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Comment on Poll: What would happen if News.YC had explicit support for polls?

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Most of the "Ask YC" questions get answers the asker did not expect, so a poll would do no good.

pgOP

The creator of a poll can add new choices later, in response to comments.

That would skew the results.

If it was possible to downvote choices a new choice could maybe start out with an average of the other choices. But since this isn't possible I don't see an obvious way of resolving this.

Note by the way that the same mechanism applies to comments, particularly since the comments that are added later and therefore have no votes are displayed at the bottom, thus making it proportionally harder for them to make it to the top of the thread before it falls off the frontpage. The last argument assumes that users start from the top of the page, and don't always make it through all the comments to the bottom. A behaviour that I think is quite common - I know I do it...

Results of these polls are already skewed because the respondents are self-selected.

You're right - but that's a problem that can't really be solved, unless we start hijacking unsuspecting random people to answer.

:-)

1) I like the way you implemented the poll. 2) But I'd like to be able to change a vote - even if just for a few minutes. I upvoted the third choice and then upvoted the second just to see if I could vote for more than one - but that was just a test. I wanted to change my vote but couldn't. 3) What if you showed votes as a ratio of votes to (quantity of unique visitors since the choice was added)? This would balance the scores of questions added later. This might be interesting with comments, too. A really good comment added to a posting that almost everyone has seen doesn't get recognized so much now.

Wouldn't the results then be biased in favor of the original choices (since they were available longer) making it hard to draw any conclusions?

No, because it would be added in according to the scientific method.

what on earth does that mean?

It was a joke.

Feature request: Allow author to make choices exclusive or multi-response. By that I mean, some polls

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126903

are designed to allow voters to vote on multiple choices. While others:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923

should only allow for a singular response.

Love the line break for a new choice. Could you automatically add in letters or numbers to delineate them? It would make discussion around each choice a bit easier, especially if there are four choices or more.

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