This shifts the challenge from acknowledging the collective action dilemma to the process of coordination itself.
Coordination is not straightforward. Any attempt is often hindered by the lack of a clear or dominant outcome. There are several impediments to organizing a process in which everyone is incentivized to participate. There may be various ways to achieve a common goal, but the mechanism to ensure they all make a compatible choice may not exist.
At a more fundamental level, there is also the matter of Manifestation - the bootstrapping of change through the power of belief itself. Not in a Woo-Woo sense, but for many cases of human organization around plans, goals, norms, and values, if enough people believe something is possible and act accordingly, that alone is enough to make it possible. It is a self-fulfilling outcome manifested by the decision itself. Inversely, something that hypothetically could happen never will if not enough people believe it can.
Relevance to Effective Altruism
A keyword search for Collective Action Problem(s) and "Coordination Problem(s) returns over 200 results in EU forum posts alone. Some examples:
How can information be gathered to generate the best opportunities for donors and recipients to find each other and meet each others’ expectations?
How can knowledge gathering, dispersal, and specialization all be optimized at the same time?
How can EA harness collective action to affect the behavior of large-scale institutions?
Novel fundraising mechanisms like the one used to fund this series of projects!
Exploring different ways of raising and dispersing funds at scale requires building support for new experiments and norms.
Gain of Function research and AI Safety
How can we enable insiders to mobilize in opposition to institutional incentive structures surrounding endeavors that carry extreme tail risks to humanity?
Coordination Solutions with Spartacus.app
One can delve deeply into Game Theory to better understand coordination problems and equilibrium states. Spartacus.app is designed to take those insights, instrumentalize them, and productize them as a mechanism of coordination where the need exists but the means are inadequate or nonexistent. For the purposes of this proposal, we can break down some discrete impediments to coordination and respective solutions we’re building into the Spartacus platform:
Challenge 1: Multiple equilibria: Multiple stable outcomes can be achieved.
Challenge 2: No dominant strategy: No single choice is always the best, regardless of what others do.
Challenge 3: Heterogeneity: If individuals have diverse interests or preferences, finding a solution that satisfies everyone may be difficult.
Challenge 4: Asymmetric Information: When individuals have different levels of information, it can lead to misunderstandings, mistrust, and a failure to coordinate efforts.
Solution: Spartacus can be a vehicle for the revealed preferences of large segments of a community, organization, or institution and weaken the forces of preference falsification. This enables stakeholders to better understand what others are thinking, what they want and to calibrate their positions accordingly, which increases the likelihood of convergence.
The default campaign creation process allows for the evaluation of specific proposals. Other campaign types may involve surveying a community directly for various potential solutions to known problems that can be selected by rank-choice. There are options for both campaign creators and participants to designate “tipping points” or action thresholds based on strong signals of other peoples' preferences and risk tolerances. Surfacing a range of alternative equilibria and providing credible indications of what other people want adds meaningful data to the information landscape, leading to more rational and effective decision-making.
Challenge 5: Interdependence: Each individual's outcome depends on others' choices.
Solution: Spartacus makes numerical support for a given proposal visible before identities are revealed, similar to an anonymous poll, but with much stronger commitment signals. The information a Spartacus campaign reveals goes beyond sentiment analysis by binding participants through mutual assurances of action.
Challenge 6: Lack of trust: Individuals may be reluctant to cooperate or contribute if they do not trust each other or the mechanisms involved.
Solution: We use (or plan to implement) several mechanisms to ensure data privacy and security, including enterprise-grade ID and liveness verification, 2-factor authentication, encryption of PII, domain exclusion, financial staking, and unique invite codes. We're aware of the threat of Sybil attacks, “honeypot” entrapment, brigading, and other malicious tactics bad actors might employ to sabotage campaigns or harm users. We will utilize all feasible best practices to mitigate these threats.
Challenge 7: Uncertainty: If individuals are uncertain about the benefits of cooperation or the costs of not cooperating, they may be less likely to participate.
Challenge 8: Transaction Costs: The costs associated with organizing and coordinating collective action can be significant. These costs may include time, money, and effort. Individuals may be less likely to participate if the costs outweigh the benefits.
Solution: The assurance contract framework addresses uncertainty by holding all commitments provisional until a high-impact threshold is reached. This dramatically raises the expected value of participation and reduces the risk that efforts will go to waste or fail to achieve viability. This general principle has been well validated by the success of companies like Groupon, Kickstarter, and dozens of other crowdfunding platforms. We can further reduce uncertainty by adding a financial staking component to filter for even stronger commitment signals and allowing each participant to choose a personalized participation threshold.
