good morning, Beehaw
this morning we have a survey for you, which will run for approximately three days. it contains three questions on site policy (plus an optional explanation field), and two questions about the site’s current vibe (plus another optional explanation field).
you can find the survey here.
some caveats to this survey
you likely have some priors for how this “should” work, and i would like you to leave those at the door. to be up front:
- this is not a referendum—it is more like a Wikipedia vote if anything. we’re looking for a consensus or a synthesis of the community’s opinions with the practical limitations we’re working with, not a first-past-the-post winner.
- this is not (currently) a democracy, and you should not expect public results from this. we talked this part over as an admin team and we don’t see much value in publicly releasing the results of a survey like this. if we do release the results publicly, we’ll be announcing that before it happens.
- the same caveats just mentioned will apply to any surveys like this into the foreseeable future. i’m sure everyone understands that in online spaces it is very easy to manipulate surveys like this; accordingly, it is not a great idea to take them at complete face value until you can audit votes. since we don’t have a foolproof, private system for doing that yet, these caveats are necessary to make any kind of vote involving site policy work.
(we do eventually want to create a foolproof enough private system, but this is way on the backburner and i’m guessing most of you prefer having an imperfect way to chime in on the site’s direction than none at all until this system is created)
I want to see the results… not because of democracy, but because of curiosity about what others think.
If you want to prevent a scenario of “51% vs 49%” discussions, may I suggest publishing the results with rounded numbers, like “more than 20% think that [whatever]”. It would be informative enough as far as I’m concerned.
i think you’re unintentionally making a good case for why releasing results isn’t useful here in any form: if we have to take active steps to distort or fudge how the data is presented to prevent sectarianism or people feeling like they’re in a vast minority then it’s just easier (and more productive) for everyone if the data is kept with us.
Hm, maybe.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind finding out my views were “less than 10%” as long as it’s not a popularity contest/vote, it would actually interest me to find out why others might have a different opinion. My only concern would be data that could be construed as a divisive vote, instead of as a feeling to discuss.
On the other hand, I guess these topics have already been discussed, so maybe it would be redundant.