Poll on the Direction of the Current Proposals

@Skygunner  
Sir this is a community poll made by a community member

@Boxless  
Sure is!
 
I even acknowledge this if you’d actually read what I type.

@Skygunner  
Your wording suggested otherwise, but yeah sure jump straight to ‘haha you didn’t read what i typed’ mode.
 
Of course a grassroots poll with little promotion besides one group attempting to brigade it (badly) is going to have shit representation. I don’t know what you expected or why you’re complaining here when you could bring up the rather on-topic idea of an official poll for changes in the… actual policy discussion thread? Mods don’t really read here.

@Boxless  
So what you’re saying is…….it’s a very bad poll. Thanks, I agree.

@Skygunner  
What i’m saying is your expectations were ridiculously high.

900 out of 40k would actually be a fairly decent sample size, if the poll was randomly selected, but the group that actually uses the forum is a small self selecting sample already. Additionally, the poll choices are pretty poorly written..
 
Though I think skygunners poll leaves some ambiguity.
 
Do you agree with the rule 0 changes.
 
No, there should be no change.  
No, they are too much change.  
Yes, the new change is good.  
Yes, but it does not go far enough.
 
The problem with skies poll is that no could encompass both no change, and not far enough.

@Background Pony #44A1  
Don’t lose your nuance. Having a with us or against us attitude is just making us like them. The passive users I do think would count as a separate block due to probably a range of more passive attitudes about this that I’d imagine that would be prevalent. Being kind has its value.
 
@Venport  
I think you would still get a significant portion of people who were sitting out/not paying attention to at least vote if it was a site wide announcement.
 
@Skygunner  
I don’t think he was actively trying to spin it so much as trying to echo the general sentiments that people held.  

 
@Moonatik  

 
@Aponty  
@MorningSun  
@pingzing  

 
@aperture_tech  

 
@Background Pony #5C8B  
@Background Pony #25FA  
I still would have issues with it. Like a lot of the consistency stuff was said regarding the staff pole while I didn’t really see that raised for the proposed rule 0 changes.

900 people is actually well within the reach of election opinion polls of countries with millions of voters

@FrecklesFanatic  
There is a meaningful difference between self-selected respondents (forum users) and randomly selected respondents, but yeah I think we have a really good sample size here.

@Background Pony #F515  
To be fair dilarius posted it on Twitter too and everyone in that crowd (that still wants to engage with the site at all) is voting as they see it, so its not just forum users.

I’m a little surprised by the total amount of votes this poll has

@doloresbridge  
I’ve seen it raised around some of the nebulous language that’s been proposed, a lot of people are asking about specific images because they’re not sure how the rules would be applied to those images.

@Background Pony #F515
 
The sample size might be good, but it’s absolutely not randomly selected, and so you can’t really derive information from the poll about the general userbase.
 
To get an accurate representation of all users’ opinions, you’d first need to know what the demographics of the userbase is. Then you’d need to randomly sample from each of those demographics, and weight the responses based on the size of each of those demographics.
 
That would get you closer to an accurate view of the community. As others have pointed out, self-selection bias is a real big issue which pretty much makes this poll useless.

@Whatsapokemon  
I think to a degree this is mitigated by the subsampling in stsyn’s analysis – no matter how you cut the voter sample, it’s fairly consistently 50/30-35.

@Whatsapokemon
 
But that’s the point! Staff could launch a sitewide poll. Staff could make an announcement. They don’t want it and after that some people come and say “but your poll is not strong enough of a proof”. Of course it’s not strong enough! But staff seem to be satisfied with that - if no one can present overwhelming proof what users want staff can pretend they’ve done their best to think about it.
 
Even when they sacked Raptorshy nothing prevented them to continue with the planned user pool. But no, they treat that as emergency and want to use emergency powers.

re: the poll quality
 
It’s a twice self-selected sample. Forum users are self-selected from derpibooru users, and forum users actually responding to the thread and voting are self-selected.
 
Yeah, the staff could launch a poll-and give it better questions, I’m sure.
 
 
Re: “civility”
 
In my limited experience, nazis are hypocritical about civility, often demanding that people be civil to them while having little to no intention of being civil in turn.
 
I’m not sure describing civility as a weapon of nazis is an apt description, however. Being civil to eachother is a very important skill-as is knowing when it’s actually appropriate to stop being civil.

@Frosku  
Not really, if you subsample a bias portion of the population, you still get that bias. It needs to be random from the whole population.

@Background Pony #AD7A  
Derpi decided to log me out while posting that :V

To the people keep bringing up the fact that the poll isn’t perfectly random and/or doesn’t really cover the actual derpibooru userbase, We already know.
 
I don’t think anyone is going around saying that this is the end all be all for the discussion, and it’s just an informal poll until something more concrete comes out.  
Besides, there’s evidence that both sides have done some level of vote brigading, something that could potentially be dealt with in an official poll.

@danmur15  
Even filtering by age and activity though the results remain the same. If anything an official poll that forces the grillers who have been ignoring this shit storm since they only go here to nut to pony art to vote probably would make the ratios worse

@Background Pony #9951  
Depends on your definition of “worse” tbh

Problems with a sitewide poll would be the same as were outlined in this thread, only with a lot more people yelling.  
People would just assume it’s rigged regardless of the results.  
The question and options would be criticised to death for one reason or another.  
It’d just divide things further and we’d be right where we are now.

honestly im not sure if we could really reliably get even close to a somewhat random sample just because those who have an opinion on the whole issue are going to be more likely to respond overall, forum user or not

Even most official pollsters are highly skeptical of “internet polling.” It’s easily manipulated. Leaving a decision to an internet poll means you are simply leaving it up to trolls, bots and brigades. There’s no way that the site can do a realistic poll unless they are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring a real polling firm - and I don’t know how easy it would be for such a firm to actually randomly contact community members to create a fair sample. Absent that, the only realistic way for them to make decisions is for it to be made by site staff with some input from the community, which is what they are already doing.

@Background Pony #EF6B  
There is analysis in the OP stripping out newly created accounts, inactive accounts, etc.