Creators needed: Option space design

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

~ Bono

The importance of MetaPoll authors

Perhaps more importantly than the structure that MetaPoll provides, is what we put in that structure.

How we craft the options is more impactful than the structure itself.

Unfortunately us mechanism designers often become enamoured with the elegance of our frameworks—the voting algorithms, the cryptographic proofs, the incentive structures—while overlooking the fundamental question of what exactly we're asking people to choose between.

Consider an example of a quadratic voting system. The mathematics are beautiful, the incentive alignment is theoretically sound, but if your options are "Should we paint the house blue or green?" versus a more nuanced set that captures the actual preferences and tradeoffs at stake, the sophisticated mechanism becomes largely irrelevant.

What's the point of having an F1 race car that your driver can't drive faster than 20 kph?

The garbage-in-garbage-out principle applies with particular force to collective decision-making systems.

This creates an interesting paradox: the more powerful our coordination tools become, the more critical it becomes to think carefully about the inputs we feed into them. A poorly designed mechanism with perfectly crafted options will often produce more useful outcomes than a sophisticated mechanism operating on poorly framed choices. The bottleneck isn't just computational—it's also conceptual.

What does this mean for MetaPoll specifically? It suggests that MetaPoll needs a community of thoughtful creators (like you) who's primary focus is on exploring and designing better methodologies for MetaPoll option space design. Or more bluntly, we need racecar drivers. The core challenge for creators is giving their communities access to well designed option spaces that maximize skill appropriate preference expression while minimizing cognitive load. Can you rise the to challenge?

These next pages explore some advanced concepts to consider when creating MetaPolls. They aren't mandatory to become a great creator. We just hope they'll give you some juice to work with.