Challenge 9 Free-riding: Even if individuals understand the benefits of cooperation, they may still be tempted to free-ride by benefiting from the efforts of others without contributing themselves.
Solution: One of the side effects of transitioning from anonymity to real identities is the introduction of reputation management dynamics, which add social pressure to keeping one's commitments. The structure of Spartacus campaigns ought to filter out people with low follow-through intent. We are not seeking to replicate the lowest friction methods of registering the most superficial indication of preference and sentiment, as many petition platforms do. While we cannot coercively enforce follow-through and expect some amount of leakage, we’ll experiment with gamified accountability mechanisms and novel "skin in the game" elements that preemptively select against those most likely to flake and deter unserious participation.
Challenge 10: Inefficient institutions: Weak or ineffective institutions may be unable to provide the necessary incentives or coordination to overcome collective action problems.
Challenge 11: Path dependence: Past choices or historical factors may create barriers to cooperation or limit the effectiveness of solutions.
Solution: The immense value of creating brand-new associations and organizations that could be viable alternatives to a dysfunctional, unresponsive status quo is precisely what Spartacus is designed to do.
Challenge 12: Time horizon mismatch: Individuals may prioritize short-term gains over long-term benefits, leading to suboptimal outcomes for the group as a whole.
Solution: If people weighted their short-term and long-term interests equally, many collective action dilemmas would disappear. Studies and observations show that people generally have high time preferences, meaning they value immediate gratification and prioritize present needs over future needs. Spartacus can create a playing field where long-term interests, which many acknowledge but cannot effectuate, find a venue to compete with default behavioral patterns.
Challenge 13: Intimidation / Retaliation: In some cases, individuals may be afraid to participate in collective action because they fear retaliation or sanction.
Challenge 14: Lack of Leadership: Strong and effective leadership can be crucial for overcoming collective action problems. Without good leadership, individuals may be unable to coordinate their efforts or achieve a common goal.
Solution: Using phased anonymity to protect first/early movers and delaying public exposure unless and until a campaign success threshold is crossed addresses critical reasons why people are reluctant to initiate action or voice dissent, especially if they’re unsure how much support there is for their position. Few people are comfortable being the lone voice of dissent.
Risk aversion can be modeled on a curve. If the risk of an action is very high, only outliers with extraordinarily high tolerance for risk will act. The problem with waiting for heroes is that they rarely appear; if they do, they’re often not the people best equipped to deliver productive change. Unfortunately, there’s scant evidence that bravery and competence are correlated. On the contrary, reckless disregard for personal risk is associated with incompetence, irrationality, and extremism.
People in the normal distribution of risk aversion - most reasonable people - become paralyzed if they do not think the benefits of action outweigh the risks. They will certainly be disinclined to test that assumption without assurances. They will acquiesce to dysfunction, corruption, abuse, insanity, and even institutional collapse, all the while justifying their inaction in perfectly rational terms. The parable of the naked emperor comes to mind.
Empowering those of average bravery and risk aversion to take action by decreasing the level of risk below their action threshold would open the door to many more people willing to act on matters of collective importance.
What have you done so far?
As mentioned in the intro, after about six months of spec and design work, we debuted the MVP in early June at NYCTechWeek. It's a web app built on Next.js, with APIs to services like Supabase, Twilio, Plaid, and Auth.o.
Right now, anyone can sign up and test the core functionality of real-time and private campaigns. Feel free to check it out. (We recommend the mobile interface and using a phone# to sign in). Create, Join, and Share user flows, and some basic user settings are all working.
You can find more details on our progress journey in previous monthly posts to our substack.
What do you have planned next?
We're continuing to focus on user acquisition, use case discovery, testing, identifying and publishing success stories and case studies, and using feedback to determine how to shape our medium- to long-term product roadmap.
How will this funding be used?
Extending our runway for another 9-12 months.
Here's a rough breakdown of the annual project OpEx at current levels of spending:
Continued compensation for co-grantee TetraSpace at $50/hr for 10-20 hrs of work per week (variable).
Software & subscriptions: $5,000 | Essential dev tools, service providers, APIs, CRM, lead generation tools, user support, and product management software. (may fluctuate based on metered services).
