Etha is a real-time representation of news and peoples opinions on specific subjects and policies. Users on the platform can vote and debate and see a bigger picture of data analytics and how the world shares their views.
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Maker
I'm Tatiana, and am working in public relations and marketing for Etha! I joined because Etha's bottom line is inspiring to me, I think we should all thrive to be as unbiased as we can be.
❓A common FAQ about Etha: Why is all the content focussed on Ukraine-Russia right now? ❤️🇺🇦🙏🇷🇺
✅Answer: Ukraine and Russia have been in a conflict for the past couple of months as of now. Some news articles/videos that have been published show content that is not from the respective time period. It is during times like this that truth suffers. “The truth is the first casualty of a war”. We are trying to reach people and gain grass roots level insights as to the developments that have been going on in the affected areas.
This helps us understand the different faces of the same coin. Collecting data from various demographics and ideologies also helps us understand the happenings at a more intricate level, allow us to hold the leaders responsible and provide honest information to the masses to safeguard them from the emotional narratives of the media that sway them to either extreme end of the spectrum.
@ryanholiday @ethankurz the media is everything. We have read your books and have implemented some in full swing! More to come and would love to hear what you think about the concept!
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@tatiana_lima Hi! Greets from Ukraine. Not happy with the word "conflict" for this war. But anyway. I've upvoted the product and love the idea very much. Though after a few months of living in this world of post-truth, fake news and cyber attacks on media, I'm curious: do you think it'll be possible to detect if some group of people will strategically upvote or downvote some content? Not talking ab hacking, there it's always a risk, but ab hid "lobbying" inside of the app?
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Maker
@tatiana_lima @natalka_chekh thanks for responding. Would you happen to know a word that might be better to use instead of conflict? I know it's much worse from what it seems on the current news media right now. None of us in the US have much insight to what's actually going on in there, other that the horrid imagery that we see :/ We wanted to give this to those in Ukraine, that might be able to share their stories of people and their ACTUAL situations, as opposed to the moderation of the media/web. It would be super. helpful and powerful to give to those there, and if you know anyone or a community that we can share this with, we can build this product with them! I am sure they have many things to say about this entire situation
answer to your second question: YES, 100% we have found extremely creative ways to go about this. Think of it as 'anti-propaganda' software, 'anti-terrorist' or terrorist tracking software and same with the strategic patterns that the AI can figure out the rest when we train it. There is a lot that does go into it, but I would be happy to jump on a call and explain more with my technical team and cofounders @ethaofficial @dimitrysf (which is actually from Ukraine). Any more questions i would be happy to address! Please take care!
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Maker
@tatiana_lima @natalka_chekh we also have 10 hackers on our team. We want this to be a true grassroots effort and allow to give those a voice against the 'oligarchs' that run things. We can really build a digital fortress, especially when it all comes on the blockchain in the future. AI + Blockchain + ML = extremely difficult to manipulate. The crowdsourcing feature will be able to make our AI's 95% accuracy rate up to 99.99% accurate, by disproving stories and leaving it down to just the people talking. It will make people very careful of what they say and what they promise to the public.
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@tatiana_lima @nicole_ogloza thanks for the detailed response! It really has helped me to understand how these propaganda acts can be prevented on the app.
To be honest I don't know the right word for this situation. Here we use "war" or "Russian invasion". But I'm not sure there is anything more politically correct or neutral for description.
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@nicole_ogloza I think I can at least try to help you with finding Ukrainian community for this task. Where we can continue this convo?
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Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get it.
- The links are to sites like Newsmax and GatewayPundit that are basically fanzines rather than journalism. Fine, but the rating system seems to approve of them. Not sure why that's useful?
- 'News Reals' and 'Trending' are almost the same content for me.
- Nothing has noticeably changed in 3 hours, so it doesn't feel live or 'newsy'.
- 'More features coming soon.. Stay tuned!!' looks kinda unprofessional.
Don't get me wrong - I think the problem this is trying to solve is huge and complex, and I don't want to be negative, but it's just not evident to me what the AI / crowd sourcing is doing to help.
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Maker
Hi @alexmwalker
We are currently uploading statements only twice a day, you might see new statements show up as soon as we update them for the day. We are also continuously collecting loads of data and a single statement can correspond to multiple sources on the internet. We will soon have the capabilitites and the analytics to be able to represent the various narratives that are being pushed bby the media houses and how they affect people's perception.
