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Seen by Jason F. on December 18 2008:

So far the answers to question 12 in the Signal vs. Noise survey have formed a perfect bell. Amazing.

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16 comments so far

Radical Dreamer 18 Dec 08

Aren’t you skewing the results of an ongoing survey by publishing the results?

Jeff 18 Dec 08

Wow, not much action you guys could take based on results like that.

Vincent 18 Dec 08

That’s one of the issues that leads survey experts to remove the neutral choice. Too many people tend to use the neutral answer as a way to end the survey faster.

By not providing a neutral answer, you will actually force people to think. Not anyone may like it so you may have less answers but they will be more valuable.

Chris 18 Dec 08

Why the survey in the first place? I thought SvN was an outlet for 37 Signals. Should your readers really control what you write about?

JF 18 Dec 08

Chris: A survey doesn’t control what we write about. We’re simply curious about the questions we’re asking. That’s why we’re conducting the survey.

Jordi 18 Dec 08

Well, Vincent, actually in this survey we can see that the result is the neutral answer… If it weren’t a neutral answer, the answer would be neutral too… by splitting those votes into half pos/neg votes…

Curious George 18 Dec 08

I’m interested in the results of the “jump the shark” question.

Since the answer choices are a binary “yes” or “no”.

GeeIWonder 18 Dec 08

If it weren’t a neutral answer, the answer would be neutral too… by splitting those votes into half pos/neg votes…

This does not follow.

jamesckim 18 Dec 08

There is an implicit sixth option. The blog has gotten so bad that I unsubscribed my rss and didn’t even see the survey.

I actually really like this blog so that’s not me. :-)

David Andersen 18 Dec 08

Bad assumption Jordi.

PSols 18 Dec 08

I was always taught to provide an even number of choices for each question in a survey.

Peter Cooper 19 Dec 08

Too many people tend to use the neutral answer as a way to end the survey faster.

If you really wanted to end the survey faster, you’d just click an item at random (a bit like how on Hot Or Not nearly all votes were a 10 or 1 – people just wanna look at the pictures). I’ve done that before, so I’m glad of a neutral option if that’s what my actual opinion is.

SS 19 Dec 08

All the questions on the survey are optional.

Terry Sutton 19 Dec 08

what’s really interesting is that almost 300 people cared enough about svn (at that early point) to fill out a survey.

Chris Hajer 20 Dec 08

I forget if there was a question asking when we started reading svn, so you could correlate the time period that people are referring to in “over time.”