Show HN: JuryNow – Get an anonymous instant verdict from 12 real people

For Jury, I would give a "skip question" option. I found one relating to Christianity that I had _no_ idea what the "correct" answer would be based on the two options.

I thought clicking "Ask a new question" then going right back into Jury Duty would give me a new question, but I landed on the same one.

I think the asker providing the two valid responses is flawed. It doesn't allow the "jury" to draw their own conclusion, or provides leading answers (one about "is it rude" to eat by themselves when they're socially exhausted in a work context -- one is "yes they would be offended", the other "no they won't be" -- well, they certainly may be but it is your right to eat alone, so the answer could have been "they may, but you need to take care of yourself").

Interesting, fun. Suggestion:

I really miss not seeing the results.

After answering several questions, I really wanted to see what the final jury decision was. I saw a question from a father asking about leaving his assets to his children. I would want to know what the other 11 random people selected (for various reasons).

Without this feature, I think I might start to lose interest because it'll start to feel like I'm clicking into the empty, voiceless void.

I'm using Firefox on Android. For me, it showed a question and two answers, but all attempts to select an answer failed.

The big problem is kinda the same as what happens in push polls -- in that they ask misleading or suggestive questions trying to boil the issue down to a good and bad answer.

The reality for many of these questions is pretty complex.

I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but I'm saying forcing users to choose on some topics aren't black and white.

It's maybe worthwhile getting information on things like people who aren't knowledgeable, people who don't care or have no preference, or people who don't want to answer because the answers are skewed towards one side.

> diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices

If the userbase becomes equally-ish distributed around the world, for many questions, this wouldn't be very useful.

Especially when you only get a yes/no answer. People can give you the same answer for opposite reasons.

Should I invite 400 people to my wedding?

12xNo

1 from countries where this is too many, 11 from countries where this is too few.

(and it depends on who is up, timezones and all)

You were hoping for a No, because you can't afford 400 guests, and now you think the world agrees with you. Wrong.

With a well-crafted question, this can be mitigated. But I doubt the average user will be willing to put the effort.

First congrats on launching, from personal experience that's the hard part.

Are there filters or monitoring for the more violent or maleficent types of things that people have a habit of gravitating towards? Depending on the number of people online and the balance, I could easily see groups jumping on and choosing the negative or harmful choice for lolz

It's really unsatisfying as a 'juror' to not see the 'verdict'.

It's not objective, because the questions are biased.

It's really just an (I assume) real-time online opinion poll with a low sample size.

After asking a question, I was 'juror' for the same question approximately 10 times in a row.

I don't know. All of this smells fishy. Clearly noone has worked 16 years on this. The whole description is odd. Made by a new HN account. The thing barely works. Sometimes you get stuck in the same question loop. Sometimes buttons are huge.

Is it possible that this is some form of clickjacking site?

It just gets stuck on the same question with badly formatted boxes and does nothing if I click either of them.

Look, this is good entertainment, you should own up to that and enough with the noble purpose stuff:

> I built JuryNow because I wanted to create a truly objective place to get outside opinions that were not from my peer group, but from 12 people in 12 different countries, different ages, professions, cultures, a truly diverse global objective jury with no algorithms.

You don't collect demographics, and couldn't verify them anyway, so this game doesn't give insight into those dynamics. And the result is not more objective than a social media consensus.

That doesn't mean it isn't fun and even maybe useful in collecting one's thoughts, so go with that.

Would love to be able to offer a nuanced answer, you could still give the questioner 12 answers from people who accepted/responded to framing.

I’d also like to see such responses.

I’d also like to skip.

I’d also like to see my past questions and results, and results for at least questions I recently responded to.

Brilliant idea. To make it more accurate:

- Don't force people to participate in jury duty when waiting for jury answer. Many of them will just click random answers.

- Provide "I don't know/Skip" as an answer. Otherwise the options are "Pick a random" and "Logout"

- Allow jury to write text feedback or at least give them a button saying "All provided answers are wrong / NA / Fallacy / ... "

- "your verdict is simulated by AI" if there aren't enough people logged in. Don't do that. I have no interested in that answer.

