At Capitol Bells, we think ahead when contemplating our team’s vision; how are people using our technology three years from now, who gets to vote in a virtual congress comprising of millions of people, how do we maintain the system’s integrity? As developers, we often consider far-reaching consequences of our designs for new products and features.
However, over-emphasizing such foresight can lead to it’s own challenges. Worse, it can lead to ignoring the concerns of users. In some cases, solving for a future problem can cause even more problems today, which is a position we have found ourselves in with Capitol Bells. In order to protect the integrity of voting in Capitol Bells far into the future when there are millions of people on the platform, we made it too hard for people to use Capitol Bells today, thus making it hard for the community to grow into that future in the first place!
We previously wrote about why we chose to use social networks in order to verify users. We understood that we would get some pushbacks on this issue, but we believed our implementation was frictionless and users would understand why and how we were using their social identities. We were wrong. Even though we do not share user data with third parties, we found that our users simply do not feel comfortable logging in through big social networks.
We have heard our users, and to remedy this mistake we are announcing the new Capitol Bells login. Anyone can now sign up for Capitol Bells using nothing but their own email address. That’s it! There are no tricks, no special hoops to jump through, no third party verification. Tapping into democracy through Capitol Bells should be as easy as possible.
We want to use this opportunity to thank all of our users and supporters. Our hope is to make this a community driven platform for the people and moderated by the people. We encourage each user to bring forward issues they care about in order have engaging and intelligent dialogues. As for us, we will continue to evolve with the demands of developing a mobile platform and continue to build out the most powerful features we can think up to connect you to Congress.
Have a minute? Try out our new verification system today by downloading Capitol Bells: www.capitolbells.com