Hosting & infrastructure: $3,000 | Cloud hosting, website, and basic IT infrastructure.
Marketing: $5,000 | Social media, content marketing, and SEO.
Public relations & events: $3,000 | conferences, exhibitions, presentations, demos, and speaking opportunities.
Legal and accounting: $3,000 | Basic legal services and accounting for tax compliance and financial management.
Outsourcing, consulting, and interns: $6,000 | Paid internships, compensation for consultants and subject matter experts, guest speaker fees.
I'm covering my own expenses with personal savings while working on the project full-time.
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
I’m Jordan Braunstein (He/Him). I've been an avid reader of ACX/SSC for eight years and actively participate in the LA rationalist community. I'm also connected to the EA community via EA Los Angeles and Lighthaven in Berkeley. I can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.
I have 15+ years of experience as a business development lead and product manager at various startups, ranging from pre-seed to Series B, including employee #1 at a VR startup called Vivid Vision. I have a B.S. in Economics and Political Science from SUNY Purchase, NY. I've lived in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and now Santa Monica, LA.
My primary technical collaborator is Tetraspace (She/Her). We independently submitted similar applications to the ACX/Manifund grant program and were told we could receive a more significant joint grant if we agreed to work together. I had a robust framework for the project, and Tetra had the technical skills I lacked. As her contribution, Tetra joined the Spartacus.app project as a freelance engineer, using her half of the grant as compensation.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
Market-Related:
We vastly overestimate demand for a platform like this.
Users don't see enough value in the platform to justify paying for it.
We fail to market to the most receptive audiences because of incorrect assumptions about our ideal use cases.
A competitor sees what we're doing, copies our functionality, and poaches our users.
Association with controversial subjects causes the project to become polarized and anathematized by a large segment of potential users.
Product-Related:
The platform is too complex, complicated to use, or unreliable.
We can't scale the platform effectively to meet growing demand.
Making collective coordination easier and less risky has a double edge. We don't sufficiently limit how the platform can be used, allowing activities that cause real-world harm.
Financial:
We run out of money before achieving profitability or securing additional funding.
We vastly underestimate the costs of user acquisition and retention.
We can't find a viable revenue model and/or business model.
Team-Related:
Conflicts and disagreements within the team.
Key team members leave the project.
We don't have the means to recruit necessary additions to the team.
If we ever reach a point of irreversible failure or resource exhaustion, hopefully, we can salvage the valuable assets and find a new home for them.
What other funding are you or your project getting?
This project received $34,000 in February 2024 from the ACX 2024 grant series, split between two projects (which were functionally combined).
If we continue progressing, our tentative plan is to transition into a public benefit corporation. This will allow us to grow faster and diversify our funding pool. If we can't source sufficient philanthropic funding, we'd be very open to securing private funding from value-aligned angel investors contingent on validating a viable business model.
Lovkush Agarwal
3 months ago
Jordan Braunstein
3 months ago
@TheManxLoinerThank you so much for your feedback!
1. Fair point! An aesthetic overhaul is on the agenda soon.
2. I agree. Initial call-to-actions should be MECP - Minimally Effective Coordination Points
3. "But again, maybe I am thinking about this wrong, and the aim of the tool should be to simply find out who is even interested in discussing it, rather than who is ready to commit to doing more." Exactly this. Small Steps
4. This collaboration could be exciting once we've gotten enough traction.
Thank you again!
Sasha Cooper
5 months ago
My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:
They: Seems like a long shot but haven't seen tried seriously, so good value of information
He: Idea seems unique, worth trying, skin in the game/track record of builders (title of Manifund post kinda offputting - makes it sound much less concrete than it is)
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
@Arepo I greatly appreciate the feedback and donation from you and your partner. Could you be more specific about why the post was offputting / why it sounds less concrete?
Sasha Cooper
5 months ago
@JBraunstein It's mainly the title. It's hard to put my finger on exactly - a) something about the phrase 'an online platform' make it sound like it's a fairly abstract idea rather than something you've already built an MVP for, and b) something about the phrase 'to-solve-collective-action-and-coordination-problems' reinforces that feeling of abstraction - giving the impression that you're trying to fix an incredibly broad class of concern all in one go ('solve' I guess is a key part of that impression), rather than contributing a more realistic partial solution.