We try to understand how the general public is responding to the statements made by politicians and the issues that they support. We atry to understand how different news articles would affect the people's responses and if some published articles disturbs this equilibrium, we can suspect it to be a possible source of misinformation.
We will be adding daily briefings feature to our applicaiton that would allow people to consume news which is devoid of all these emotional narratives and is based purely on factful information.
We are trying to build a social platform where people can engage in constructive conversations, hold politicians accountable and be able to see the analysis of current trends, in an environment that is devoid of misinformation
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@ethaofficial I appreciate the feedback. I'll look forward to the updates to get a broader sense of what you're doing. As I said, this is a tough problem to solve, so I'd be pleased to see you do well.
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@alexmwalker @ethaofficial How you detect the disturbance seems really innovative, and to provide this all in a transparent way seems even more.
It must be just because I don’t understand AI so well, but could you explain a bit more about what kind of technologies you use? Are they currently working only in English? People in Europe might have somewhat different opinions about politicians' ratings, for example. Will the AI be able to detect which opinions are fact-based?
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Maker
@ethaofficial @alexmwalker Thanks so much! means a lot to us! We want to relaunch this product in about 6 months on here and should have a boat load of features coming your way!! :D super excited for what's currently on the roadmap :D
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Maker
@ethaofficial @riia_jarvenpaa AI, ML, blockchain, several of advanced mechanisms to provide balanced equilibrium through algos
Everything only works in english for right now. It will take a bit of time to redeploy these in other languages but would love to incorporate that as soon as the AI is tried and tested.
AI will be able to detect fact-based solutions as well. Even down to how much % biased an article already is based on what side or party they fall on. When we reapply this to other countries it will be that countries politicians and people on it, not seeing what's going on in the US (though everyone can look into a different country on the app) for a more world news type feel. For right now, it's just US centric. Dev will take a bit of time to complete this and multiple countries in the future, but everyone from now can comment and vote/share until we turn on our localization effect and take all these factors into account.
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Maker
Hi, I am Samson a SEO consultant at Etha, I started working with Nicole and Aastik late 2021 and the experience has been great
A common FAQ about Etha: Why are the founders qualified to make this startup successful? What about the team? 🏆
✅Answer: (Nicole): prior to becoming the CEO at Etha, she was a deployment consultant for Workday in government-education and communication systems at WarnerMedia. She got a broad sense of how the media operates and saw first hand the importance of polarization to companies in the various media spaces in regards to the creation and release of information to us, consumers. She also had a startup with a past SpaceX employee on advanced jet bridge engineering startups and to me, she is a true jack of all trades! (Aastik): has an incredible depth of computer science knowledge and being a lead developer at 4 successful startups in India. He has managed high-quality software solutions for companies and has been building innovative technology-based solutions to elevate communities in India in the information space, and is not the CTO of Etha. (Dimitry): is a 6x entrepreneur and had over 3 successful exits in his career. He was a past business leader in prestigious firms like IBM, AT&T and Cisco in the areas of sales, marketing, engineering, and AI! (The rest of the team): Given our extremely diverse backgrounds, not only culturally, but through professional skillsets, we cover everything from PR, marketing, AI, data science, and more! Some of us have powered through and broke glass ceilings, others have been able to make it work in the most disadvantaged settings in our own countries. But one thing I know that we all have in common, is our intense passion and drive to make a system like Etha work. We all look to be represented equally through culture, race, history, ideology and how our countries really are pierced by true, on the ground citizen journalists working towards a common good.
@davetisch sharing with you because I know this is something you might love to be a part of!
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Transparency in news is a great thing. The fact that you have been able to compile relevant pieces of information without linking to mass media or corporate social media platforms is amazing. Is this totally crowd-sourced at the moment, or do you use AI to find the trending items on the net?
Would it be interesting to know how your crowd-sourcing works - are people participating as a hobby? You mention that your team is culturally diverse; it would be interesting to know if you plan to expand the scope of your news item sources to other countries than the US and to include some liberal websites also?
I am also curious about how the ratings for politicians are calculated. Do they include both crowd-sourced votes and sentiment analysis of content that is curated on the website?
