ethoscore's recent activity
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentThanks for the suggestion. I kinda like Integrity. It has the same issue as ethics though "corporations can't have integrity!"Thanks for the suggestion. I kinda like Integrity. It has the same issue as ethics though "corporations can't have integrity!"
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentYes, making it more international is definitely a goal. All feedback on that is welcome. I'll look into broader terms for company types. I know from company research that the number of...Yes, making it more international is definitely a goal. All feedback on that is welcome.
I'll look into broader terms for company types. I know from company research that the number of designations for company types globally is big enough that trying to include them all would likely be overwhelming and confusing for users. But more generic designations covering all of the important structures might work.
The /companies table can definitely include more columns, and/or filtering options. I was waiting for user feedback to help determine what to include, so thanks for yours! The trick is balancing UI simplicity with having the options most people will want. That and fitting it all into mobile screen sizes.
Point taken about tag visibility, I've been giving a lot of thought to how to surface the various features to casual users without adding clutter so that's useful feedback.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentNot sure I understand. Yes, being able to tell a company, via spending, that "we won't buy your products unless they're responsibly made" is a big part of the point. I'm not saying I don't...Not sure I understand. Yes, being able to tell a company, via spending, that "we won't buy your products unless they're responsibly made" is a big part of the point.
I'm not saying I don't consider the platform accurate. Accuracy isn't really the point, instead it's about utility. It could have no scoring at all and tags and lists would still make it useful for the intended purpose.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentThis exists, though not in cloud form. There's a 'tags' stub that lists all tags attached to the company on company profile pages. It's not comprehensive at this point, managing a large list of...This exists, though not in cloud form. There's a 'tags' stub that lists all tags attached to the company on company profile pages.
It's not comprehensive at this point, managing a large list of tags and assigning them to all the companies is going to take community contribution. In the meantime I'm working on it slowly (14 tags and counting, including Child Labor and Greenwashing from your list). The best way to find companies with tags at the moment is using the tags filter dropdown on the /companies page.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore (edited )Link ParentHello target audience member! Good to see you :) Your request is queued, thanks for using the feature. The 'listed/unlisted' feature does exist in the form of company type (on company profile...Hello target audience member! Good to see you :)
Your request is queued, thanks for using the feature.
The 'listed/unlisted' feature does exist in the form of company type (on company profile pages). Currently it includes Public (as in publicly traded), Private (not the former), Government and Coop (cooperative). Do you feel like that should be more visible?
Not so fun fact: There's a new trend. These days some of the worst offenders aren't publicly traded shareholder pleasing companies, they're private equity conglomerates.
More on company types: There is currently a B Corp tag, which is one of the new structures you referenced. B Corp certification has requirements like baking environmental, social and ethical considerations into their corporate structure (whether or not they're publicly traded), transparency and so on. It's one of the most popular ways for companies to make impact a part of their mission and prove they're serious about it. More on the B Corp organization if you're curious.
I'd love to learn what those are in each country and which companies have chosen to function under those particular structures.
This is a great idea for a blog post, I'll add it to the list. It's also a good idea for a curated List, which anyone can create.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentSorry for misunderstanding. It will probably help to differentiate between different types of metrics here. There are the 3 metrics the app uses: Environment, Human Rights and Ethics [0]. Those...Sorry for misunderstanding.
What I was trying to say was: I assume you use some metrics to evaluate the ethics of the companies [0].
You then combine these metrics into an overall score (regardless of if you decide to show it as a number, smiley or not at all!)
This total is currently based on how you, personally, value the different metrics in relation to each other.
It will probably help to differentiate between different types of metrics here. There are the 3 metrics the app uses: Environment, Human Rights and Ethics [0]. Those are averaged to get the overall score with no weighting. If these are the metrics you mean, user customization is indeed an interesting idea.
And then there are 3rd party metrics that are basically used as a placeholder for companies that don't yet have scoring impacts. Those do get weighted during the process of translating them into the Enviro, Rights and Ethics metrics. For example, policy metrics get less weight than practice metrics and well sourced metrics get more weight than less rigorous metrics. That system is a bit complex, and still evolving, so at this point it would be challenging, and likely confusing, to try to expose levers for people to customize weights.
For me, it would be interesting to be able to read up on the metrics and your method of evaluating the companies, that would also be a nice way to drill into the data.
