The overall total equals the sum of the individual answer totals, in contrast to previous polls.

What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

Upvote this comment and downvote the karma sink if you think I should not kill myself. :-)

(Edited to add smiley per Poe's law, especially in case someone sees this comment without seeing the parent first.)

1. Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There's no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.

2. Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.

3. Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.

4. Individual responsibility. You can't legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves?

I suspect people would react against people asking that regardless of whether they include radio buttons. If I recall there has even been drama surrounding making observations about a former member suiciding. I'd be somewhat surprised if someone asking this question directly did not prompt that comment to be banned.

The questions will be limited to whatever the poll creator types in, but that doesn't mean everyone will use common sense while creating their polls.

No, I haven't observed common sense to universally constrain posting behavior in general. However explicit polls don't strike me as sufficiently different or more powerful than regular comments, (inherently anonymous) votes and private messages that a move from informal expectations that people don't behave like @#%$s need be changed to a formal "Terms of Use".

Upvote this comment and downvote the karma sink if you think I should kill myself. :-)

(Edited to add smiley per Poe's law, especially in case someone sees this comment without seeing the parent first.)

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves?

Then a moderator takes the poll down.

Karma sink.

We've covered this.

Seriously, what is it about this that is so hard to understand? I mean it was right there in the grandparent:

About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

You can insult people if you want. You can use text. You can insult people using using ad hoc polls with karma sinks that we've been making do with for years. You can insult people in comments and happen to use the new poll markdown syntax. You can even insult people with the markdown image feature that we've always had:

Either way the rules are the same: You can get away with insulting people to the extent that you can do so subtly, choose targets wisely and be well in tune with social dynamics.

That is just an example of how polls can go horribly wrong, I have absolutely nothing against wedifrid and have no inside knowledge to his/her appearance or personal life.

Could you taboo "asshole"?

It's fairly taboo already.

shminux has helpfully provided an example of the sort of fake poll that should have no place here.

Could you taboo "asshole"?

Explain how not to be an asshole? Possibly, but I don't think anyone here actually needs an explanation, beyond pointing out that anything you shouldn't say for that reason in an ordinary comment, you shouldn't say in a poll either. The slightly different sort of thing that a poll is doesn't change the standard.