Not to degrade polls in any way, but they don't often add to the above reasons for being here. While I would love to chime in on which web framework is the best my observation is that:
a) the information I gain from reading a poll is minimal
b) the comments to a poll are less interesting than an ask YC link or a link to a story. The reason being that polls are (mostly) yes/no answers and tend to promote yes/no answers or flamewars.
Just my opinion of course. And since I come here to have my views challenged, feel free to do so. :-)
Zeitgeiss anyone? Vote a), b) or c).
Why would that be bad?
:-)
You're right. Sorry about that.
1. vote only when you add a comment by specifying your vote in addition to the comment
2. upmodding someone's vote/comment automatically adds a vote from you for the same choice
We need to keep in mind that a benefit of polls is that the folks answering can answer without worrying about loosing karma if they vote for the least popular choice. But we need to balance this with the fact that readers of the site don't gain much from just reading the numbers of a poll.
Would this harm the aesthetics?
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...
:-)
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.
If the poll-maker can add choices later, and people are encouraged to modify their opinions in response to discussion, you may want to allow voters to change their votes later. OTOH, if you want the polls to be snap surveys of initial impressions, the totals should start out hidden, and votes irreversible, so votes are unswayed by perceived popularity.
With the proposed UI, there's still a problematic conflation of 'agree' with 'quality' -- both are clicks on the same 'up' icon. So I would again suggest using a new right/left vote that means 'agree/disagree', orthogonal to 'promote/bury'. Agree/disagree would have no karma implications, and would lend itself to a horizontal bar-graph of running results:
> Users would create too many
***********
> Users would create fewer
*********
> We'd have same number
******************************
Humanity already has enough noise, nonsense, and astroturf masquerading as data; the last thing we need is more of it.
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.
Feature request for polls: a simple bar graph (esp useful for polls with a ton of options like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127203) so that someone doesn't need to do this each time: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3ZpyEuzg1jyMSQxC-NBM... for http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923
Also, post will act as a catalyst (as if we need one...) to discuss, and this is good ;)
And finally it stops mangling with the karma to vote.
May I ask an extra feature? I think it would be useful to display the total number of votes, and maybe even the percentage of each option.
I think this is a result of the fact that names are no longer associated with votes with the explicit polling system. In more frank terms, people no longer get their burst of vanity from "voting," and thus many replace it by shouting their vote out loud. In previous polls, many would post a more complex response to the prompt in their own words, along with a few thoughts. While we'd get plenty of the '"a," "b," "me too"' comments (glad I'm not the only one to detest those), they'd at least be at the bottom of an interesting thread rather than the top of a shoutfest.
Look at BB websites, a large number of polls is usually followed by a "Comment As To Why" afterwards. I mean what's the point of having a poll if you want comments. You don't get quantifiable data online, so why have a poll that is inherently useless because simply seeing a number influences peoples choices.
It's pack mentality. I'm sure "We'd have the same number of polls, but they wouldn't look as ugly" is getting a lot more votes now it's broken into the lead than when they were at 0 points.
I probably will eventually let poll creaters enforce exclusivity, though.
I actually really like this - perhaps you can limit users to submitting one poll a week or something, or only allow one or two polls on the main page at any time? Sites like Slashdot has always had one poll running at a time, and I think thats for good reason.
I'm a little out of it right now, mostly from lack of sleep, but it seems like an interesting concept to me.