Why I Built This

I wanted to ask the world a question.

Not a poll. Not a survey. A real question—the kind you ask an old friend at 2am when the pretenses fall away. Questions about life. About death. About what we've learned along the way. About how we really feel, not how we present ourselves.

And I wanted real answers.

This started as a thought experiment and here's why:

The Problem With How We Talk Now

It feels like something has broken in the way we communicate. Social media turned conversation into performance. Every opinion is a public statement. Every take is part of a personal brand. We don't share what we think anymore—we share what we want others to think we think.

The result? We've lost track of what people actually believe, generally.

You hear phrases like "people are saying" or "everyone thinks"—but nobody really knows. We have more data than ever and less understanding. More voices and less honesty. More platforms and fewer places where you can just... answer a question truthfully, without worrying about who's watching or what they'll think.

I wanted to build that place.

One Question at a Time

Every week, I ask one question. Sometimes it's big—about meaning, about fear, about what we'd tell our younger selves. Sometimes it's small—about habits, preferences, the mundane details that somehow reveal who we are.

These questions are for me. They're the things I genuinely want to know. But they're also for you—you can suggest questions, see what others have shared, and maybe find something unexpected in the answers.

Over time, I hope this can also become a repository of how we all felt about certain moments. A record of collective thought that isn't filtered through algorithms or amplified by outrage. Just honest answers from real people, preserved.

Anonymity That Actually Means Something

Here's the part I care most about: when you submit an answer, it gets anonymized immediately. Your response is detached from your identity the moment you hit submit. Not "anonymous but we could figure it out if we wanted to."

Actually anonymous.

Even I can't go back and trace who said what. If someone broke into our database tomorrow, they'd find answers—but not people. We've built it so the connection simply doesn't exist.

Why does this matter? Because anonymity enables honesty.

When there's no fear of blowback, no audience to perform for, no permanent record attached to your name—you can just answer. Truthfully. Without calculating how it might look or who might disagree.

You can share the thing you've never told anyone. The opinion that would get you yelled at on TwiX. The doubt, the fear, the lesson learned the hard way. The stuff that makes us human but rarely makes it past our filters.

Unless you explicitly choose to save your answers to your own profile, there's nothing connecting you to what you wrote. That's not a bug—it's the whole point.

How We Make Sense of It All

When hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people answer a question, something has to make sense of it. But I want to be clear about how we do this—because it matters.

We don't just throw your answers into an AI and hope for the best. I understand how current LLMs work so feeding honest responses into a black box and trusting whatever comes out the other side isn't worthwhile.

Instead, we start with statistical analysis. We analyze the responses to find natural groupings—clusters of similar thoughts and perspectives. We identify which answers are representative of larger themes, and which are unique outliers worth surfacing. The math comes first. Hit me up if you want to nerd out.

AI does what it's currently good at, it helps us articulate what we found. It synthesizes the patterns into something readable, but it's grounded in the actual structure of what people said. Representative examples come from real responses. The themes emerge from the data, not from the model's imagination.

It's not perfect. Nothing is. But it means when you see "here's what everyone thinks," there's real analysis behind it—not just a language model making educated guesses.

I Don't Know If This Will Work

I want to be honest: I don't know if people will find this interesting. I don't know if the world wants another place to share their thoughts. I don't know if removing the performance actually produces something meaningful, or just something different.

And there's another limitation I should acknowledge: self-selection. Whoever chooses to respond is, by definition, someone who chose to respond. We're not capturing "what the world thinks"—we're capturing what people who cared enough to answer think. That's a real constraint, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

But here's why I still think it's valuable: every other feedback channel has the same problem, plus additional ones. Comments sections are self-selected and performative. Polls are self-selected and limited to preset options. Social media is self-selected and optimized for outrage. At least here, you're getting honest self-selection—and because it's anonymous, you might actually hear from people who'd never speak up in public spaces. The silent majority is more likely to participate when there's no social cost.

So no, this isn't a perfect mirror of humanity. But "what people who cared enough to answer honestly think" is still a meaningful signal. Maybe more meaningful than what we're getting now.

We've built a world where truth is negotiable, where "what people think" is whatever someone wants to claim, where honest conversation requires private spaces because public ones have become battlegrounds.

Maybe there's room for something simpler. One question. Honest answers. No names attached.

That's the experiment. That's why AskEveryone exists.

What I'm Hoping For

In my most optimistic moments, I imagine this becoming a place where we actually understand each other a little better. Where people who have thoughts but don't tweet them—have a voice. Where we can look at a question and see not what the loudest people think, but what everyone thinks.

Not to prove a point or win an argument. Just to know.

So let me ask you: If you could ask the world one question, what would it be?