BRAND NEW! It's the Tuesday Mini-Poll

[muckefuck]

Another Monday has come and gone and, once again, I find that my opinion on some matter of burning interest to rollick has not been solicited. Woe be me! Fortunately, I know she is susceptible to shame, so I hearby declare my intention to start the Tuesday Mini-Poll, which will only appear on those Tuesdays when no Monday Mini-Poll has been forthcoming. That'll light a fire under her!

This week's topic: Surveys

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a new LJer who I consider Friending. I'm cautious about doing this too soon, since some people get freaky when you unFriend them. This caution generally lead me to audit their journals for a time. (As welcomerain warns, don't assume I don't read your journal just because you're not on my Friends list.)

There are various reasons why I choose not to add these journals to the select pool I read daily, but nothing kills my interest quicker than seeing a bunch of entries which are merely surveys or quiz results. Quizzes can be cute, but they ultimately tell me more about the quiz than about the quiz-taker. Plus, the more outré they become, the more arbitrary they seem. Now I'm simply waiting for the Which LJ Quiz Are You Quiz, a reductio ad absurdum that will suck all the joy out of designing quizzes like a fun singularity and leave us all gasping for something else to fill the hollowing void of our journals with.

Like surveys.

I've never gotten into these. I think I can understand the appeal: They're a way to talk about yourself without seeming too narcissistic. After all, someone asked, right? And if everyone is filling out the same survey, it becomes like a party game; not participating comes to be seen as the antisocial act. The interview meme takes this a step further by, in essence, demanding surveys tailored specifically for you. What could be more validating?

But that's all just my cynical penny-ante psychologising. Rather than listening to my own ass, I'd rather listen to y'all's...er...opinions. Why do you take surveys? What do you get out of completing them? Out of reading them? Why do/don't you post the results and who do you think reads them--and why?

That oughta get things started.

Comments

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Oh, the shame! Oh, the vilification! Oh… someone noticed?

The Monday Mini-polls had lost popularity to the point where they were starting to lose their appeal for me. At the point where they were only getting a half-dozen responses from the 200-plus people who were supposedly reading, I felt like they'd served their purpose. At least for a while. Maybe I'll bring them back after my vacation.

As to your survey question… What kind of survey are you talking about? Do you just mean those check-some-buttons surveys and polls that so many people post in their journals? (I fill out those mostly so I can see the answers automatically on my friends page, because I'm always curious.) Or do you mean online, off-LJ surveys where you fill out a lot of personal info, like on the amazingly-dumb-IMHO "LJ Slut" thing that's going on right now? (I don't bother with those.) Or do you mean something like this, where you ask a question and we answer? And if the latter, why would you bitch about my non-poll-posting while saying you never much got into them yourself?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Okay, let's talk definitions.

For me, the first are "quizzes". All the "What Major Arcana/Heinlein novel/nasal hygiene product/etc. are you?" crap that people post in their journals fall into this category.

The second are the "surveys" I'm talking about--lists of personal questions. They seem to be getting longer and longer, with more and more cutesy variations (e.g. numerical or alphabetical themes) appearing.

"Polls", either produced using the LJ poll tool or like your Monday Mini-Poll, are different. They strike me as more targeted: The poller has a particular question in mind they'd like to hear various people's responses to. It's not so much a scattershot, shotgun attempt to get people to talk about themselves.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Gotcha. Yeah, I pretty much don't bother with surveys unless they're actually on LJ and are very quick and I'm bored. I already know stuff about me. I'm more interested in finding out stuff about other people.