I guess both title or the first paragraph of the post would benefit from a more concrete and intuitive statement of what your app actually does, which it doesn't really start discussing until the first paragraph of 'What are this project's goals?' - (and even then it's only after offering a summary which you then quasi-retract), and on quite a technical level - I had to Google 'assurance contract', and reparse 'temporary anonymity to break the inertia of bad equilibria and incentive structures that deter people from acting on their actual preferences or suppress crucial information required for rational decision making' a few times.
It's not a trivial problem to solve, but ideally you'd have a one-or-two-sentence summary of what actually happens when I use the app. In general I think your marketing feels slightly off. "Kickstarter" for Collective Action' doesn't really evoke anything for me; 'spartacus.app' is a name I can only barely follow the conceptual link to (and would really struggle if I hadn't seen the film!); the three-image diagram on your page is the most helpful, but feels both too much (I feel like there's a way to get the same amount of info across much more succinctly) and not enough (I still don't have a good sense of what the parameters are, or example or actual use cases, or how much effort it's going to be to find a 'movement' I want to get involved with if I download the app, etc).
There's another project on here that's offering free marketing support, so you could maybe reach out to them (though for some reason they got no funding, which I don't get - they were one of the best couple of projects we decided not to fund, and our reasoning didn't seem very generalisable). There's also a post by Annabel Luketic offering free marketing strategy calls.
Sasha Cooper
5 months ago
(Since Manifund to doesn't seem allow editing) After writing all that out, I retract my initial comment that 'it's mainly the title'!
Jason
5 months ago
Pushing to minimum based on some deference to original ACX grant + work done since then + Jordan's skin in the game as evidenced by self-funding.
ampdot
5 months ago
I donated because using incentive design is a neglected area, but I only donated $10 because this project seems to lack targeting at any specific niche or market, which makes it unlikely to succeed. Different usecases/markets have different feature requirements. For example, a protest needs to avoid using phone numbers and would prefer to determine membership using Bluetooth peer-to-peer communication, while a crypto community would want a zero-knowledge way to anonymously prove membership and to communicate via a blockchain layer 2. Without targeting one specific market, the project seems very unlikely to succeed, because each market has a unique minimum featureset, and implementing the most-requested features between all markets is unlikely to meet any individual market (usecase)'s needs.
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
@ampdot I'm well aware of the conventional wisdom that product market fit in a specific niche must be established before trying to serve a generalized need. I also know the hazards of trying to simultaneously satisfy many different constituencies with non-overlapping feature requirements, which can lead to feature creep, overextension, and a failure to do any one thing well.
How can we know precisely where this product will gain traction in its current design without running experiments on different use cases and getting feedback? We have certain educated assumptions about our most promising use cases, and we're concentrating our outreach in those areas, but we expect we'll need to update many times based on real-world feedback. We intend to follow signals and focus our efforts where we're delivering the most measurable, unambiguous value.
Instead of being critical from the sidelines, why not join the Beta to help us in that discovery process?
ampdot
5 months ago
How can we know precisely where this product will gain traction in its current design without running experiments on different use cases and getting feedback?
Before writing any code for my SaaS for explaining code with AI, (with users from top companies), I asked people to give me code that they're interested in seeing explanations and I would return explanations manually and ask them to pick the best one in a blind test. I manually wrote explanations and ran early versions of the AI tool. Only when the AI tool started being better and converging, did I write a Discord bot for generating explanations and shared it with a small group of people who provided feedback on it. Only when that matured did I write everything else.
Today, Spartacus' method of getting data should be a google form, spreadsheet, and Notion space, with you personally performing all business logic, contacting people, and publishing things. Your tool of choice should be Zapier. Once things get repetitive- and you'll learn lots of things before they do– you can begin to automate the repetitive components of your manual operation using software tools, which you will eventually assemble into a fully autonomous application.
Airbnb's cofounders got its first hosts by knocking on people door-to-door. Meraki assembled their routers manually. Manual labor is the phase where you can learn things most adaptably, most quickly.
Besides, if you need to interactively test a complex user interface, you can use a GUI-based tool like Figma for Prototyping that allows you to create interactive prototypes and share them with users.
We intend to follow signals and focus our efforts where we're delivering the most measurable, unambiguous value.
People generally give more honest signals of demand when they're interacting with a project that has successfully retained ongoing users. By default, people will dishonestly say they would use or pay for something, because they like being nice. The market research phase is grueling and difficult because almost everyone lies to you to make you feel better.
Instead of being critical from the sidelines, why not join the Beta to help us in that discovery process?