Agreed, I plan to add more details about scoring when creating score impact submission guidelines. Long term, score impacts are the method for evaluating companies and they're entirely transparent, each impact is detailed and available on company pages. Possibly you just didn't happen to look at a company that had full score impacts.
I've been thinking about this project a bit and I think I don't really understand how you see it being used as a consumer or contributor.
What this says to me is that I need to do a better job of communicating what it's for and so does the app user experience.
There are a lot of potential use cases but I'll just pick one quick example.
Prerequisite: Someone needs to care about what their spending is supporting. Without that the platform is entirely useless to them.
Say someone is trying to decide which vacuum cleaner to buy. They're looking at 3 options based on the features they want. They could use Ethoscore to compare the companies behind those 3 brands either by searching for the companies or by scanning the barcodes on the packaging.
How they do the comparison is up to them, they could use overall score, or focus on the Environment metric, or look at specific tags that are important to them. Or they could dive in and read all of the scoring impacts for all three companies.
Alternatively, and to me this is probably the most useful for the majority of people... if they've already created or followed some lists, the work might already be done. Maybe they already follow an Ethical Home Appliances 'support' list and one of the brands is on it. Or they follow an Evil Conglomerate 'boycott' list and two of the brands are on that. In which case the decision is straightforward.
[0] I scream a little inside when typing this out. So adding a little reminder here for myself and whoever needs it: companies can not have ethics because companies are not persons. Only living creatures can have ethics. People can decide to be ethical at work, but that doesn't make the company ethical.
I'm with you there. I struggled with that when naming the Ethics metric. I needed a category for everything that was left after Environment and Human Rights that wasn't clunky or unintuitive (like Governance). I look at it as a way of capturing company behaviors that people would generally consider unethical (lying, cheating, stealing).
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentAgreed, some sort of left/right indicator makes the most sense for politics. That's intuitive for at least most countries. Not at all, one of the main points of the beta is to polish the rough...Agreed, some sort of left/right indicator makes the most sense for politics. That's intuitive for at least most countries.
I hope the US-centric feedback wasn't too harsh
Not at all, one of the main points of the beta is to polish the rough edges. I'm happy to hear about things that don't make sense or feel off.
Thanks for the details about Tags and Lists. Restless toddlers are a good excuse for almost anything! It's not just you though, there have been a few comments in the personalization vein. Somehow much of the functionality beyond just scores isn't obvious for everyone. Just need to figure out how to make it more clear in the UI. Maybe an opt in tutorial.
About the tag acronyms... I expect there to eventually be enough tags that finding visually intuitive icons for all of them would be challenging. Also, eventually tags will be community created, where icons would be even more difficult to manage simply. I agree though, the letters are a lot harder to parse at a glance. I think giving users the ability to highlight certain tags they care about, which would change how they display, will help with visual differentiation.
Adding tags to search makes sense, that'll go in when I add an advanced search UI.
About RSS... yeah it's mostly dead, but that doesn't mean we can't keep supporting it. It's early internet tech, long live Web 1.0! At the very least it makes sense for new post updates.
RSS or not, an updates feed for tracking company developments is a great idea.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentSent, and best of luck with whatever's taking all your time!Sent, and best of luck with whatever's taking all your time!
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore (edited )Link ParentFirst off, this is outstanding feedback! 🤌I'm grateful you took the time to browse the site and write it up. I'm glad someone found the impacts! Which makes your point, they're not prominent...First off, this is outstanding feedback! 🤌I'm grateful you took the time to browse the site and write it up.
Score Impacts: I really appreciate the Score Impacts pages and found these to be the most useful for my purposes. While the overall score is important at a glance and can give a decent overview, being able to review the qualatitive information that justifies the score and verify via the sources is what I value most. That said, I feel like this information is a little hidden away and could be better integrated in each company's main page. Instead of clicking on a 'view score impacts' hyperlink, could these be expanded/hidden by the user? Alternatively, clicking on any of the Metric Scores currently takes the user to the 'how scoring works' page; could clicking on the Metric Scores instead expand a list of relevant score impacts with a seperate link for how scoring works (either when expanding, or always visible to the right of the metrics?)
I'm glad someone found the impacts! Which makes your point, they're not prominent enough. I've noticed this from analytics over the last couple days, a lot of visitors never open them. And yes, linking from metrics to impacts is definitely the way to go. When I added the scoring and metrics, impacts didn't exist yet and I never got back to it.
