Poll: Did you know that HN allows you to make polls?

[AussieWog93]

It isn't obvious, but it seems like you can!

The link to do so is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

[grumblepeet]

I did not know that you could make polls on HN and I’m also 5 karma points short of being able to make them. Besides that, I don’t think that I would make polls here, I value the good story links posted and the insightful replies, and often when I see polls in other places it just seems to ignite flame wars and low value discussions. It’s a good thing that it is obscure, long may it be rarely used!

[dredmorbius]

"How accurate are online polls?"

[M]ost online polls that use participants who volunteer to take part do not have a proven record of accuracy. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that not everyone in the U.S. uses the internet, and those who do not are demographically different from the rest of the public. Another reason is that people who volunteer for polls may be different from other people in ways that could make the poll unrepresentative. At worst, online polls can be seriously biased if people who hold a particular point of view are more motivated to participate than those with a different point of view.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...

Rather than serve as accurate assessments of public opinion or beliefs, online polls at best surface sentiments and potential areas of interest. Some are mere amusements. Many serve a darker purpose of advocating for a specific cause or ideology (a "push poll" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll), fishing for either insights on how audiences might be manipulated through advertising or propaganda, or outright soliciting personal information that is of use in hacking into accounts by guessing passwords or so-called "security questions".

[nopenopenopeno]

I guess we’ll just have to accept that we may never know how many people were previously aware that they could create polls on HN.

[Semaphor]

This is always very apparent on /r/SampleSize (a subreddit dedicated to posting and taking surveys): While Reddit as a whole has far fewer women than men, women often outsize men, Germans are usually the 3rd biggest group after USA-ians and British, and transgender sometimes make up 15%. Luckily, most people there (judging by the comments) are aware of that.

[kwkelly]

Most serious online pollsters are using random sampling through panel providers and stratify based on known demographic statistics. Samples are re-weighted by raking (which reduces bias but increases variance) to better match population statistics.

This of course doesn’t mean all sources of bias are eliminated, but you also can’t eliminate all sources of bias in phone polling. Just like those taking polls on the internet, certain slices of the population that you can’t control for or don’t know about may be more or less willing to participate.

[jodrellblank]

> “Another reason is that people who volunteer for polls may be different from other people in ways that could make the poll unrepresentative.”

See also “most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people” on r/Slatestarcodex - https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

[mike741]

These criticisms are not limited to just online polls. One advantage that online polls have is a larger sample size. Gallop polls, for example, tend to have an extremely small sample size of less than 2,000 people while an online poll can reach hundreds of thousands. Both online and offline have advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, if you're being shown a poll that you didn't pay for or participate in then it's likely intended to influence rather than educate.

[tzs]

I wonder what could be done if HN itself were to analyze data from an HN poll, combining it with other data they have on the participants?

Quite a lot about a person on HN can be inferred from that person's comment history. Inferences could also be made from their IP address history if that is logged. Upvote, downvote, flagging, and vouching history if logged would also provide some information.

I wonder if there would be enough to correct for some of the biases?

[jart]

Pew Research is a biased source because CGI Script polling poses an existential threat to their business model.

[asplake]

Polls brought a plague of dumb clickbaitiness to LinkedIn, unwittingly amplified by commenters complaining of their lack of nuance. Let’s not do that here

[jmcgough]

Back around 2012 HN had a massive amount of polls every day on the frontpage. I even wrote a scraper to scrape them all off and write them to a hnpolls website. Glad it's not really a thing these days.

[jonathankoren]

Let’s vote on it.

[jfoster]

Problems like that don't have to be solved by changing the existence of a feature. There are many ways to address such an issue; adjusting the incentives, changing the ranking algorithm, etc.

[seanhunter]

Exactly. If they start getting used at all, I hope the feature gets disabled.

[laoganmaplz]

No, but I also sincerely believe that dang is a lizard. Not because I have any reason to believe that dang is a lizard, but because my ethos obligates me to believe anyone is a lizard when I see an opportunity to do so.

