Introduction #
> read(the_room) began as a half-baked thought: how can we better understand the collective sentiment of the world in real-time? Now, RTR is a living and (slowly) growing web app, an active platform!
Although the platform we currently have deployed is a fun polling game, I am trying to take it bit more seriously; I don’t really think that we can begin to effectively tackle significant global issues, e.g., the climate crisis, regional conflicts, and the (potential) degredation of societal fabric until we begin to map sentiment effectively, gauge it accurately, and have a trusted source for this information.
The grand vision? To build a platform where the world can see itself, in all its diversity and nuance. To build a human bioindicator that generates realtime maps of people’s sentiment, and allows everyone of us to reflect on the responses.
If you didn’t go to McGill, here’s another fun question you could answer: “When you picture a camel, how many humps does it have?” — the responses were not what I expected.
Why anonymous? #
Hiding in a herd is a survival strategy in the animal kingdom. Much like animals hiding in herds for protection, anonymity online can foster a sense of being protected thus allowing for more honest expression, especially if you feel like you are in the minority. Anonymity allows people to express themselves freely, without fear of backlash or judgment — it’s empowering. It is an essential ingredient for building a more faithful representation of people’s opinions. Of course, this means there’s a lot more taboo that shows up on the site. But, by anonymizing responses and aggregating data, we’re creating a space where people can share their thoughts candidly while still contributing to a better understanding of eachother. Hopefully, this cultivates more empathy for each other; because, for me, that’s where meaningful conversations can begin.
Information Asymmetry #
In today’s digital age, information is power. Often, that power is highly concentrated in the hands of few: big tech companies hold the keys to valuable insights, leaving the rest of us in the dark. I would be very surprised if the likes of Google, Twitter/X, Meta, and OpenAI haven’t been performing sentiment analyses on the all the data they obtain from their users. After all, being able to gauge sentiment is useful if you want to change behaviour to get you to buy a product, for example. The problem now is that the incentive of a profit-driven organization is misalligned with the incentives of it’s users: people aren’t online to have their data sold, or their attention auctioned off. People are online because it is where they most easily acquire information.
Read The Room aims to flip the status quo. If we give our users access to the open and anonymized data, we’re breaking down the information asymmetry that is increasingly present between consumers and producers of online media. I believe everyone deserves to have access to data that helps them understand and navigate the world, it doesn’t need to be hoarded for profit maximization. A great example of a similar initiative is Wikipedia.
A social experiment #
Ultimately, Read The Room is a social experiment. It’s for the memers, the dreamers, and the believers who want to understand how and why the world feels such a way. It’s a space where you can ask questions, explore perspectives, and hopefully challenge your own assumptions about what “everyone else” thinks.
Why don’t you check it out: > read(the_room)?
Better yet, join us in building this future by talking to your friends about it, asking questions, and sharing the site throughout your community. Together, I hope we can bring this dream into our reality.
Want to show your support? #
It’s really hard trying to organically grow a project like this. If you can, please show your support by following our socials! Every follow counts. You can even get involved and show engagement through the communities you are a part of :)
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Backstory #
It’s been just over a year since > read(the_room) went live, but I’d been floating around this idea of secure, anonymous, digital voting system for years. I tried to imagine what that world would look like and how it react to realtime information flow, although, I didn’t have any actual implementation or way in which I could imagine running this trial. It was more like a concept for a digital utopian future in a sci-fi book. So the premise of RTR wasn’t exactly new, and I’m definitely not the only one to think of it.
These ideas were floated during a hangout with some friends sometime in 2023. I pitched the idea of an anonymous polling game that we could play, “wouldn’t that be interesting??”… but people were against it. Until our friend, Janay, actually set it up in front of us. We all tossed in a few questions on sticky notes on her laptop and overlayed them so that we couldn’t see who submitted what question. We did the same for our responses to those questions, and the results were quite entertaining to go through!
Fast forward to October 2023, the Gaza conflict had just started. Watching the global response unfold to massacres on both sides online was frustrating. How could the world be so incredibly polarized and seemingly not able to understand the nuances of the “other” side’s feelings? So many sweeping generalizations, the shouting past each other instead of talking to each other. It was disappointing.
None of us can read through thousands of posts online to get a reasonble handle on what the distribution of people’s feelings looks like. Moreover, I had already lost trust in the neutrality of the timelines on traditional social media platforms, and the mainstream news as outlined in some of my previous blog posts. I wondered: could there be a way to collect perspectives of people from all over the world? Can we build this thing now but in a way that summarizes the sentiment, and still allows you to personally reflect on the responses?
I wanted to create a tool that could gather diverse opinions anonymously, help people understand each other better, and give everyone a chance to contribute to a larger narrative of what humanity is doing and the direction we want to move. I had already built a simple Flask web app for monitoring environmental data in our lab, and a couple of personal websites at this point so how hard could it be?
I asked my flatmates Brendon and Nico if they wanted to mentor the McGill physics hackathon together in November, and during that time we can work on this project. A few weeks later Brendon introduced me to Shayan who also joined in on the hackathon project titled “litmus-pulse”, because it was a litmus test of people, and it would check the pulse of humanity?? Terrible name… Our git organization was called fikra-mosaic — “fikra” is “idea” in Arabic. Anyways, the hackathon went smoothly and we had a working prototype by the end of the weekend. We deployed the site the next day and tested the platform in the proceeding weeks; we played the game at gatherings with our friends (sticking QR codes on the walls of our apartment) and had some fun with it. At this point, there still wasn’t any mapping feature.
I defended my thesis a few weeks later, and then started working on a new logo with my sister, Naila. I cleaned up the site, fixed bugs, and added new features in the proceeding months. When I went back to Oman that year, Hussain joined the project and overhauled our backend so that we had a more manageable and scalable database. Olivier visited me for the holidays in December 2023 and pushed us toward server-side loading and generally helped with speeding the site up. Since then, many people have given me advice and contributed both technically and non-technically to the platform, they are listed on the RTR website as contributors. Thank you!!
By the way, the logo is a chameleon 🦎 both because it changes colours to camoflauge itself in its surroundings (anonymity), and also because it changes colour to express itself (sentiment gauging).