Hewsay is a public opinion site built around one simple idea: a question is more interesting when you can see how everyone else answered it. Someone posts a question, anyone can vote, and the moment you do you see where you sit relative to everybody else who has answered.
Anyone can post a question with a short description and a set of answer options. Questions can be anything people actually argue about — which streaming service is worth keeping, whether a policy is a good idea, what the best childhood book was. Voting does not require an account; you can answer as a guest.
If none of the options fit, you can add your own when you vote. That option then becomes available for everyone else to choose, so a poll gets better the more people answer it rather than being fixed by whoever wrote it. Both questions and individual options can carry a photo.
Every question has a results page showing the full breakdown of the vote. Beyond the raw split, results are also broken down two other ways: by country, so you can see whether opinion differs between places, and over time, so you can see whether an answer that led early held up as more people voted. Anyone can look at the results without voting first.
Each question has a discussion attached to it. The intent is for the comments to be about the question rather than about each other — a poll tells you what people think, and the discussion is where they explain why.
Photos uploaded to a question or an answer option are resized on the server and screened automatically before they appear. Screening is deliberately cautious: an image is only shown once it has been checked and passed. If the check cannot be completed for any reason, the photo stays hidden rather than being published unchecked.
Questions, options and comments are written by the people who use the site, not by us. Views expressed in them belong to whoever posted them. If you find something on the site that should not be there, please tell us and we will look at it.
Hewsay is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with any political party, campaign, publisher or brand, and no one pays for a question to be asked or for an answer to be shown in a particular way.
Running the site costs money — hosting, the domain, the image screening — and the intention is to cover that through advertising. Where advertising appears it is labelled as such and kept separate from poll content. Advertisers have no say in what questions are asked or how results are presented.
What we collect and why is set out in full on our legal and privacy page, which also covers content ownership. In short: an account needs an email address, votes are recorded so results can be counted, and an approximate country is derived so results can be broken down geographically. We do not sell personal information.
Questions, corrections, takedown requests or anything else: webmaster@hewsay.com. We read everything sent there, and we would rather hear about a problem than not.