[gruez]

>but because my ethos obligates me to believe anyone is a lizard when I see an opportunity to do so.

Sounds like you're one of those people

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

[Tempest1981]

I can even vote twice; choices aren't mutually exclusive.

[elihu]

Yep, I tried it before reading your comment.

I think that's great. Approval voting is awesome, and probably a better default for a lot of things anyways.

Even mundane things like "where do you want to eat lunch" with first-past-the-post you run the risk of selecting a place most people don't want to eat at because they split their vote between a bunch of options most people preferred. Really, you want people to distinguish between places they want to eat at and places they don't want to eat at, and the optimal thing is to select the one that the most people do want to eat at. That's basically how approval voting works.

[vaylian]

Reality is complex. HN supports a complex reality.

[___q]

...even though the options are; I voted "yes" and "no"

[maxrf]

"Sorry, you need over 200 karma to create a poll." :(

[javierga]

That’s going to take a while to process for me. Have tried to be an active user since 2014 and whenever I have something of value, it’s already been expressed better by someone else.

[simlevesque]

I'm impressed that you got a 5 letters username less than 3 years ago.

[blowfish721]

Have an upvote, one less karma to go.

[axegon_]

One constructive rant on a controversial topic and you're done.

[iFred]

You’ll get there one day. I’ve kind of enjoyed the idea that downvoting is limited to a few, meaning someone that is greyed out must have said something very wrong or worthless. I’m guessing that gate keeping polls also means that they’re more of an event than low rent submission spam.

[jrootabega]

At the time when I chose my answer, I did know. So I was obligated to pick "Yes".

[doe88]

Wow didnt know it could, found a list a past polls, with really popular ones.

https://hn.algolia.com/polls

[matt_daemon]

No, and your handle made me laugh as a fellow ‘93 Aussie Wog.

[vorticalbox]

If you don't mind my asking, could you explain what a "wog" is?

[prof-dr-ir]

And now I am reminded of the CmdrTaco option, and reminiscing about days long gone - certainly appropriate for New Year's day.

[cmdrtaco]

Hey!

[DoreenMichele]

People used to occasionally post polls to HN asking demographic data. Probably not entirely accurate but semi useful to me.

[divbzero]

Perhaps polls are obscure by design. The new poll link is mentioned only in the FAQ and does not appear anywhere on the home page or submit page.

(Interestingly, you can vote for more than one response, e.g. both “Yes” and “No” which happens to be the correct answer for me.)

[phnofive]

Where's the option for 'I saw your comment about in that other thread a few hours ago and that reminded me this was launched and forgotten a while ago now'?

-- frustrated pollster with poor prognostications for options

[lsferreira42]

Well i am on hackernews since April, 2013 and i still dont have enough karma to do a lot of things, i think i have to be more confident on commenting here

[richardfey]

Any idea why it is not available in the /submit page?

[tiffanyh]

I realize a lot of folks aren’t fans of poll. But there can be some value.

Eg I could be off basis here but it seems like the norm in the Bay Area is comp approaching $1M. But if you look at this poll from 8 years ago, Bay Area comp of $300k+ is exceeding low.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5802295

[pembrook]

A lot has changed in 8 years.

[barrkel]

Is this a bot?

[shric]

Looks like it lets you vote for both options

[Aeolun]

I am certain I’ve heard about this before, but I see it so little that I forget every single time.

[pachico]

Yesterday I precisely thinking about polls in HN and if they would make sense. Although polls might seem the preamble of an ad populum fallacy when it comes to agreements, I see their potential too.

Glad to know they are available and thanks for sharing.

Happy new year, BTW!

[lucgommans]

And the answers are randomized for each pageload. Can be a good thing, or it can be annoying if it's more of a scale kind of thing. Then again, polls aren't used that much anyway so having this as only option is fine.

[folli]

Is there a practical reason that they are randomized?