Hi Tilderiños,

This post is long enough for a TLDR: I made this thing, it's a platform for conscious consumerism. I'm launching the beta on Tildes. It's far from complete, expect imperfect scores in many cases. Scoring is a work in progress that's part of the platform but not the sole focus. It's invite only, and on Tildes only, see my top level reply below or DM me for an invite.

To start, I'm a long time member who posts enough that at least some of you would recognize my username. I made a new account for this project because I don't want to think about being a representative on my main account.

Early on during development I decided Tildes would be the perfect place to launch a private beta because Tildoes are some of the best people on the internet in my experience. And also fairly diverse by internet standards. Aside from a handful of friends and family you'll be the first to see it.

I should give you a little backstory. A couple of years ago I lost my income. Fortunately we were in a place where we could mostly afford to live without it for a while, so I had some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. For context I have over 30 years of experience in software development. Similar for marketing, brand strategy, business development, mostly but not exclusively in the context of the internet. I'm not quite as old as that sounds, I was still a minor when I starting building things on the internet, back when almost no one really knew what the internet was or what to do with it. In short, I'm comfortably fluent in all the languages of the internet.

I've built all sorts of different types of applications and businesses, mostly commercial. This time I wanted to build something that would have a positive impact and I wanted that to be the point, rather than a side effect. I spent most of a year researching the feasibility of a number of ideas before I landed on this one.

I've been on the internet long enough to see a lot of well meaning ideas fall flat. At this point I have no idea if this is another one of those. I know the concept is solid, but that doesn't mean it will inspire people. Or more specifically in this case, be a platform people can use to inspire each other. This is complicated by my intention to be as uncynical as possible about the project. I know all sorts of tricks for capturing attention and creating hype, I know how to monetize an app and sell products. But all of that feels out of place to me if the goal in uncynical. No doubt Tilders could have a long conversation here about the balance between good intentions and practical reality. I'd have lot to contribute.

The Ethoscore Project is an attempt to make the entirely unsexy concept of conscious consumerism easy and accessible. I genuinely believe it's a viable way to make the world a little better. It includes things like company scores and community lists (including boycott lists) and accepts community contributions and corrections for every company data point including scoring. I won't make a wall of text about all the functionality and features here, you can find out more on the site.

The project is currently self funded, which will hopefully be able to last long enough to see if the idea has potential. For now, funding is a problem for later.

The roadmap is long and wide. There are so many things I want to add, at least some of which aren't terrible ideas, but at this point development has been going on for over a year and I think it's time to see what strangers think. The project's 50k lines of code took time but the larger part of development has been company research, there are currently over 15,000 brands and companies covered, which is really just a start.

You might imagine that researching the international conglomerates that own most of the brands we see would be depressing in a capitalist dystopia sort of way and you wouldn't be wrong. But there's also more good news that I expected. There are big, successful companies doing the right thing when they don't have to. More than you'd expect. And there's evidence that their practices are inspiring other companies to do the same. I don't know if it's outpacing the general capitalist race to the bottom but it's not nothing! I see reasons for optimism.

I'm hoping some of you will be kind enough to take a look. I welcome all questions, contributions and feedback. The company database and scoring are far from complete, my goal for the beta was to have enough coverage that scanning products at a big box grocery store would result in more hits than misses. I think scoring is necessary but, to me, community lists are more interesting and have more potential to be useful. At this point there are going to be a lot of bugs, imperfections and companies with scores that seem off. I want to hear about all the issues you encounter. I'm more excited about your impressions and ideas though. How does it feel to use it? Does it make sense? Is it low friction? As a user is there something important missing that you'd expect to be there? What works well? Would you do anything differently?

There aren't smartphone apps yet, I want the codebase closer to complete before I start on the joys of maintaining two more codebases and dealing with the app stores. You can install it as a PWA (web app) on your phone if you like, which mostly just makes it quicker to access. I definitely recommend using your phone if you want to play with the barcode scanner.

Throughout the beta the app will be invite only and available only to Tildes users and people I personally invite. See top level comment below for an invite.

Sorry everyone for yet another post about the ~life.women post but the second thread about that same topic in ~life.men made me realize we could have used two separate threads from the start.

Instead of hoping that all the men instinctively knew to stay quiet and be dissappointed when some inevitably failed to notice, there'd be less friction if the people had two separate discussion spaces, one meant for women as the current default expectation (and be in ~life.women), and another (either in ~life.men or ~life) to provide an outlet for those who have things to say but nevertheless feel uneasy doing so in the same space.

There need not be any compulsory gatekeeping. The conversations in the two above 2 threads have me believe that if the option was available, and people were made aware, most would be considerate enough to know where to go and respect boundary.

Women who don't want to having to bother wading through seas of men's opinions regardless of how well-intentioned, could now conveniently hit 'Ignore' on the alternative thread once and be done with it. Or if that thread was in ~life.men and they have already unsubscribed, nothing to be done and the experience would be seamless.

Some potential concerns:

Ideally this setup needs to be done as early as possible from the moment the sensitive post goes public.

Maybe the poster themselves could create the two threads from the start.

However, I imagine in practice this would not be most common scenarios. The average users are not tuned in to all the potential sources of drama and just post whatever they find interesting first, only realsing when there's blowback after the fact. So the cases when this approach may be needed would also more likely be reactive. (Maybe with a pinned comment, a title change and a 2nd post. Since we cannot do pinned comment, probably have to rely on boost voting to keep it on top).

The people who are in position to make the judgement of when to create this setup are veteran and highly trusted member of the community. Someone who has been around enough to be able to quickly recognize the common painpoints for the community, able to remain impartial without getting dragged into the conflicts themseves, and know when such intervention is warranted. They're users who people can trust that if they do so, it's not an attempt to control the narrative.

Normally if I come up with any random ideas, I'd prefer to test it out myself and see the results directly. However, this is the kind that requires buy-in from the whole community, as well as the right people to take the helm. Hence this post. The ultimate aim is maintaining harmony among the community. If you think it's worth a try, you may also choose to nominate who you think is trustworthy enough for this responsibility. Those who may want to step in could benefit from the confidence boost that others trust them.

This post is motivated by the recent event with the ~life.women post but I hope it's clear the proposal is aimed at being a more general approach to future conflicts of similar nature.