#Hyperspecific R+ poll

[a-paradise-for-hyperfixations]

Time for another hyperspecific poll

[mahesiyah]

The Board encourages you to answer this poll as a part of your required onboarding for the viewing of the season finale. Praise Kier.

[starswallowingsea]

okay hyperspecific poll but its just things i've done at my various jobs

[unripe-lemon]

REBLOG FOR MORE DATA!!!!!! THANKS

[ohmydais]

*tear duct thing & worse vision are unrelated

[hyperspecific-iterator-oc-polls]

oc: Sacred Magic of Light

funny name abbreviation

tiny puppet

swapped puppets with another iterator

transgender (MTF)

their local senior got their puppet mutilated by a lizard

heart-stoppingly cute

very little or no trauma

transphobic ancients

[chronotopes]

deeply deeply unfair that deeply respectable ships enjolras/feuilly and bahorel/prouvaire are going down to a canon ship and the big old man yaoi between two actual main characters and meanwhile i havent been able to vote against prouvaire/montparnasse ONCE because both times they've gone up against ships i hate too much

[sprinklecipher]

Just how "hyperspecific" are those polls, anyway?

I was curious about a possible trend in those hyperspecific polls you see passed around here sometimes, so I pulled some data to investigate

Basically, in theory, if a poll is hyperspecific to its author, the most common response should be that none of the options apply to the reader, and multiple options applying should be uncommon. But does that pattern actually bear out in practice?

Here’s a graph of the “winning” (i.e., the most commonly-selected) responses across a whole bunch of hyperspecific polls:

Looks like the “none of the above” category is the most common winner, as should be expected, but over 1/3 of the time, the most common selection was for multiple options to apply, which says to me a pretty sizeable chunk of #hyperspecific polls are really not that specific at all!

I figured this could be due to people being less likely to reblog polls where none of the options apply to them, so I crunched the numbers, and there was a small but significant negative correlation between how frequently the “none of the above” option was selected and the total number of votes the poll received (r = -.22, p = .03), which is consistent with the possibility that polls which are not very relatable to readers—i.e., those most accurate to the “hyperspecific” label—are shared less than are more widely relatable polls.* So, it seems the truly specific polls have the odds stacked against them, and something like #moderatelyspecific would be a more accurate tag for the polls that actually get passed around :P

*this is a horribly messy analysis done for the sillies please do not quote me on this

Method:

I went to the #hyperspecific poll tag (“Top” tab) and recorded a few pieces of information about the first 100 polls that met the following criteria:

Asked what “hyperspecific” qualities applied to the reader

Voting complete

At least 500 votes

Not an obvious parody of hyperspecific polls (at a quick glance)

Featured both “none of the above” and “multiple of the above” response options

This approach is obviously slanted towards more popular/widely shared polls, although I think it’s worth noting that I also checked out the “Latest” tab to see if I could find relatively smaller polls that way, but it was hard to find relevant polls quickly (even if I relaxed the minimum vote requirement), so I dropped that idea.

Some other numbers:

The average selection rate for “none of the above” was 24% (range: 0.7% - 69.9%)

The average selection rate for “multiple of the above” was 19% (range: 1.4% - 71.1%)

[pokeballanon]

I heard of this hyperspecific poll thing and wanted to try it :D

@rotomblr-polls

[pollswithnogoals]

hyperspecific poll!!!!

you hooked up with a guy named bus stop

you're having so much fun with []'s dad on the kitchen floor

you like to fill the bathub with tomato sauce and pretend that you're a meatball

what harry potter taught you is that nobody deserves to live in the closet

^ except r kelly

josh fox gave you some perspective

you dressed up as John Cougar Mellencap in 3rd grade

you've drawn a cowboy dick

2 or more of these, but wtf is this about???

at least 1 of these + you caught the context (you're awesome)

none of these, but you know what I'm talking about ;)

none of these, and what the actual fuck???

[oleander-teacup]

my turn to make a hyperspecific poll

[curious-l1ght-archived]

I wanna make a hyperspecific poll :]

By the way by having Hyperdontia on repeat I mean this song

R e b l o g please /nf but very much appreciated