Pol.is was conceived around the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.
We wanted it to be able to handle 'big' and stay coherent. It was clear that if millions of people were going to show up to a conversation, the internet needed comment systems that would scale up.
We wanted people to feel safe. We wanted people to feel listened to.
We wanted people to be able to jump into a conversation at any time and not feel intimidated or exhausted by the complexity of what had already occurred. That meant ditching threading and direct replies, so that comments didn't twist into a tangled nest.
We wanted everyone to be able to get a sense of what others felt, and what the consensus was, in seconds. We wanted to make sure minority opinions were preserved. First, this meant that we wouldn’t use downvoting to invalidate upvoting, or the other way round: 200 upvotes + 200 downvotes = net zero votes. That math obscures the fact that there was some minority who felt differently, which we take as data to preserve. As we iterated, this took the form of creating and showing opinion groups.
We wanted to create a system that increased the number of roles available. More roles means more data, and more interesting outcomes. Somewhere south of 1% of users comment. Most users lurk - read but don't interact in the community. We wanted to build a system which was extensible in the roles it could shoulder. For instance, maybe some users will find it enjoyable to compare comments to see if they say the same thing in different words, and then pick which says it better.
We wanted to produce lots of usable data. We wanted to avoid natural language processing, because it's flaky, and also because we wanted internationalization out of the box. We wanted to show people as grouped with those who felt similarly, because it's satisfying and validating to find your tribe. We wanted to firmly restrict the power of individuals to ruin or take down a conversation with bad behavior.
We wanted to avoid the echo chamber effect of social networks, in which people only talk to people they already agree with. That meant creating a system that could simultaneously be embedded on content sites and be shared freely through different social networks via links.
We want to create order, satisfaction and efficiency with intuitive information design and architecture. We want to provide transparency and insight, and decentralize power generally, in all kinds of large organizations of people everywhere on Earth.