For instance, it would be cool if a requirement for commenting on a post was to enter anonymous information about yourself. I think it would be cool to gain insight into the demographics of different threads.
But, obviously one big issue with that is that there’s a good chance a lot of people would just lie.
So how do you account for that and how do you determine whether or not a poll question is useless due to the likelihood of people lying?
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The people who go out of their way just to troll a poll and put wrong answers isn’t that much, considering people barely like taking the time to answer polls honestly.
On most polls, people simply don’t have a *reason* to lie. Why would anyone? Polls on Reddit are completely anonymous anyway.
Depends how the poll was conducted. Did you ask for people off the street or did a doctor hand you a form and ask you to answer honestly. The agency doing the poll can also be a variable. Most people would probably tell the truth if there’s no incentive to lie. Sure you might have a few jokers in there but if your sample size is big enough, liars are most likely negligible.
Source: Trust me bro
If the number of responders are large and the poll is anonymous then the impact of false responses should be negligible
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Depends on the topic of the poll.
Certain topics like “do you prefer showers in the morning or night?” are probably going to have a very low amount of dishonest answers, due to the fact it’s not very controversial and there’s no reason to lie really.
Other polls like “do you support the current president?” are going to be much different as it ties very close to someone’s personal beliefs and life experiences.
Also the number of votes is very important, 15 people voting on something is not going to be a very accurate representation, I think the US surveys are around 10,000 people, when they do surveys like “approval rating”.
I’d say with any controversial poll you have to take the results with a grain of sand, along with current events that occurred.
For example, a lot of people were fine with the Patriot act in the early 2000s after 9/11, which basically allowed the government to monitor “certain” people. Don’t think that would pass as it did now lol.
People can “lie” for many reasons, to appear better in their own eyes (“Do you shower daily?”), because they think a specific answer is expected from them (“Do you approve of the government, comrade?”), because they misunderstood the question or just have no idea and don’t want to check the “don’t know” mark, &c.
So it’s a whole spectrum of uncertainty and pollsters try to even things out by asking lots of people from a “representative” background. You won’t get that on Reddit
Some psychologists who rely on questionnaires get around that problem by embedding the true point they want to know about in an otherwise irrelevant question…
> it would be cool if a requirement for commenting on a post was to enter anonymous information about yourself
Careful with that, you can be identified with astonishingly little information about you. In other words, not cool at all.
They can’t guarantee that nobody is lying, but then again they probably don’t need to.
If it’s an opt-in type poll, then it probably doesn’t matter because these things tend to be skewed anyway. You might get certain types of people who are simply more likely to fill out the information and some types who are not. Or you have things like those media polls “Vote here to tell us if you are outraged about Issue X”….it always tends to attract people who ARE outraged about X, because people who aren’t outraged just won’t bother.
If it’s a more ‘serious’ poll, then the question would be: where is the incentive to lie? If you have a Voting Intention poll, and you’re a 30 year old white female academic who votes Democrat/Labour….then what’s the point of pretending you’re a 60 year old Hispanic male auto mechanic who votes Republican/Conservative? Outside of straight trolling, nobody is ‘achieving’ anything by lying, so the instance of this would be presumed to be low.
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