Ask HN: A free open-source 'kickstarter-esque' platform for citizen scientists
Imagine you're a curious citizen scientist and you want to test a hypothesis or examine the relationship between things... For example, you've read a million times that exercise is good for mood, but you'd like to know whether different types of exercises impact mood improvements differently. Maybe standard cardio vs HIIT vs weight training.

You could do the standard n=1 thing where you conduct a self-experiment and do a little write up, which is still cool, but is of limited value to the world... Not only because the sample size is too small, but because you probably didn't try to control for any confounding variables.

What I'm proposing to build is a platform that lets basically anyone create an experiment, with a proper scientifically sound method, and then other people on the platform can anonymously volunteer themselves as test subjects...

The idea would be to take away as much of the drudge work as possible from the citizen scientist except for coming up with the hypothesis (and designing a good experiment - but the platform could help with this too).

People who join the platform as willing study participants do so anonymously, but in return need to provide information on things like their age, gender, current health issues, current medication, etc. so that they can be auto-excluded from a study if necessary, or (maybe even better) still included, but analysed at the end of the study in some kind of multivariate test.

It would automatically assign participants to control and different experiment groups, and every week (or whatever) the participants would log in, and submit data... In other words, all data collection happens within the app. In my example above, maybe their exercise routine and a mood rating.

At the end of the study, the platform then figures out things like statistical significance for you automatically
and even partially generates the results and conclusion sections of your paper (maybe using GPT3), and publishes it. Studies where no correlations were found would be automatically published too.

The 'hook' (aside from doing a nice thing to benefit humanity) is that everyone who participates in the study has the option to get mentioned as a contributor if they want to. All research findings are available for everyone to see, for free in perpetuity, with people strongly encouraged to discuss the results and suggest ideas for future study. The raw data is available for everyone to download.

Is this a crazy idea? I feel like all you'd need is a dedicated and honest core of 10,000 users or so from a fairly wide cross section of the population and you could probably discover a LOT of really amazing things, and the nice thing is so many people have various fitness trackers now, you could get in some really interesting quantitative data.

tl;dr: If you have even a hint of 'quantified self' type curiousity (like me), rather than posting half-assed n=1 type stuff on Reddit, why don't we join forces and created a free and open source platform to transform a lot of anecdotes into actual statistically significant findings?

If anyone's interested, I'll start up a discord.