Should there be an option for the poll results not to link responses to individual voters? I think there are some questions for which a confidential poll would be preferable. On the other hand, I imagine the voter-vote identity would still be known to CEA and potentially hackable (which IIRC is a reason why there is no “make an anonymous comment/post” function).
When we launched the first iteration of this slider feature for a forum-wide event, it was anonymous. We later decided to make it non-anonymous because we thought it would make people more bought into the poll (because they would be interested to see the opinions of people they recognise, and would take their own vote more seriously because it was public).
I think broadly speaking this worked, and people were more bought in to later polls. Letting people add comments was also intended to move further in the direction of “prompt for individuals to stake out their positions” (as opposed to “tool for aggregating preferences”).
I wouldn’t want to add the option of voting anonymously because I would guess people would use it just because it’s the lowest effort thing to do, even when there’s no real downside to having people see their vote. If people do want to vote anonymously they can always create an anonymous account, so a high-friction version of the option does exist.
(and: on the point about anon-voting being potentially hackable/known to CEA, fully anonymous accounts are the simplest way round this too).
Should there be an option for the poll results not to link responses to individual voters? I think there are some questions for which a confidential poll would be preferable. On the other hand, I imagine the voter-vote identity would still be known to CEA and potentially hackable (which IIRC is a reason why there is no “make an anonymous comment/post” function).
When we launched the first iteration of this slider feature for a forum-wide event, it was anonymous. We later decided to make it non-anonymous because we thought it would make people more bought into the poll (because they would be interested to see the opinions of people they recognise, and would take their own vote more seriously because it was public).
I think broadly speaking this worked, and people were more bought in to later polls. Letting people add comments was also intended to move further in the direction of “prompt for individuals to stake out their positions” (as opposed to “tool for aggregating preferences”).
I wouldn’t want to add the option of voting anonymously because I would guess people would use it just because it’s the lowest effort thing to do, even when there’s no real downside to having people see their vote. If people do want to vote anonymously they can always create an anonymous account, so a high-friction version of the option does exist.
(and: on the point about anon-voting being potentially hackable/known to CEA, fully anonymous accounts are the simplest way round this too).