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Maker
@riia_jarvenpaa thanks! we currently have everything manually done, but are working on the automation for the collection of the stories...Right now, all of the stories we have are hand picked just like other news sites that compare things, but that is not the goal.
We want the AI to be able to compare that statement across multiple articles (or showcase similar statements) across the web to see how many times it was mentioned on the web, then track down how it is narrated overtime. the AI will be working with people, and the AI will have a 95% accuracy rate after 2 years (which we will be looking at a new world then). Crowdsourcing will be able to prove stories and events that existed (based on geolocation) and showcase things that weren't spun on a narrative! That would probably make everything almost 98% correct. The only thing we can't fix is people lying.
Crowdsourcing: Let's say you got to your favorite political person's rally to support them. Let's say there are 50 people using Etha at the event. People can record the full event or most parts of it, upload it and show what happened at the event in 50 different versions and then compare it to Fox/CNN news and show things that actually happened and how they manipulate stories to be spun. With 50 people showing and verifying the whole event, people can come to a natural realization instead of seeing polarizing stories that are currently out there. Happy to share more over a call/;linkedin becuase there are a lot of different things to it, especially in the form of visualizations that are in play.
Diversity: yes, we want to expand to the whole world! A lot of countries are now taking after the same US media tactics and this can be catastrophic if it goes too far. Reason being why so many things are getting banned these days. I would say that India would be next after the US and then onward! Just takes a lot due to all the deployments and implementations. We wanted to perfect it in the US before reapplying. I am sure everyone can benefit from it!
Ratings: yes they include both. it has a lot more factors into account as well (proprietary)
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Maker
👋 Hey everyone, I’m Nicole, co-founder and CEO of https://etha.one
🙈🙉🙊 How we got here
We built Etha to restore people's faith in the democratic process. In recent years, the middle-ground between political ideologies has been disappearing, leading to a loss of shared reality and unprecedented polarization. Etha wants to give back control to the narratives to the people. We are introducing extreme transparency into our news media and accountability for our politicians. Our social media interface will use the power of crowdsourcing and AI to limit bias, find and track stories from the origination source, and allows users to express opinions and rate politicians. As keen observers of our political process, we realized that transparency and accountability elements were sorely missing from news media, so we set out to create a company, that does just that!
In March, 2020 I was working at Warner Bros as a systems engineer, implementing large Workday communications systems, and all of a sudden I'd lost my job, and a startup that I had going with a colleague of mine from SpaceX, (losing a $32 million dollar contract over night) - Thanks Covid! Dream job and startup, vanished, with myself living in a car, wondering what to do next. 🤷🏻♀️
I later met @ethaofficial (Aastik) one year later, and he became Etha's technical cofounder. With our complimentary backgrounds, we had started on an ambitious journey to create a better world in which we live. Ever since June of 2021, we became full time, and have acquired over 30+ volunteer team members, each adding over 20+ hours of work, and added @dimitrysf as our cofounding COO. We are located from across the world, in 16 countries, from all walks of life. What a better way to represent the media, than with such an AMAZING, dedicated and diverse team rewriting the script 📝!?!
🖖🖖🏻🖖🏼🖖🏽🖖🏾🖖🏿 Say 'Hi' Team Etha!
@savannah_fortis @ethaofficial @samora @daevor @dimitrysf @migue_donatien @shanza_khan15 @ojelola_ojelabi @arronston @enuenweisu_richard @austin_s1 @daniel_matheo @ayushkumar @tatiana_lima @timothy_ferner
🔨⚙️ Where we are now
As our team grows stronger, we are now focused on the next stage: giving it to the public! Since we are intensely passionate about changing misinformation and polarization around us, we all want the world to give inputs and share this idea to make it a product of a life time. Etha builds for our futures and keeps everyone in mind - those misrepresented, struggling, and even trying to make sense of this complicated world.
🚀 Etha's features
✅ LeaderQ score ratings: the overall, aggregated public rating of a politicians personal performance; ranked through AI and human crowdsourced ratings -think of this as a report card!
✅ Real-time public sentiment analytics on politician/statement rating; acts as a reports card for politicians and issues
✅ Main user feed of intelligently curated crowdsourced videos and news to vote and debate on - users can create general user profiles to comment and debate on news stories
🏁 Coming Soon
✅ Origination Source - our powerful AI will be able to find the first time a statement was ever originated on the web. For instance, if a story was picked up by a national media house, most come from smaller blogs (with pranksters begging for attention). The AI can track the statements path and how it ended up as a headline of national news!
