It allowed different sides to gradually see that they share the same underlying concern despite superficial disagreements.

Pol.is’s open-source software is designed to serve up interactive online surveys around a particular issue. People are shown a series of short statements about aspects of a broader issue—for example, “Uber drivers should need the same licenses cab drivers do”—and asked to click to signal that they agree or disagree. People can contribute new statements of their own for others to respond to. The tangle of crisscrossing responses is used to automatically generate charts that map out different clusters of opinion, making it easy to see the points on which people tend to overlap or disagree.<ref>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607990/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-bad-for-democracy/</ref>