I have joined the beta, and I provided feedback to your cofounder, but I'm not sure it was taken into account. I'm a coordination node of a 30-100 strong decentralized mutual aid network focused on AI alignment, and Spartacus lacks the features necessary for us to find it useful.
ampdot
5 months ago
@ampdot Furthermore, I've been monitoring the evolution of Spartacus since you first received the grant and I was the one who caused Tetra to apply for the ACX Grant in the first place. If there's a user community, onboarding link, or way to provide feedback on the website itself, I don't see it.
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
@ampdot, that's precisely what I did before applying for the ACX grant - using Airtable, Sendgrid, and simple intake forms to create a prototype, validate the core concept, and sufficient interest from a subset of my professional network to justify investing my time and money on this bet. It provided the framework for Tetra and me to join forces and start working together once we received the grant.
Feedback on that prototype made it clear most users would not trust a process where the administrator could see all participants' contact info and their activity before a campaign's success threshold was met - what would be the point of anonymity if I, an employee or a hacker, could see everything at a glance? We're trying to make something people feel safe using when there are actual risks to having your participation revealed prematurely. As per Tetra's thesis, it also became clear that UX/UI concerns impeded people from trusting the platform, so a minimum level of adherence to consumer expectations was needed.
So, we built the MVP, and since then, I've been putting all my efforts into doing precisely the kind of manual outreach and high-touch support you described to identify and publish case studies and success stories, which we hope will be a springboard for more publicity and growth.
You're correct - the cold start problem is hard. Unfortunately, neither of us has an extensive preexisting network of people begging to become early adopters or relationships with individuals who could make intros to high-profile users or agree to participate in pilots. I don't have an elite pedigree, technical track record, or reputation in online communities, so the user acquisition process is a grind from a baseline of near zero. The credibility signal of being an ACX grantee only goes so far. I can't wave a magic wand and get people to instantly respond to my emails and DMs. We've had to sift through a lot of the "polite but unserious" interest you mentioned. We welcome any help in this area.
I wasn't aware of any feedback you may have given earlier, but you or anyone else can contact us from the website or via our X account or substack.
ampdot
5 months ago
@JBraunstein Have you considered building it in Webflow with a small backend? It seems like the loop between you sending Tetra prototypes is impeding your ability to quickly iterate on UI/UX concepts.
UX/UI concerns impeded people from trusting the platform
This is just a suggestion, but have you found that a web app solves this? If not, you can implement a platform using new zero-knowledge cryptography (or ZK crypto for brevity) that allows a platform to match people without having any information on which projects are supported by which people. For example, you can use zero-knowledge cryptography to build a dating app / checkbox list where matches are only revealed if both parties check and the server has "zero knowledge" of who likes who.
Unfortunately, neither of us has an extensive preexisting network of people begging to become early adopters
This is not true, I have repeatedly begged Tetra for Spartacus to work closely with the mesh, a decentralized network of people working on solving alignment with significant activity and quantity to improve its internal coordination, whom I'm a coordination node for. Of course, we need specific features and a well-oiled workflow that you may or may not be able to provide.
or relationships with individuals who could make intros to high-profile users or agree to participate in pilots.
This is also not true– Tetra is one of the most prominent people in the rationality/EA space and gets recognized by multiple people at rationalist bay area and london parties.
ampdot
5 months ago
@ampdot Tetra is aware of and has been loosely part of the mesh (30-100 strong network of people working on alignment) for a long time and I think it would exciting to explore better ways to coordinate via Spartacus together. Unfortunately, it seems like the Spartacus team either isn't interested or lacked a sufficient amount of internal coordination.
ampdot
5 months ago
@JBraunstein The reason you're able to work with Tetra at all is because I went through a list of mesh members– Tetra included– and a list of grants, and encouraged Tetra to apply to ACX Grants.
ampdot
5 months ago
@JBraunstein Sorry, upon further reflection, I would like to change my tone. I'm confused that given the significant support Tetra has received from me and other members of the mesh, why you and her don't want to use it as a testbed for refining Spartacus, and I had assumed your priorities didn't align with testing on a community like the mesh. I often make the mistake of assuming other actors are omniscient or nearly so.
To you, Tetra may be a developer, but to me, Tetra is a community member with a well-known and strong reputation.
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
@ampdot This is helpful background information and provides context I wasn't fully aware of. I understand now why you may have taken the tone you did. We're coming from significantly different vantage points.