Metrics/Politics Regarding the metrics themselves, I love the categories you've chosen but think Politics needs a bit of work. As you've outlined, the Politics metric is unique in that it is the only one that doesn't alter the overall score. That's great and I agree wholeheartedly with that decision, however I feel like the UI doesn't really reflect this. At a glance, the Politics metric has a number score with a colour gradient background. The only noticible difference is the gradient is red-blue rather than red-green (and that isn't immediately obvious as a distinguishing factor if the business is conservative when comparing to other metrics).
Entirely valid. As it happens I've been working on updates to the scoring UI and I've been trying to figure out what to do about politics.
Another user has pointed out that the site is quite US-centric, and this is reflected in the colours: I'm assuming you've gone with the associations of the Democrats and Republicans with Blue and Red respectively, whereas in Australia our leading conservative party's primary colour is Blue and our more Progressive party is Red (Also our conservative party is literally called the Australian Liberal Party... Insert upside-down joke here).
Starting off somewhat US-centric was intentional for simplicity, it gets more international all the time though. But your comment makes me realize the Democrat/Republican colors is terrible UI. Which introduces the question of what replaces it?
Your chevrons suggestion is a possibility... but it's maybe a little busy? I'll need to think about it. I like the idea of a visual separator.
User-specific issues and causes: @fnulare has given you some great feedback in their comment here which I think highlights the need for users to quickly compare to their own preferences. I don't entirely agree with their suggestion of having a user-weighted score for each company (I personally like the idea of having a universal score that I can then adjust myself in my head after reading the score impacts), but I agree that the site in its current form makes it a little difficult for users to identify issues they care about on a more granular level than the broad metrics you've provided.
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You're already using tags for another purpose, so for a lack of a better term... Could you introduce 'moodlets' for different causes and issues? e.g. I care about plastic packaging waste and learned from Ethoscore that Coca Cola ditched many of their recyclable packaging goals in 2024. If Score Impacts were tied to 'moodlets', that could display a negative 'Plastic Waste' moodlet next to the specific score impact, and perhaps all 'moodlets' could be listed on the company's main page.
I'm not sure tags actually are being used for another purpose. Plastic Waste (Noun) makes perfect sense as a tag, and tags already have built in polarity. They're meant to serve as something like a 'moodlet', but primarily for filtering at the moment. And then Lists cover the rest of the concept. If someone creates or follows a "Worst plastic polluters" Avoid List, they'll see a badge every time they encounter a company on the list after that. All it's missing is an easier way to see which specific lists are involved in the badges when there's more than one in the same category (support, avoid, boycott).
Assuming I'm understanding what you mean by moodlets, I think the functionality is mostly already there.
But if so, here's my real question: Why do you think it didn't seem that way when you were browsing? Are Lists and Tags not prominent enough? Is their utility unclear? Are they insufficiently explained in the docs? There's definitely a problem somewhere if it's not obvious that "hey I can use Lists to personalize things based on my values".
RSS? - Lastly, would it be possible to push your blog updates to an RSS feed? I would definitely subscribe to keep up with updates to the site/project. As a stretch... I would also love it if Score Impacts had RSS feeds so I could subscribe for companies I use and track how they're acting over time (especially in our ever-enshittified world, I'm conscious good companies don't always remain good and would like to ditch as appropriate).
Absolutely, currently RSS is filed under "nice to have" but I'm happy to prioritize it. No promises on when, and no loss yet, there isn't much to read at the moment.
An RSS feed for impact/score/etc. updates is a really interesting idea. I have email subscriptions on the list but I hadn't though about using RSS for that. My only concern there is scrapers, I've taken great pains to make it hard for scrapers, partly because of AI training scraping exploding lately. But there's no reason it couldn't send update abstracts instead of complete records.
I think the in app notification system is also a good place for "this company on your support list just annexed a small country and is planning to sacrifice their children to Mammon" type updates.
This is great stuff, thanks!
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentThe way it works now is that brand and subsidiary scores map to the ultimate parent. So both do get scored at the parent level, there's just no individual score on a brand. Indeed! Don't let all...The way it works now is that brand and subsidiary scores map to the ultimate parent. So both do get scored at the parent level, there's just no individual score on a brand.
For example, maybe there’s a fairtrade, all green energy, responsibly sourced chocolate or coffee or something, but if they’re also willing to privatise and cut off the water supply of a third world region, any individual might have their own way of weighting those two sides of consideration.
