I think a lovely addition to this site would be to give us more control over filtering the results of polls. Currently, the vast majority of polls are decided by partisan politics, not by people actually answering the question. Let me give you an example, below.
Rate Microsoft E3 |
|||
| 10 | 21 | 3.63% |
|
| 9 | 15 | 2.59% |
|
| 8 | 52 | 8.98% |
|
| 7 | 44 | 7.60% |
|
| 6 | 75 | 12.95% |
|
| 5 | 89 | 15.37% |
|
| 4 | 80 | 13.82% |
|
| 3 | 72 | 12.44% |
|
| 2 | 30 | 5.18% |
|
| 1 | 101 | 17.44% |
|
| Total: | 579 |
Ignore the number of 1 and 10 answers for a moment and this data suddenly becomes a bell curve. Sure, the 7 and 8 are swapped around, but that's fairly minor. This bell curve represents people who are legitimately answering the question. We can therefore hypothesise that the results of '1', legitimately got about 2% of the total vote, leaving slightly more than 15% of the vote representing people who are voting '1' because they prefer either Sony or Nintendo to Microsoft. Similarly, the answer of '10' should have got about 1% of the total vote, leaving ~2.5% of voters simply clicking the most pro-MS option there is.
There are many other examples, but I picked this one due to the fact that the nature of this one (10 answers, with a quantitaive grading of how positive they are) means that it will produce the best bell curve.
I would like to see the site associate our data with a list of companies that we own currentish gen consoles for, and allow users to filter the results to only include certain console owners. This will allow us to determine, in this example, how many people genuienly thought that MS's conference deserved the lowest possible rating, and how many are simply trolls.
Thoughts?








