"DU this poll"

[Honesthumanbeing]

I see this a lot here. Apparently the practice is to encourage voting on some internet poll in which everyone here agrees as to what the answer is. What's the point of this?

[Tripper11]

1. To try and even it out somewhat....

because Freeper tend to "freep" polls like crazy.

[raysr]

2. If you have to ask.....

[saltpoint]

3. The point is to --

-- staunch the flow of far-right conservative blood from the body politic.

It's a tool for asserting a progressive sensibility among thinking adults.

[BigDaddyLove]

15. I'm not sure that stanching anyone's blood, liberal.........

consevative, or otherwise is good for the body politic. I don't like it when they do it and I don't like it when we do it.

But that's just me.

[wtmusic]

4. Bloc voting

It's usually a pretty clear Democratic choice which we like to support. That's all.

[thebaghwan]

5. We try to balance the perspective out a bit. The freepers will run some

of these polls by mass assault. Welcome to the DU!!!

[silverlib]

6. Welcome to DU!!

Your question has been answered, but just wanted you to know we are glad your here!

[pnorman]

9. It's possible that he/she regarded that term

in a less tha praiseworthy sense ... iE: the equivalent of the Freeperland battlecry of: "Hey guys; let's go over and FREEP that poll!!." But over there, they freely pass on procedures and Perl scripts so that a person could cast as many votes as they think they could get away with. Here, it's no more than: "Let's get out the vote!".

I sense no attitude here of "God's on our side; we can do NO wrong." Not all those at Freeperland are outright unscrupulous ASSHOLES, but more than a few are.

pnorman
STAND UP, KEEP FIGHTING http://shows.implex.tv/wellstone/

[Honesthumanbeing]

7. ok but

It seems like it defeats the purpose of an objective poll...now the claim seems to be that the polls are biased to begin with, and you are just evening them out, but this is very unlikely to result in a true representation of the distribution of opinions. Why bother?

[RandomKoolzip]

11. When freepers "freep" a poll,

they use multiple e-mail addresses and fake identities to beef up their numbers.

When DUers "DU" a poll, they encourage ALL the other DUers to vote ONCE to beef up their numbers.

[Honesthumanbeing]

12. and you both

expose the fact that internet polls are meaningless, which everyone already knew!

[Lars39]

16. No, not everyone knows that polls can be skewed.

A DU balancing act becomes important when these same off-kilter polls start being cited as truth.

[Lost4words]

14. there are no objective polls!

[Must_B_Free]

8. Remember when DU was way different than FR?

that was a good time.

oh well, nothing wrong with representing.

I don't think it is common practice for DU to cheat the polls though, like FR is famous for.

[LoZoccolo]

10. We are part of a one-world government conspiracy.

If you want to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

13. I don't techically DU a poll...

I always choose the answer that follows my conscience. I think that's objective.

[DrBB]

17. What "freeping" a poll is, versus what's going on here

I have NEVER seen anyone recommend the "freeping" of a poll here. Freepers used post the method for cheating these polls, which is moronically (morANically) simple. Hell, maybe they still do. We used to notify websites when Free Republic would put out a call to "freep" a poll in this way--single visitors using this technique to vote tens or hundreds of times--so that they knew they had been scammed. We'd point 'em to the post calling for the "freeping" and to the information about how to do it. Sometimes even got polls taken down that had been hacked in this way.

But that's quite different from letting people know there's an online poll and inviting them to weigh in. I can't see how that's in any way inconsistent with what these things are for (if anything). Their main purpose, after all, is to drive traffic to the site, keep you coming back to check results, tell your friends to vote, etc etc. That's really their primary function (I'm speaking as a professional webmaster here). So telling people here to go vote is perfectly okay. Nothing cheating about it. Actually, there have been a number of these where there was significant disagreement among DUers as to how to vote.