This is a very minor issue considering all what's going on right now politically but I still feel the need to make a short, quick diary about the uselessness of most DK home page polls. You know, those polls that are under posts like Cheers and Jeers and other home page posts.
I'm just going to use the most recent example for making my point but these kind of stupid polls are very frequent.
From Meteor Blades' Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Expats post:
Do you think the loss in Massachusetts vindicates your views of what the Democratic Party should be doing?
Yes
Definitely
Of course
Yes, but nobody gets it.
Not only that, I've been right about all the other stuff, too.
Other
I know, I know, these polls are intended to be funny and not to be taken too seriously at all but in my mind these kind of silly dogmatic pushpolls reflect the larger problem of DK and all the other political blog sites on the web.
The poll above doesn't give you an option of saying "no". No, my views were not vindicated because of what happened in Massachusetts. No, my political take on things was actually misguided. No, I was wrong.
Polls like these create such a hubris around this site that I feel is sometimes unbearable. It feeds the know-it-all attitude of people on this site. We know the truth, we are always right and dissenters are DINOs, trolls or whatever.
Why not just seriously try to gauge the opinion of the DK community by creating balanced policy questions for example? At least I would be interested in actual polling of this community about serious issues - the excise tax is a good recent example of an issue like that. The poll could give us a couple of "yes, I support the excise tax because..." and "no, I'm against the concept because..." and "I don't know". That would be enlightening and if not very informative or productive in the grand scheme of things, at least it would illuminate the actual issues behind the silly political theater.
Every time there has been a poll like that, a poll about an important issue and with balanced answering options, the results have surprised me a little bit. The rabid, active noisemakers on this site (who I adore for their passion and action) are most of the times actually in the minority. The silent majority on this site, a liberal activist site, are more "mainstream" and "moderate" than the few most active leader figures on this site.
This matters not because I want DK to be more "moderate", whatever that means. It matters because it creates an echo chamber, an effect that make the posters on this site believe that everybody actually agrees with them. There's no debate. There's just this one line of thinking that is repeated and repeated and is reinforced by the silly, completely useless pushpolls in the main page.
Long story short, the point I'm trying to make is that it's almost insulting to me sometimes that polls on this site are not legitimate. They are not balanced. People like us always brag how rational and open-minded we are. Well, how about actually not feeding the hubris of this site with these stupid polls and actually try to create a more intelligent site based on issues and not dogma?