There's no doubt that the process of arriving where we are has taken longer than it could or would have for others— partially due to the constraints of our collaboration arrangement, timing and availability issues, the inefficiencies of asynchronous remote collaboration, the typical losses in translation between non-technical and technical partners, and some higher-than-expected learning curves for me. A relatively strict division of labor was also agreed to at the outset, which created additional bottlenecks.
I'm somewhat familiar with ZK architecture and have spoken to some folks associated with https://www.projectcallisto.org/, for example. But because A, to my knowledge, neither of us had the requisite expertise/knowledgebase to build on the framework, and B, to your earlier point, in the beginning, specific security architecture was a variable of unknown importance. Unless we were willing to pre-commit to building for only those use cases where ZK was table stakes, it would be less critical than validating other parts of the value proposition, and it could prematurely force path dependencies before getting sufficient data on what different kinds of users prioritized. I also had a preexisting bias against building on Web3 for various reasons I won't get into here.
You've raised plenty of valid concerns, some of which remain challenges while we successfully mitigate others. Our exchange reinforces the value of open communication, community engagement, and information exchange, which can only benefit the project.
Because of your personal connection to Tetra and familiarity with the space we're playing in, I'm open to taking this conversation offline if you'd like. jordan @ spartacus.app
ampdot
5 months ago
@JBraunstein I sent another email to that address a few days ago and also sent one to Tetra that Tetra said she forwarded to you.
Lucie Philippon
5 months ago
Spartacus is super interesting! Thanks for working on this. I've been enjoying the substack articles :)
I expect the base rate of success for software implementing novel coordination mechanisms to be quite low, and I'm unsure how much people saying they're interested in such a software translates into actual users. Do you have some early evidence that this project will succeed at facilitating some meaningful changes?
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
Thanks for your response, Lucie! We're building that evidence as we speak through closed cohort beta testing. We're aiming for a small handful of success stories in what we think are our most compelling use case categories and then use those as a springboard for broader marketing efforts. We've received interest from some high-profile people, but we can't publicly discuss those yet.
If we can show how spartacus works in one example case for which there are potentially thousands of other local correlates, there's no better way to persuade people with similar challenges that Spartacus is something they should use.
But there are a few known unknowns concerning how effective this platform can be and whether we can grow and sustain demand in a few niches vs. a broader range of scenarios. Two significant challenges are discovering the actual demand for non-financial collective action organizing.
1. Crowdfunding works very well, works on the same underlying concepts, and has a predictable and sustainable business model (for the biggest players). However, the market for people willing to pledge non-monetary support to campaigns is less legible, and how to monetize that kind of value enablement is not immediately apparent.
2. Even the most successful examples of Spartacus working does not necessarily lead to people using it frequently or repeatedly. Incredibly impactful campaigns might naturally be an ad hoc, situational phenomenon. We don't yet have features that lend to routine use, making a subscription model harder to justify.
The next step is to demonstrate how valuable Spartacus can be in a handful of high-profile scenarios. When we do that, the contours of our addressable market should come into higher relief.
wasabipesto
5 months ago
This seems like a technically interesting solution but extremely niche application. It will be difficult to get people to trust you with their anonymity for the most beneficial situations and for less privacy-critical situations many groups will default to the simpler solution of “text X person if you’re interested”. There might be some growth potential if the site can become a “platform” like Kickstarter or GoFundMe, but I’m not sure how that would work with your target applications.
What does success look like for you? Is there a path forward where this product exists but without a full-time support team?
Jordan Braunstein
5 months ago
Good questions. If people don't trust their information will be private and secure on our platform, that would defeat the whole purpose of this undertaking. We have to get that right; luckily, it's a solvable problem.
Providing temporary anonymity is vital because we hypothesize that cases where coordination would generate the most benefits tend to correlate with situations where bad equilibria are sticky because of incentive pressures that are not openly acknowledged.
When there's no risk or penalty for trying to organize something new, assurance contracts are a good framework, but anonymity isn't necessary for standard marketing and mobilization best practices on social media. Change.org would be sufficient.
As far as the potential for this to become a platform, that depends on whether you think most people could answer the following five questions affirmatively:
1. What about your workplace, school, community, or social setting do you wish you could change or a problem you want to fix?
Can you change it by yourself?
Do you think other people feel the same way as you do?
If enough people agreed with you and all decided to act together, could the change happen?
How many people would need to agree with you until you felt confident it could happen?