Flutterby™! : On surveys

Eccentric Flower rants about surveys, and I've got further thoughts on this (especially the *PIRG scamsters, who are using push-survey techniques to try to get donations which, last time I checked, seemed to go entirely to their on-staff lobbyists).

But the big thing, the place I so want to help, is places like product surveys, feedback to make services better for me, and far too often the questions are completely orthogonal to my concerns. The "Why did you hide this ad?" survey on Facebook is one that's particularly badly designed, every discussion I've had about this suggests that we all just start randomly answering questions rather than giving them useful feedback, because the knobs are put there to mollify and pacify us, rather than to actually help us help them.