#polls #product #design

Invite Trees for Polls

Flat tallies hide how answers spread — Polls renders the forwarding tree instead.

Most poll tools stop at percentages. Polls cares about path: who forwarded the invite, which branch converged on one answer, where a subtree split.

Mechanics

  1. Creator mints a signed link.
  2. Recipient auth’s through gate.too.foo.
  3. Vote is recorded; recipient can forward a child link.
  4. Each token encodes parent → child edges in D1.

The result view is a tree, not a bar chart — useful when you are studying diffusion (onboarding flows, internal referenda, soft launches).

Mobile trap

Auth bounces on portrait phones must preserve the invite token through the gate redirect. That edge case is why Polls stays a Worker with explicit session handling instead of a static form.

Status

Live at polls.too.foo. Deploy via tools/deploy.sh polls; verify the landmark string in the Worker HTML after every release.