Comment 23H Re: Why are the numbers so low?

Poll

What topics would we like to see here?

Preview

Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by koen@pipedot.org on 2014-06-12 16:28 (#22Y)

At this point 101 have voted, the highest count is "operating systems" with 14%

I'm a bit surprized, I would expect it to be far over 50%, the same goes for some of the other categories.

I added the percentages, they add up to 99%, which is not even 100% - I would expect a sum closer to, say, 200%.

Why come to this iste if you're hardly interested in the subjects discussed around here?

The only explanation I can imagine is that voters do not realize they can vote for more than one option (or even all of them) - maybe that needs to be made clear in the header. Or is the |. approval vote system bugged?

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by axsdenied@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 04:36 (#239)

I don't know how and why you would have 200%. That makes no sense at all. We are talking about percentages and not about individual votes.

The votes are normalised so that the total is 100%. The sum of 99% that you see is probably the rounding error. 14% of the total votes is "operating systems'.

This is what you would expect and this is the usual way of representing similar data.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by quadrox@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 08:01 (#23E)

But it would be interesting to see how many percent of individual voters are interested in one topic or another. Right now there is no way of knowing if every voter is interested in only a single topic, or if every voter likes several topics - the number here would look the exact same, but the meaning would be vastly different. The current format gives us no way of knowing which scenario is true (or closer to the truth).

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-13 10:24 (#23G)

So far, we're seeing pretty even interest across all the topics, and not many write-in options. I'm not sure we're learning a huge amount, here.

Re: Why are the numbers so low? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-13 15:17 (#23H)

No offense intended, but are you really surprised the numbers are low? I don't have access to your logs, but from what I can tell, hardly anyone is visiting Pipedot.

I'm one of the more frequent posters, but always anonymous, and so I couldn't even vote.

At this very low sample size, averaging might be expected; I don't know that one could really determine anything from the poll yet.

I hope this is just pessimistic and that Pipedot's audience is increasing; its design, thoughtfulness, and editorial quality deserve it.

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-01-04 00:16