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

[Nathan C. Smith]

I Suppose I look at it a bit like playing the lottery.  If the InfoWorld
servers get DOS'd from all the signers and they have to ship the petition to
MS on 3 DVDs because of all the signatures, it just might be the one they
take notice of.  One can hope I guess?

In reality, I mostly agree with Mr. Stien, and generally, would not even
pass something like this on.  Especially considering the usual sources.

Sorry if I or this topic has stolen valuable minutes from your day or your
life.  Maybe I can make it up to you with a valuable timesaving tip in the
future.

-Nate

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Stien [mailto:nathanism at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 4:23 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: [Cialug] OT: Online Petitions (was: OT: Choose the 
> lesser evil? Save XP?)
> 
> 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
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