Indeed! Don't let all the scoring conversation give you the wrong idea, that's a big part of the goal.
Your example is perfect, though maybe a little unlikely since fair trade certification includes water management! Sorry for being pedantic, I've been spending a lot of time reading about certifications and standards.
The way the system would work for your example:
Overall score is broken into 3 metrics: Environment, Human Rights and Ethics. Your hypothetical company would probably have high a environment score and a low human rights score, which would lead you to look at their human rights impacts and read about the water rights issue. If you didn't like that you might add them to your Avoid list. Thereafter that company and every brand they own would show a warning badge when they came up in searches or from barcode scans.
Along with that, there are tags (fair trade already exists, green energy doesn't yet) you can use to filter based on broader behaviors. So you could find all the Fair Trade Certified companies and then figure out which ones try to pillage as minimally as possible while sourcing their chocolate. Then you could put them on a list and share it so other people can buy pillage free chocolate too.
Assuming someone hadn't already created that list, in which case you could skip the research and just follow it.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentThanks for the feedback! I'm not sure it has to get too complex, but I'm definitely hearing that's where a lot of people's minds go. As I mentioned in a different comment: perfect is the enemy of...Thanks for the feedback!
I'm not sure it has to get too complex, but I'm definitely hearing that's where a lot of people's minds go. As I mentioned in a different comment: perfect is the enemy of good.
Regarding the text contrast, that's useful thanks. Looks like on the green end of the spectrum at the worst case the contrast ratio is about 2.5:1, which is definitely too low. As it happens I'm working on the score UI right now so I'll fix that soon.
What you're seeing with the scores is the result of incompleteness, neither Tesla or Geely have had a full scoring impact run yet. Thanks for being specific, that makes it easier to talk about. I'm probably about to give you way more information than you wanted!
The impacts aren't arbitrary, if you click through to the impacts page there are details about each impact, along with source links. However in the case of those two companies the only impacts are tag related, which cover a lot of companies with a given tag at once.
On a company that's had a full scoring pass there are many more impacts, each with reasoning and details. Which, I think, makes it pretty clear why they're scored the way they are.
Prior to a full scoring run companies get their scores from aggregated 3rd party sources (assuming the company is covered by them). To give you an example, the most popular and widespread scoring system is Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). It's used by investors, regulators and internally at some companies. There are a variety of problems with it including: No two ESG data sources agree on scores, to the degree that it calls the whole system into question. Scoring is mostly focused on publicly traded companies, which gives private equity a pass. Scoring is weighted towards policy and compliance, as opposed to practice and outcomes. The end result is that ESG scores kinda suck. But at least they exist! This is a problem society is still trying to solve.
The same is true of other large scale scoring systems. It's great that they exist but they don't cover anywhere near all of the companies you'd want them to and they don't capture the full picture. Part of the reason for that is, despite what many people might imagine, there just aren't reliable or comprehensive sources for the data. Companies aren't required to track or report as much data as you'd hope and there's no 3rd party organization with anywhere near the resources to gather and publish the data on anything other than a limited subset of companies. Many kudos to the orgs that try.
On the other side you have highly targeted scoring like the Lead the Charge org you linked. It's granular because they only have to cover 18 companies. And even then I suspect a lot of people would disagree that Tesla should be ranked number 1. Mostly because: Musk. In the case of Ethoscore his impacts would likely show up in Ethics. So there you have a project where they don't have to deal with a huge list of companies and even then scoring is incomplete. Not to say they're doing anything wrong, it looks like they kept it narrow intentionally. It's a targeted awareness campaign and for that purpose it looks great.
Scoring is hard, it's an unsolved problem that I think is worth trying to solve and I think community contribution can be part of the solution. Someone could submit new scoring impacts for Geely or Tesla that would modify their scores and make them less wrong. And less wrong is a lot better than nothing. Eventually scores could even become mostly right! Though of course people will never completely agree on what right looks like.
My view, at least right now, is that keeping scoring relatively simple is a better solution than trying to give it too much granularity and intimidating people. Contributing should feel straightforward enough that anyone can do it. If it involved, say, 500 data points, no one would even consider it.
