Timi Olotu's profile on Product Hunt | Product Hunt

Timi Olotu

Founder, òtító (Fighting Misinformation)

#668571@timi_olotuotito.io

Activity 12 Made 3 Hunted 8 Following 54 Followers

Upvotes (23)

òtító
Tools to crowdsource facts and fight misinformation
7
News
Have I Been Sold?
Check if your email address was sold without permission
52
Privacy
HubSpot Free Forms
Convert your visitors into leads and grow your business
19
Marketing
Prototypr.io
Daily design news, inspiration and deals
68
Design Tools
Spotify.me
Beautiful analytics on your Spotify listening habits 🎧
91
Web App
Muzzle
Silence embarrassing notifications while screensharing
178
Mac
Flawless App
Make your iOS apps look exactly like the expected design
112
iPhone
Tragic Design
The impact of bad product design and how to fix it
8
User Experience
Hacking Growth
The definitive playbook for growing your business
109
Marketing
Baremetrics Recover
Automated failed payment recovery for SaaS companies
20
Web App
Marvel for Sketch
Sync, play and record prototypes in Sketch!
22
Design Tools
WhatMarketersDo Podcast: The lowdown on social media user experience
What experiences do users expect from social platforms?
1
User Experience
WhatMarketersDo Podcast: The user experience of online advertising
Can we improve the user experience of online advertising?
3
Web App
UX and eCommerce storybook site
Use these UX principles to increase online sales
1
Web App
WhatMarketersDo podcast: UX Made Me a Marketing Sceptic
The tension between effective Marketing and good UX.
1
User Experience
Improve the UX of your website, app or prototype with a free trial of WhatUsersDo
Make a big step towards understanding your customers.
0
Web App
Be Good to Your Users Newsletter
Weekly top articles from our blog & around the world.
1
Email
A Dissection of Conversion Rate Optimisation and UX
How can we resolve any perceived tension between UX and CRO?
3
Sales
Hacking Growth (by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown of GrowthHackers)
The must-read GrowthHackers playbook
1
User Experience
28 Expert Opinions on User-centred Product Management
28 Product Managers share their expert opinions
2
User Experience

Joined on September 28th, 2016

Followed Topics

Analytics, Marketing, Artificial Intelligence

17 points

Comments

💬

Hey, everyone, this project has been a real labour of love so far. But, aside from growth in numbers, feedback from people like you (positive and negative) is a big part of what keeps me going. So, please, take a look and let me know what you think!

1mo ago

💬

@mickc79 thanks for your comment. Below are my responses to your very important questions. 1.) What was the thinking behind the difficult to pronounce and difficult to spell brand name? In a nutshell, brand differentiation. There are personal/aesthetic drives—for example, "òtító" looks like a palindrome (although it isn't one, strictly speaking) and it means "truth" in Yoruba (one of my native tongues). But, ultimately, I decided to bet on it because it stands out and I thought it would get people curious (precisely because it's unusual). The corpus of branding is full of unusual names that were never supposed to work... but did. So far, so good—I get many good comments about the name (mainly, people are curious about what it means and from which language it's derived). Plus, it's actually very easy to pronounce—just follow your gut and don't be intimidated by the accents :) 2.) What’s to stop the people from either “side” (for want of a better word) from continually moderating each other out? In short, nothing will stop them. They will try very hard to do that. But, I'm a believer in the concept of "anti-fragile" systems, as popularised by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Instead of trying to stop people's instinctual drive to game the system (which always fails), I tried to construct a system that will benefit from their attempts to do so. The first layer of defence is that it is impossible know by whom a claim/topic has been posted—so you can't target certain ideas because you don't like the people who posted them. But, hypothetically, you can target an idea you don't like, regardless of who posted it. So, if we assume that some left wing people might unfairly vote against some facts simply because those facts support right wing ideas, then we can also assume that some right wing people will also unfairly vote for those facts (simply because those assertions support their ideas). But those people will cancel each other out (roughly speaking). The real difference will be made by the outliers on both sides who actually scrutinise the information and vote/contribute based on the evidence. You might be tempted to dismiss the effectiveness of this dynamic but it's actually well demonstrated in politics, academia and science (for example). It is naturally occuring (rather than artificially imposed). It is the basis of the concept of "institutionalised disconfirmation". Many scientists/academics do not keep their biases in check, so they miss insights they're intellectually capable of seeing. However, the few who are able to better analyse the information objectively, discover new insights and bring those to the table—and that drives the entire field forward. It's why "germ theory" succeeded even though the majority was against it. And it's why "heliocentrism" died and Galileo's ideas prevailed (even though he represented a minority view). It's also why the concept of "swing states" is so key in US politics, for example (it's not the partisan that decide but those who can be swayed using information). The second layer of defence is that the platform records all activities by each user (e.g. which claims they add, how they vote on sources and how other people vote on their sources). If a user consistently votes in a way that runs counter to the votes of the highest-rated contributors (and mirrors the voting behaviour of the lowest-rated contributors), that user's votes start to become less impactful (in terms of weighting). If they continue to make low-quality contributions, their permissions might be restricted. It is very difficult to game this because no one knows for whom's claims they're voting or how individual users have voted. No one knows whom the highest ranked users are, so they can't simply devise workarounds (at least for now). This feature is still in progress and we're even looking at things like a "polarity score". To illustrate, imagine there are 2 groups, "A" and "B", and they disagree on almost everything. But there's person "X", such that groups "A" and "B" both tend to upvote contributions by "X" at rates of 90% and above (which puts "X" in the 99.99th percentile, in terms of quality of contributions). This suggests that "X" contributes quality content, regardless of ideological leaning. If person "Z", whose voting patterns usually match those of group "A", suddenly deviates from that pattern by consistently downvoting contributions by person "X" (even though group "A" does the opposite and person "X" is otherwise highly validated by all user cohorts), that could be a signal that person "Z" is simply ideologically opposed to the information being presented by person "X". There's still lots of testing to be done, however. These are problems of massive scale and we don't have that yet (although, we will soon, I hope). What we want to avoid in these situations is using data signals to make permanent, unilateral decisions. So, rather than simply banning a user, we drastically reduce the impact of their votes (and let them know about it). Or rather than removing content, we hide it, show a warning that the community thinks it's misleading and let users choose to view the content. KEY POINT: none of these measures are foolproof. If it were simple, it would be solved. But, I believe we can make significant progress based on the two overarching approaches identified above: a.) "Blind transparency" (i.e. no one knows who's doing what, even though everyone can see what's being done) b.) "Perpetual recalibration" (i.e. the impact of an actor's action is based on a constant evaluation of the impact of previous actions by the same actor, relative to the impact of all actions by all actors). Hope my somewhat philosophical/abstract explanation of the formal logic underlying the design of the platform doesn't bore you (but I think sharing it is critical to properly answering your question). Please let me know if you have any more questions, thoughts or feedback!

9mo ago

💬

@harsh_gelda Thank you!

9mo ago

Collections