I've never liked online polls. They're intensely unscientific, suffering from all the biases that trained sociologists battle every single day, with no attempt to correct for them. And they're easily manipulated, both by the questioner and by the respondents and their claques.
Humanity already has enough noise, nonsense, and astroturf masquerading as data; the last thing we need is more of it.
You may be right. But even if the results were worthless they could still set off interesting conversations. And the fact is, people already were doing polls, via various awkward hacks. When your users keep walking through a hole in the wall you should probably make a door there.
Well, I thought about trying to argue that it's better to keep polls awkward and ugly, so that people get discouraged from creating the darned things and just ask questions instead. :) But, in fact, you're right: You've tried that already, and it hasn't worked.
I suppose polls are the online equivalent of asking people in the audience to raise their hands. It's a similarly useless technique for actually gathering data, but it can be effective as a rhetorical tool. And, given that the alternative in an online forum is to write for a completely invisible audience, maybe it is sometimes better than nothing.
Comments
I've never liked online polls. They're intensely unscientific, suffering from all the biases that trained sociologists battle every single day, with no attempt to correct for them. And they're easily manipulated, both by the questioner and by the respondents and their claques.
Humanity already has enough noise, nonsense, and astroturf masquerading as data; the last thing we need is more of it.
You may be right. But even if the results were worthless they could still set off interesting conversations. And the fact is, people already were doing polls, via various awkward hacks. When your users keep walking through a hole in the wall you should probably make a door there.
Well, I thought about trying to argue that it's better to keep polls awkward and ugly, so that people get discouraged from creating the darned things and just ask questions instead. :) But, in fact, you're right: You've tried that already, and it hasn't worked.
I suppose polls are the online equivalent of asking people in the audience to raise their hands. It's a similarly useless technique for actually gathering data, but it can be effective as a rhetorical tool. And, given that the alternative in an online forum is to write for a completely invisible audience, maybe it is sometimes better than nothing.