Show HN: MAGA or Not? Political alignment scores for people and companies

Show HN: MAGA or Not? Political alignment scores for people and companies(magaornot.ai)

7 points by rcar1046 57 days ago | 3 comments

I wanted a way for people to support companies and people that align with their political beliefs. Additionally, I think it can serve as a valuable, source-linked public ledger of who said and did what over time, especially as incentives change and people try to rewrite their positions.

This is fully AI-coded, researched, and sourced.

Additionally, AI helped develop the scoring system. The evidence gathering is done by a number of different agents through OpenRouter that gather and classify source-backed claims. The point of that is not to pretend bias disappears, but to avoid me manually selecting the evidence myself. I intend for it to remain current and grow. The system is close to fully automated, though ongoing evidence collection at scale is still limited mostly by cost.

The name is an homage to the early days of Web 1.0 and Hot or Not, which was a main competitor of mine as the creator of FaceTheJury.com, but I think it works well here.

The backend and frontend are running on Cloudflare Workers with D1. It's coded in vanilla JavaScript.

highhands89 56 days ago |

This is really cool. Do you mind sharing a bit about your process for coming up with the scoring system? Like, what was the process like when you were working with the AI to develop it?

Also, have you ever considered the ability to provide the site with, say, a name and some links to social media or a blog or any other websites associated with that person, and it provides a score on demand?

rcar1046 56 days ago | |

Thanks! At first I was using OpenAI's deep research to just give a summary and overall score 1-10, but I realized that could not be iterative and future proof as new evidence comes to light.

So after some thought, I switched to a system of individual evidence gathering and weighting each piece of evidence. I've given the models some basic starting points for types of evidence (for instance a donation has a default weight of 8/10), but have given the models leeway to make relative judgements.

After all evidence is collected, the weights and confidence that the evidence is accurate (usually very high) are put into a formula to derive a final score. No recency bias. The nitty gritty:

-Each row contributes direction × weight × confidence × status_factor, where disputed is cut in half and there is no recency decay.

-All signed contributions are summed into S, and total support mass goes into M. Final score is 50 + 50 * (S / (M + 4)), clamped to 0-100.

-That +4 prior mass keeps thin but unanimous evidence from producing extreme scores too easily.

-Neutral evidence (direction = 0) doesn’t push the score up or down, but it does increase M, which pulls the result back toward 50.

As for the ladder - I think that is a good idea, but in a controlled manner because of the token cost and potential for abuse.

rcar1046 57 days ago |

*forgot to mention there is also a chrome extension that puts scores next to Twitter/X profiles and websites as you browse waiting for approval...