Banjooie
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Okay, so your whole..cell phone app thing didn't take off.

Have you considered just making a website about this? I think at the very least dudes might like a website to be all 'Man, I really hate Proctor and Gamble, how do I buy products that aren't from them?'

Also I'm making this thread because it's been like what, four years since you made it (I mean, QR codes weren't even common when you went out on that magnificent venture) and it's probably an idea that's more useful now as we approach some kind of alarming company singularity?

ErikH2000
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Banjooie wrote:
Have you considered just making a website about this? I think at the very least dudes might like a website to be all 'Man, I really hate Proctor and Gamble, how do I buy products that aren't from them?'

It sounds like a good idea, and I think there is a way to do it and have it take off. But I don't feel like I'm the right person to pull it off. I'm better at projects with more of a creative bent. Other people are better at raising funds, networking in the right circles, and getting people to rally behind ideas.

That said, I think there is a lot of room for a user-friendly, accessible website that accepts rating on companies and products based on ethical principles. You have to worry about legal issues. You have to worry about being bullied and threatened by people with a lot of money. As soon as the site became relevant by affecting people's buying habits, the corporate knives would come out. If you look at the history of consumer criticism sites that targeted specific companies/products, you see a lot of takedowns, cease&desists, and lawsuits.

I've gone back and forth on the idea a few times. There is even a domain I registered a few years back called "youareevil.com". My thought was just to give the rating system a more fun, negative, jokey bent. I played with having company logo inforgraphics covered in a dirty brown smudgy substance. And as more people with belief systems similar to yours click "fling" next to the company, its precious logo gets more shit on it. (That's the kind of thing you can do only if you stay anonymous and the hosting is in an untouchable country.) I would love to see crap-coated logos of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile standing next to each other for comparison. If the site were fun like that, then people would get into it. "Ethical Spender" was not fun. Even the name sounds as enjoyable as doing a really thorough job of sorting out recycling.

But I lost confidence in my ability to keep my own personal motivation up and to attract the resources needed to complete the project. I am still very interested in the idea. And I'll say that if someone else will try a similar project, I am interested in helping and potentially joining the effort.

-Erik


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Jatopian
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You want people to be jokey about it? You want the criticism reduced to something so crude and nuance-free that a kid might just go on there and spend an hour doing it for fun and not as criticism at all?

I get that you want lots of people to get into it, but sounding like being good at sorting recycling is really perfectly fine. Because your target audience is going to be the kind of person who is conscientious about sorting their recycling. The kind of person who think an Ethical Spender would be a swell thing to be.

Anyway, the revolutionary part as I understood it was being able to use your smartphone to do it. Scan a bar code, get product and company info. Maybe this info would be customized to what you actually care about, so you don't get notified that the food was genetically modified but you do get notified if it was made with child labor. Sounds like a pretty viable app, and like the hard part would be the database behind it.

Just having a website... eh. Pretty sure that function is already served, though perhaps each individual cause is on its own website and an aggregator for the data would be nice.

I'm not sure what you fear from corporations. Last I checked, libel laws in the US require that a claim be demonstrably false.

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Dischorran
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Jatopian wrote:
I'm not sure what you fear from corporations. Last I checked, libel laws in the US require that a claim be demonstrably false.

SLAPP suits would tend not to care.

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ErikH2000
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Jatopian wrote:
You want people to be jokey about it? You want the criticism reduced to something so crude and nuance-free that a kid might just go on there and spend an hour doing it for fun and not as criticism at all?

No, not exactly.

And it's not like I have one complete idea that is chosen and ready. That's part of the reason why the revised idea did not launch.

There were other sites that had an orderly, objective process of rating things by ethical standards. They had no appeal. They were ignored. I haven't checked to see if they even exist anymore. These are the kinds of sites that get grant money and large donations, but super low irrelevant traffic.

Then there are blogs, political rants, propaganda style sites, rallies, boycotts. This is where the energy is. But it is detached from an underlying reporting structure and it doesn't address the scattered, helpless feeling people have about making purchasing decisions in an ethically consistent way.

I didn't figure out the right design. I don't have it now. I'm not planning to build anything related to what I've said. It might be that my ideas of what people on the Internet want to do are wrong. I do feel that to be successful with an ethics-based rating system needs a different approach than what I tried earlier.

Anyway, the revolutionary part as I understood it was being able to use your smartphone to do it. Scan a bar code, get product and company info. Maybe this info would be customized to what you actually care about, so you don't get notified that the food was genetically modified but you do get notified if it was made with child labor. Sounds like a pretty viable app, and like the hard part would be the database behind it.

The apps are already there. If anyone has the database and evidence (traffic) that people care about the data. I talked to this guy, Alexander Muse about integrating rating data into ShopSavvy some years back. He just said "I'm interested. Let me know when you have something." I had talks with other mobile app devs too. In general, if there is data to use and they can see a way to integrate usefully into their apps, they are interested.

Just having a website... eh. Pretty sure that function is already served, though perhaps each individual cause is on its own website and an aggregator for the data would be nice.

And that is a problem that I worked to address with Ethical Spender by writing a standard for decorating the HTML for consumption by a web crawler that aggregates the data. I think the approach was fine, but it needs a lot of people working on it.

And I don't say this to argue with you... if there is a general website/aggregator now that is collecting ethics-based reviews with a reporting structure, it's of interest to me to know about it.

I'm not sure what you fear from corporations. Last I checked, libel laws in the US require that a claim be demonstrably false.

You need to have money to defend yourself against bad lawsuits too.

____________________________
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dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)