MoominDave
Well-Known Member
This is a pretty peculiar way to conduct a study -
i) You've only obtained a few responses. You need 'many' (100 would be more like it) to meaningfully make statistics and draw comparison.
ii) The main result of the way you've gone about it has been to make people annoyed with you. It was obvious from the moment you posted your initial comments that this would happen. Indeed, so unsophisticated did your post seem that there was a good chance that you were simply trolling - and you don't want the people who run sites like this to think that, surely, because then you would be blocked from using the sites in question.
iii) As a result of (ii), you've introduced a strong biassing effect into the responses - people have focussed on responding to you, not on the subject that you want them to be stirred up about.
A much better way to run it would be to be totally upfront about it - create a thread, state what you're trying to do in the first post, set things going with a "controversial" comment or two (you may have to stir a little more than that to generate momentum), then sit back and wait for the thread to take on its own identity as the discussion develops. Then you won't have the nasty residual effects that you've generated here that render your 'data' worthless.
I'd leave it a little while before trying this if I were you - long enough for people to forget this episode. You may get a large volume of responses, or you may get a small number - but you're guaranteed to get at least as many as you did here before you called time on your experiment.