I asked “ Toddlers should be allowed to be licensed to operate a motor vehicle.” with yes/no answers.

It errors out with “ Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it.”

I actually saw this in your previous HN post and tried it out - it's a great improvement to replace the email/password with a captcha, since I anyways filled out a fake email and I'm sure most people would do the same. Super cool concept, congratulations on launching it!

>> if there are fewer than 13 people playing (and it only just launched last week and that was just on Reddit!) then a popup will appear saying your verdict is simulated by AI. But this is just a TEMPORARY feature with the MVP. As soon as there are regular players, it will be permanently dismantled and we will celebrate the power of collective human intelligence!

Congratulations for a great idea and a fun game, but AFAICT there is no way to stop participants from plugging in an LLM to your site and having the LLM read questions and make decisions. For example, someone might do this to cheat their jury duty and get decisions from others without having to personally invest time and effort.

I don't know what you can do about this. Do you have any ideas?

Interesting idea. While waiting for my verdict I was asked the same question (and provided the same answer) over and over. Was expecting a bunch of different questions, rather than the same questions, repeated.

If I report a question, I should skip to the next one. Why do I have to answer what I consider to be a bad or unfair question?

If you’re waiting on a response there’s no way to get to the next question besides answering it.

Congrats on the launch! Very nice idea! Looking forward when more people are playing so I get answers from real people. While I was waiting, I had to answer the same question multiple times. Is this by design?

Fun idea, grabbed my attention right away.

As a follow up, I'd guide people on asking questions. More context = better answers.

For example, I joined a jury. The question was "Should I go to Belarus?" That's so vague, it doesn't even feel helpful for me to answer. I would much rather the question have said something like "I've always wanted to go to Belarus, but my rent is also due in a week. I only have enough money for one. Where should I spend my money?"

That at least gives me something to work with and weigh in on.

I always imagined a system like this could be used for a larger community to self-regulate/moderate. Moderating would be a requirement of membership -- sort of like mandatory military service. So everyone is invested in creating a good community and everyone sees what it is like to be a mod. Maybe it is a naive idea and I am sure it isn't original. Curious to see who has experimented with it before. I bet in RL communes/utopias have attempted something like this.

I did a few and would almost not want to respond with boolean answers unless I could provide some commentary (which the recipient could choose to read or not).

Needs the ability to skip questions. For example there is a question is Michael Is natty? I have no idea who that is or want is meant by natty.

The premise of this app is undermined by the oversimplified implementation.

Truly diverse panel? You have no idea what the diversity is. Far removed from your peer group? You have no idea. "Just a verdict"? Jury duty is not a duty to pronounce judgement. It's a duty deliberate on evidence. There's no evidence, here, and no deliberation.

This is no celebration of collective human intelligence. This is silly and cynical.

Always (3/3 times, anyway) hangs when it's time to return results. Sometimes hangs during jury questions.

Seems like a fun idea, if it worked at all?

Nice idea! I think it would be useful if the jury members could provide context on their decision as well as see the other jurors’ responses.

I love the concept. One tiny recommendation: on my phone the page both for voting and to see the voting result requires me to scroll. When content wise it could very easily fit within a single screen what is being displayed.

That is mostly a problem with the results page where i wanted to make a screenshot to show it off to my friends but couldn’t.

Cool idea. Not sure exactly, but when it went to the jury duty section I just got the same question a bunch of times.

Congratulations on the launch.

I had two huge yes/no boxes that I thought where missing an image. So I reloaded and lost my question.

Unsolicited feedback: I felt that some questions (what do you think of new Indian government) require “I have no idea about the topic”, and some (do I have moral duty to visit family member in prison) require “much more nuance nuance exist here”

The first question I received had two options that were essentially the same decision worded differently.

Voire Dire is what makes jury trials legitimate, but I do like the idea. It would be neat if there was a way to challenge potential jurors like that.