✅ Daily AI sourced briefings: when a user signs up for an account, they will receive daily briefings i.e. the current trending news. The users would be able to browse through these news articles and interact with them, which would add to the analytics of the daily briefing.
✅ Timelines - have a timeline of when a story first originated, and track narratives and patterns in news, while comparing it to the current narratives of the media.
🌰 In a Nutshell:
Our users, will be apart of a community that serves as an interactive news and social media hub that will be able to bring people from different ideologies in order to see a larger perspective of how the world represents itself through transparency into topics, with a powerful AI that will be able to find the origination source of the first story and how it became national news (whether its overly exaggerated or untrue), and have an additional feature for crowdsourcing videos to prove a story EXISTS.
🎳 Hang out with our team and learn from our stories on what powers our team on Launch Day! We will be free to answer any questions and open to any thoughts on how we can improve our product! Thanks @producthunt and @rrhoover for making such a great community to share our vision.
🎁 🆓 PH DEAL (Free Lifetime Advertising)
Use 'EARLYADOPTERADS' as a discount code in the next 48 hours, and as a first user from PH, you'll get free LIFETIME access to post ads on our network (as soon as our ads feature goes live). We already have 4,000 active users, so the last 1,000 user sign-ups ONLY get this deal! This is great for future entrepreneurs and small business owners that want to ditch the expensive social media and google ads space. We want to give back to small communities and businesses and give them a fair shot and getting the word our their about their awesome products and companies, for a fraction of the cost! Also, did I mention we are FREE?
Please leave feedback and thanks for checking us out! 🙌
🎊 BONUS: to learn more about how we founded the Etha, check out the story here: https://docs.google.com/document...
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Right. Feedback?
I'm going to break down the view from one user's experience.
1) It's been 24 hours since the Etha ProductHunt launch and the same Matt Gaetz story - quoting a 10-day-old story - is still at the top of the feed. I believe @ethaofficial assured us that they 'currently uploading statements only twice a day'. With news being released every second, that's hardly an aggressive target, but not seemingly met.
2) I clicked on 'Disagree' on that Gaetz post and it changed the approval rating from 50% to 40%. That's the voting pool size?
3) Regardless of the pool size, I can't see how a popularity vote solves the misinformation problem. It's not like QAnon can't vote. Is there anywhere where we see the results of these 'LeaderQ scores' and 'advanced AI technologies' working?
4) Your landing page mentions 'participate in free, open, and global conversations with healthy discourse'. Where are these conversations?
5) These UI units used on your landing page (link below) don't seem to be your actual AI tech acting on real-world data, but rather Figma/Sketch mockups of what you'd like to see. I say that because the same quote is used for three different non-existent people. Isn't that advanced lorem ipsum rather than a product?
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6) How does this ranking system (link below) work? Green seems to be '100% trustworthy' and a full-screen bar graph. Yellow is only 65% trustworthy but a 95% bar graph. Red is '100% UNtrustworthy' but 85% screen-width. Or are you saying Green is '100% Misinformation' as the label says? Very confusing and eyebrow-raising for data-nerds. 
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7) The sidebar quote says 'With an innovative fact-checking process for an extra layer of accountability', yet Shanza (@shanza_khan15) insists 'Etha is not a fact-checking system'. Mixed messaging.
I could go on, but that would get tiresome.
Surely with this app, you are saying 'Identifying trustworthy information is HARD! - Trust US to help you with that problem'. Nicole says she wants to restore people's faith.
But then you present untrustworthy mockups of made-up data points as part of your pitch for trustworthiness, and no real evidence of progress on the stated problem.
I'm not sure if you just weren't ready to launch, but color me skeptical.
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6) How does this ranking system (link below) work? Green seems to be '100% trustworthy' and a full-screen bar graph. Yellow is only 65% trustworthy but a 95% bar graph. Red is '100% UNtrustworthy' but 85% screen-width. Or are you saying Green is '100% Misinformation' as the label says? Very confusing and eyebrow-raising for data-nerds. ![]()
7) The sidebar quote says 'With an innovative fact-checking process for an extra layer of accountability', yet Shanza (@shanza_khan15) insists 'Etha is not a fact-checking system'. Mixed messaging.