The goal is to give people a tool to make spending intentionally easier. Scoring has to be a part of that, but it's just one piece.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore (edited )Link ParentIf I'm understanding you, I think what you're asking in answered in this comment thread. I'd add that people can make their own decisions on how to interpret the data, the goal is absolutely not...If I'm understanding you, I think what you're asking in answered in this comment thread. I'd add that people can make their own decisions on how to interpret the data, the goal is absolutely not to make the decisions for them.
About Russia... this is a fantastic idea for a tag, which would then make it easy to avoid companies that haven't exited Russia. That's going on the list!
China is more challenging because you'd have to go multiple levels deep into supply chains to determine if a company has Chinese suppliers. That's complicated by the fact that almost no one publishes that information. You could pull together some of it from investigative journalism sources, certain NGOs and regulatory actions, but right now it would be essentially impossible for it to be comprehensive. Still, anyone could make the attempt via the Lists system.
ETA: The Forced Labor tag accomplishes the China goal to some degree because in so many cases the source of the forced labor is Uyghurs. Coverage is limited at the moment though, the supply chain tracing issue again.
Fossil fuels... 100%. There's actually a start to that in the form of a big research project I did on the industry shortly before the beta launch. It's captured in the score impacts of a bunch of companies and also via the Climate Policy Obstruction and Climate Deception tags. The reason it's captured in those tags is that, almost without exception, every fossil fuel company, along with most automakers and some investment firms, have been involved in fighting against climate regulation. I have a post planned covering the research for when time allows, but the scoring impacts and tags are already applied.
Another good solution for the fossil fuel industry would be a list that includes all of them, and all related companies.
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentThis is a great idea, I'll give it some thoughtThis is a great idea, I'll give it some thought
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
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Comment on Tildes exclusive: the Ethoscore Project in ~creative
ethoscore Link ParentI like the idea of giving location first class citizenship. I'd say it's reasonably accessible on company profiles as is, but it sounds like it would be useful to a lot of people to be able to...I like the idea of giving location first class citizenship. I'd say it's reasonably accessible on company profiles as is, but it sounds like it would be useful to a lot of people to be able to filter or search based on location. Is that sort of what you're getting at? Or is it just that you hate having to scroll for it on company profiles?
The only way I could see a project like this succeeding is following the Wikipedia model and remaining nonprofit and asking for donations. The minute investors become involved the validity of the ethics scores could come into question, not to mention leveraging community labour to flesh out the scores before capitalizing on it for yourself (and whoever else stands to gain financially) would be quite unethical itself in my opinion
We're on the same page, I'm curious what gave you the impression investor money was the goal? Was it the use of the word funding?
I actually had a bit about this in the OP, but removed it because it was already too long. My goal is for the platform to remain independent, that's part of the idea of doing it as uncynically as possible. That means a benefit corp at first and eventually either 501c3 status or foundation ownership.
It really doesn't make sense to me any other way, as you say, taking for-profit funding of any kind makes the entire thing suspect. It would also be hypocritical, the highest scored companies on the platform are going to consistently be those that bake the mission into their structure so that markets can't corrupt them.
My plan is to increase the amount of community involvement as far as possible. For now community contributions are admin reviewed but at some point I hope the community will be able to handle reviewing changes and submissions. It's a problem for when the community actually exists though. For now it's enough for the tools to exist, and I plan to add more community contribution tools before the end of the beta.
Perfect sense. We might have different ideas about who those people are though. In my mind the main demographic is people who want to be intentional about their spending but also have busy lives so the less bandwidth required the better. But I think there's plenty of opportunity to dig deeper for people that want to via impacts and tags.
Quoting from my previous post:
I hear you about transparency but again I think you're extrapolating its lack from incomplete scoring. The goal is definitely for it to be easy for users to understand why a particular score is the way it is. At the same time the scores really aren't as important as they currently seem, which is a problem I've been working on for the last few days. Posts like yours have helped me realize that the way scoring is presented distracts from arguably more useful ways to determine whether or not to buy from a company like Lists. I think I mentioned this in a different comment thread but: With scoring completely removed the platform would still be useful. Maybe more useful, I've considered just removing scoring.
By the way, the Tesla scoring pass is done. It's actually worse than I expected. It's rare for a company to have so much recent evidence of bad practices on the public record. Along with so few good practices. Which likely means their bad practices that are unproven and/or undiscovered are epic in scope.
Thanks for the reply, your perspective is really helpful. At this point nothing about how the app works is written in stone.