Gunnar_Zarncke comments on What is your rationalist backstory? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: adamzerner 25 September 2015 01:25AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (38)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 25 September 2015 10:09:40PM 7 points [-]

Let's poll for backstory type:

One side-note: I notice that I seem to be almost the only one using polls. Why is that?

Submitting...

Comment author: Eigengrau 06 October 2015 06:45:51PM 2 points [-]

I enjoy the polls, but I'm new here and lack the karma to even vote in them (indeed, the desire to see the results of the polls is part of what motivated me to make an account in the first place). Hopefully my rationalist backstory will be interesting enough to gain the requisites! Then I can go back and vote in all the polls I've lurked in the past...

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 06 October 2015 10:14:44PM 0 points [-]

Welcome Eigengrau! Looking forward to see your story in the Welcome Thread.

Comment author: adamzerner 25 September 2015 10:20:36PM *  2 points [-]

One side-note: I notice that I seem to be almost the only one using polls. Why is that?

I think it's just because other people don't think to use them. I love the polls!

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 25 September 2015 10:30:50PM 2 points [-]

Nice to hear that. I got the impression that is a chore not only for the poster but also for the voter - "do we need to vote again?" - given how little the polls are upvoted.

Comment author: caffemacchiavelli 26 September 2015 09:15:05AM 3 points [-]

FWIW: The idea of upvoting the poll itself kinda eluded my internal option mapper until right now, even though I like them. Guess my decision making process went straight past "If post interesting then upvote" to "If poll interesting then participate".

Comment author: CAE_Jones 25 September 2015 11:21:09PM 1 point [-]

One side-note: I notice that I seem to be almost the only one using polls. Why is that?

I tried a couple times, but couldn't figure out how to make them work. The wiki wasn't especially helpful.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 26 September 2015 08:12:44AM 0 points [-]

I found the example here fully sufficient.

Comment author: CAE_Jones 26 September 2015 09:07:12PM 0 points [-]

I tried entering the code in the examples there, with the labels replaced. It showed up as code. Then I noticed polls showing up in the Recent Comments list (where markdown is not rendered) as [poll id=\<numbers\>], and concluded there must be some middle step that was somehow obvious to everyone else that I couldn't find.

Comment author: gjm 26 September 2015 09:37:09PM 1 point [-]

Nope, no extra middle step. A couple of rather far-fetched conjectures:

  1. You weren't maybe trying to put polls in a post rather than a comment? The markup is different in the two cases, and so far as I know there's no way to put polls in posts.

  2. Is it possible that you have some sort of web browser extension that messes with your comment text somehow? (Semi-relevant anecdote: I wrote myself a trivial Greasemonkey script that identifies portions of text that are likely to be rot13-ed and provides a mouseover tooltip for each such chunk that shows the result of rot13-ing it; but because I was sloppy, it sometimes does its thing to material other than actual text, and from time to time that's corrupted my comments on LW. It's easy to imagine something of the sort that happens to mess up LW polls in comments.)

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 26 September 2015 09:38:49PM 0 points [-]

I think I will make a Poll Thread with a tutorial or something to push this a bit.