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What we're doing is narrower: can a city council member tell which comments come from people who live in their district.

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Different scope. Agora verifies constituents within a platform, district by district, not citizenship nationally. A government-run verification layer is a much bigger proposal with its own tradeoffs.

The actual problem isn't that they were identical, it's that the system had no way to tell "1,000 individuals who agree" from "1,000 individuals who copy-pasted" from "a bot farm." All three look the same to an unconstrained comment box. That's the design failure.

Fair correction. Identical isn't the same as fake. Most of those were real people who used a message an org gave them.

Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 19/06/2026

Different failure mode, same root cause. Our post is about unconstrained input burying signal. Yours is the opposite: a process with no defined inputs at all, so there's nothing to fill out correctly. Both come from treating structure as optional.

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The form letter problem isn't limited to federal agencies. Any public comment system that accepts unconstrained input becomes a volume game. Organized groups win volume games. Individual constituents don't. The design has to make that impossible, not just harder.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 17/06/2026

During the FCC's net neutrality comment period, the agency received millions of submissions. Most were identical. Individual citizens who wrote genuinely had no way to know if their comments registered at all. That's not a civic system. That's a lottery.

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Agora can't force officials to act on what they hear. What it can do is make "I didn't know what my constituents thought" a less defensible excuse. Whether that's enough depends on the official.

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Campaign finance is a real problem and a different layer. At Agora, we focus on the input channel. Improving the quality of the constituent signal. Both can be broken at once. We're working on one of them, hoping it also affects the other.

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Meetings work for the people who can attend them. That's a smaller group than it should be. Trying to extend that to everyone else.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 14/06/2026

More seats are a real argument. But whatever the count, the channel between citizens and whoever holds office is still broken. The gap survives any ratio. So adding more seats is not enough

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NYC has 51 city council members, 65 state assembly members, 27 state senators, 26 members of Congress. Plus borough presidents, mayor, comptroller. Most constituents have zero interaction with them between elections. That's the civic gap, in numbers.

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This is why verified official anchoring isn't a design restriction. It's what keeps the space civic — because every conversation is anchored to something governmental, something accountable to a constituency.

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A platform that can't sustain official engagement becomes citizens posting into a void. The void empties. The platform dies. The same failure, different name, repeated across a decade.

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It became a place where citizens expressed opinions to each other — not to officials. Without that anchor, it had the dynamics of social media with none of the reach.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 12/06/2026

Brigade tried to build civic social networking. Got traction. Didn't survive. The postmortem is worth reading carefully.

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The hardest design problem in civic participation isn't how to let citizens be heard. It's making being heard feel real. That means acknowledgment, reference, and follow-through. Not every input gets a custom reply. But every input deserves a structured one.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 11/06/2026

What participation looks like from the citizen side: A council member posts about a proposed rezoning in your neighborhood. You see it. You weigh in through a structured mechanism. Your input is aggregated with other verified constituents from the district. You find out if it moved anything.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 11/06/2026

"I hope mine was noticed" is the whole problem in four words. You did the work. You made a real distinction. And you have no idea if it registered. The lack of the feedback loop is what makes people stop trying the next time.

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The form isn't censorship. It's signal design. You can't extract useful signal from unconstrained input. Every good facilitator knows this. Every useful survey is built on it.

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Structured participation is different. A specific mechanism matched to a specific type of input. A vote-along on a bill. A budget allocation exercise. A question for a town hall. The form shapes what can be submitted — and that shaping is the point.

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An open comment section on a bill gives everyone an equal voice. A constituent in the district. An activist from another state. A bot. A coordinated campaign. All equally weighted, all equally visible. That's not participation. That's noise with a comment box.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 09/06/2026

The official inbox problem isn't a staffing problem. You can hire more people to read more emails. What you can't do is turn a form letter into a constituent. The problem is upstream. It's a design problem.

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One official showed me their inbox. Thousands of emails. Most were identical form letters routed through advocacy organizations. A handful were real constituent stories. No way to separate them. They weren't ignoring constituents. They couldn't find them.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 07/06/2026

I understand what you say, but this is not the problem Agora is trying to fix. I would add that, based on my knowledge and expertise, there is no solution that can come from a private enterprise. This requires a big cultural and societal change, which can come only from the roots.

Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 07/06/2026

Citizens can also initiate discussions on Agora. But they can't post at each other. That's the design distinction. Social media is citizens posting at citizens. Agora is citizens and officials in the same structured space, anchored to something governmental, something accountable.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 06/06/2026

The question we hear most: if officials anchor the platform, don't they control the agenda? The weighting is the answer. Their post, their actual constituents respond, and the signal comes back as a read on their specific district, not a popularity contest. They can't curate who they hear from.

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Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 06/06/2026

The accountability gap, issues officials refuse to address, is real. It's a different problem, with different tools. We're not trying to solve both. I do believe that the first will affect positively the other.

Tomer Rozenberg @tomer-rozenberg.com · 06/06/2026

Two different problems. Agora is built for one: constituent signal on decisions officials are already making. For example, the official is considering a budget cut with no real sense of what their district thinks.