I could go on, but that would get tiresome.
Surely with this app, you are saying 'Identifying trustworthy information is HARD! - Trust US to help you with that problem'. Nicole says she wants to restore people's faith.
But then you present untrustworthy mockups of made-up data points as part of your pitch for trustworthiness, and no real evidence of progress on the stated problem.
I'm not sure if you just weren't ready to launch, but color me skeptical.Report
Maker
@ethaofficial @alexmwalker Thanks for the feedback. This is super helpful. This is just our MVP, our official launch will be sometime in Oct. We just wanted to get the official feedback and validate this idea before we concentrate on a lager launch :) the next one would take all of the feedback into account from here and users
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Maker
@alexmwalker We really appreciate the feedback and will continuously work towards it. The issue with the data update happened because of a broken pipeline, whihc caused duplication of data in the server. We have resolved that issue as of today. We are updating statements twice a day on our platform but the news statements are continuously fetched and processed by the system. The system is responsible for fetching the news articles and getting the politician's statements automatically from the articles. We are curretly working on improving our data collection system, that would allow us to mark the different narratives and biasness depicted in different news articles. This would help us inform the users better as well as help us gain insights into what the users feel about the topics and the politician's in question.
The whole advanced Ai technology that can pin point misinformation is still under progress and would take about 3 years to be perfected with a 95% accuracy. This is because, we need to develop other systems that help us understand the various topics in the news, eg. covid vaccines and how different narratives or same narratives from different politicians affect the audience responses. We will also be taking sentiment data from other social networks and interent as well. This would help us establish a balance between the latest news being produced and people's reactions to it. If any element in this balanced environment causes disturbances in an unfavourable manner, we can pinpoint it as a source of misinformation.
In addition to this, I highly apologize for the mixed messaging you might have experienced because of our website. We are working on the copywriting to adhere to our current cause that will grow out into the larger cause. The whole website will be revamped and the process has already started.
We assure you that the your experience with Etha will improve from here on out.
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Maker
Hi
I am Aastik Saini, the CTO for Etha. Nicole and I started etha because of our mutual frustrations with the current news media. Our vision is to provide people a sense of responsibility and belonging in the political domain and develop an interactive way to consume the news.
❓A common FAQ about Etha: How will we solve misinformation? 🧮
✅Answer: Etha’s goal is to hold politicians accountable while mitigating the spread of information. We achieve this by providing users with the current happenings in the news and understanding how they agree, disagree or comment on those statements. We understand the various narratives that are put out by various media houses and analyze them to understand what type of bias is being introduced by the articles. Our proprietary AI will be able to detect the originating/ sources of misinformation by understanding correlations between what the media puts out and how people react to politician’s statements and other topics in the news. This would reform the way we look at the media and introduce transparency into a new system. @naval curious what you think about the idea? Would love to hear feedback if possible, given your interest! You have inspired us!
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Ok. Seems like you've launched heavier on the 'M' and not so much on the 'V' and 'P'.
I still can't envisage how you wedge yourself in between a person happily ensconced in their 'bias silo' and the content they are happily consuming. Everyone *else* needs this product because everyone else is bias - except us, right? But that's your problem to solve.
I'll keep an eye out for the next updates.
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@alexmwalkerIt I have to say the information you've provided has been a bit confusing for me as well, just from a practical standpoint. It is just unclear to me how a platform will manage both misinformation and ensure the right to speak without limitations at the same time when the discussion is related to values.
But anyway, I think something definitely should be done to improve the current media scene. I wish you good luck at @ethaofficial, there is definitely a lot to do in the field!
Nevertheless, it might be wise to consider how people here in Europe feel if you state that the news and politicians are all spreading the same news and ignoring something very important about Ukraine. The Senate in the US just approved a bill unanimously to give Ukraine more help, calling the "conflict" as bloofy invasion and war. So I was not sure what you mean by saying that we should see the other side of the coin, or hear from the grassroots what's going on in Ukraine.
Of course, I don't know how the people in the US in general feel and what kind of misinfo about the topic you have had to deal with, this was just my opinion from the neighbour of Russia.
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