[Cialug] OT: Online Petitions (was: OT: Choose the lesser evil? Save XP?)

[Nathan Stien]

On Jan 14, 2008 1:27 PM, Nathan C. Smith <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com> wrote:
> Infoworld has some information and a petition to save Windows XP.  Don't
> know if it will do a lick of good, but I signed it.

Does anyone know of any example of an online petition *ever* doing a
lick of good? ;-)

I mean no offense to my fellow Nathan here.  Signing the petition is
very cheap, and if you think the reward (marginally increasing the
odds of bringing about your outcome) outweighs the cost of the time
you spend clicking on it, it makes sense for you to sign it.  In my
case, I must humbly disagree with Mr. Smith -- I don't think the
rewards are ever worth even a few seconds of clicking around.

If I were some corporate or governmental decision maker, I would
personally disregard any online petition or poll.  They are far too
easy to rig and otherwise pull in a lot of sampling bias.  There's a
reason Ron Paul pulls in 99% on interwob polls but then gets 5th place
in real-life primaries.

And in the case of Microsoft, I submit that they know full well that
most people hate Vista.  As much as we like to bash them round these
parts, MS is not staffed by gibbering idiots.  They read the news, the
blogs, and the tech pundits.  And most importantly, they can see their
sales numbers on Vista.  The petition brings them no new information.

I am very curious -- has any org ever cited an online petition as the
reason for a major (in dollar terms) policy reversal?  The strongest
example I can think of is the petitions to bring Family Guy back, but
FOX cited unexpectedly strong DVD sales and good syndication ratings
as their rationale.  And all the "Save Firefly" petitions out there
did nothing to resurrect the show, since its ratings were fairly crap
in the first place, and I doubt the reruns on the scifi channel are
particularly lucrative.  (Alas.)

As an aside, if you could somehow build a dataset about the
effectiveness of online petitions, I would be curious to see if there
is a higher success probability for polls with catchpas or other
anti-bot tech...

- Nathan