I asked a question that was 4-0, then suddenly 8 votes came in at once that made the score 4-8, i wonder if that was a UI bug or if the 8 votes were the AI kicking in and they all disagreed with the human answer...

It appears to have either been hugged to death or something broke on the backend - jury duty now just returns the same question about whether or not it is ethical for a startup to sell an ai as a physiologist.

Pretty neat, it’s super slow though when selecting an answer. I exited out of frustration. I like the loading bar though.

I would definitely like a skip question button for jury duty. I also think it’s allowing me to vote multiple times on a single question, potentially when the queue is empty.

Isn't this what the Internet Oracle is for? It's been giving me rock solid answer to my most troubling questions for over 30 years now.

This is really cool!

I get why you decided not to include commentary, but I think in some cases it would be useful. For example, if I have a moral dilemma, I might be interested in the moral framework used by each juror; if a juror makes a judgment based on a moral framework I disagree with (or, worse, find reprehensible), I might discard some responses and come up with a different verdict. But it would take a lot more time for a juror to write down a rationale than just picking from two options, so that would make JuryDuty more onerous, and it would take longer than 3 minutes for people to get their responses.

I tried JuryDuty and the first question was just "Israel or Palestine?" And... ooof... there is no way to boil that down to a binary decision. I am frankly not interested in choosing either one over the other without any ability to provide commentary or nuance.

Do your jury duty, stop demanding a "skip" button. Think for half a second about what the consequences of that would be.

Easy to fatfinger report on phone with no way to take back or confirm, and it does not even skip the question

Cool idea and execution! The use of AI unless there are sufficient humans is a clever way to beat the chicken and egg problem

I just asked a question: the questions I had to answer while waiting were all blank.

I love it. Could definitely see more features where you can see the results of the jury questions.

Sorry, but I stuggle to see the point or the fun in this.

Having strangers pick a binary choice with zero explanation or chance to provide context doesn't sound useful nor fun for neither the questioner nor the "jury".

You also have no way of ensuring diversity and goodwill of the people answering.

It seems like jumping on the trend of oversimplification for the sake of it. Do we really need to turn forums/Reddit intova Tinder-like yes/no experience?

Why not juries of 13 people? That way you never have a clean tie?

It would be nice to be able to see the final results of questions I voted on

"Sorry, we ran into a temporary bug and can't complete your request. We'll fix it as soon as we can; please try again in a bit!" What is this about? running on firefox 137.0.2 (aarch64) on Apple M1 Sequoia 15.4.1

Make it an iphone and android app. more people will join in.

This is peak 2008 internet, and I love it deeply. Thank you.

Neat concept! Although I was a bit surprised at the AI stand-in's finding. I posed the silly argument that "My neighbor's dog refuses to speak French" with the options "Neighbor is culpable" and "I am clearly an idiot": The final decision was 7/5 in my favor! But seriously, this really is a great idea IMO. The jury-duty-while-you-wait feature also seems like a fair trade-off.

I got the same choice presented several times in a row.

Always (3/3 times, anyway) hangs when it's time to return results. Sometimes (1/4 runs) hangs during jury questions. Brave on Android.

Seems like a fun idea, if it worked.

What AI? What version/parameters?

This is not a "game"

7-5 JuryNow is banned.

"Neutral" is truly a required option. I have played around a bit and ALL of the questions I've got were undecidable. Like, same shoes in two pics and "which one is better".

I feel like there needs to be a third option, which might be "not a good question" or "false dichotomy" or "low quality"

for example, i got "Q: Is Luigi Mangione guilty of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare?"

Well yes, he shot the guy on camera. Due process and all of that, he's probably guilty. It's like asking is the sky blue. What's the point? That's a low quality question. Did you mean "is jury nullification a good choice" or "is what he did morally right"?

Also got asked if I ever had a physical fight with a sibling.

Well, I don't have one, so no. Perhaps not what the question was intending.

Yawn, I can't get past the filter. Boring. Please moderate the content of your question before submitting it Apparently "Furry" is enough to set it off.